Edward M. Bruner – författare

Recruited to be a lecturer on a group tour of Indonesia, Edward M. Bruner decided to make the tourists aware of tourism itself. He photographed tourists photographing Indonesians, asking the group how they felt having their pictures taken without their permission. After a dance performance, Bruner explained to the group that the exhibition was not traditional, but instead had been set up specifically for tourists. His efforts to induce reflexivity led to conflict with the tour company, which wanted the displays to be viewed as replicas of culture and to remain unexamined. Although Bruner was eventually fired, the experience became part of a sustained exploration of tourist performances, narratives, and practices.Synthesizing more than twenty years of research in cultural tourism, Culture on Tour analyzes a remarkable variety of tourist productions, ranging from safari excursions in Kenya and dance dramas in Bali to an Abraham Lincoln heritage site in Illinois. Bruner examines each site in all its particularity, taking account of global and local factors, as well as the multiple perspectives of the various actors—the tourists, the producers, the locals, and even the anthropologist himself. The collection will be essential to those in the field as well as to readers interested in globalization and travel.

Fourteen authors, including many of the best-known scholars in the field,explore how people actually experience their culture and how those experiences are expressed in forms as varied as narrative, literary work, theater, carnival, ritual, reminiscence, and life review. Their studies will beof special interest for anyone working in anthropological theory, symbolicanthropology, and contemporary social and cultural anthropology, and useful as well for other social scientists, folklorists, literary theorists, and philosophers.

`This book is one of several indications that the sociology of tourism is on the move.... these articles raise relevant important themes in the study of tourism.... The contributors to this very readable book provide valuable insights, many of which have been derived from empirical research, that should interest anyone involved in the study of international tourism. And by moving us away from polarised positions over the social impact of tourism toward more complex but also more considered perspectives they have also helped alter the agenda for future research' - David Harrison, University of Sussex

Tourism is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary life. More of us travel for pleasure than ever before, yet the social scientific literature on tourism is relatively scant. This book provides an original contribution to the field of tourist studies.

The contributors to International Tourism reconceptualize the local and the global, avoiding such crude oppositions as centre v periphery, modern v traditional, macro v micro and North v South. Instead, they demonstrate that the local cannot be understood without the global, and that the global can never be isolated from the regional setting within which it operates.

Providing new insights into theories of touristic practice, this volume places tourism within the same framework as other transnational global studies.