Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society – serie

In Tourism and Prosperity in Miao Land, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has reshaped the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Feng examines the cultural reconstructions of space, ethnicity, gender, and morality within changing power structures. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, Asian studies, and tourism studies.For more information, check out A Conversation with Xianghong Feng.

**Winner of the 2020 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group**"Leite, Castaneda, and Adams's volume is a beautiful retrospective of the enduring importance of Ed Bruner's work and legacy in our field, and we have no doubt that it will be used as a central historical, theoretical, and teaching text by many." - Prize CommitteeWhat does it mean to study tourism ethnographically? How has the ethnography of tourism changed from the 1970s to today? What theories, themes, and concepts drive contemporary research? Thirteen leading anthropologists of tourism address these questions and provide a critical introduction to the state of the art. Focusing on the experience-near, interpretive-humanistic approach to tourism studies widely associated with anthropologist Edward Bruner, the contributors draw on their fieldwork to illustrate and build upon key concepts in tourism ethnography, from experience, encounter, and emergent culture to authenticity, narrative, contested sites, the borderzone, embodiment, identity, and mobility. With its comprehensive introductory chapter, keyword-based organization, and engaging style, The Ethnography of Tourism will appeal to anthropology and tourism studies students, as well as to scholars in both fields and beyond.For more information, check out A Conversation with the Editors of the Ethnography of Tourism: Edward M. Bruner and Beyond and In Memoriam: Ed Bruner.

**Winner of the 2020 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group**"Leite, Castaneda, and Adams's volume is a beautiful retrospective of the enduring importance of Ed Bruner's work and legacy in our field, and we have no doubt that it will be used as a central historical, theoretical, and teaching text by many." - Prize CommitteeWhat does it mean to study tourism ethnographically? How has the ethnography of tourism changed from the 1970s to today? What theories, themes, and concepts drive contemporary research? Thirteen leading anthropologists of tourism address these questions and provide a critical introduction to the state of the art. Focusing on the experience-near, interpretive-humanistic approach to tourism studies widely associated with anthropologist Edward Bruner, the contributors draw on their fieldwork to illustrate and build upon key concepts in tourism ethnography, from experience, encounter, and emergent culture to authenticity, narrative, contested sites, the borderzone, embodiment, identity, and mobility. With its comprehensive introductory chapter, keyword-based organization, and engaging style, The Ethnography of Tourism will appeal to anthropology and tourism studies students, as well as to scholars in both fields and beyond.For more information, check out A Conversation with the Editors of the Ethnography of Tourism: Edward M. Bruner and Beyond and In Memoriam: Ed Bruner.

Alternative Tourism in Budapest: Class, Culture, and Identity in a Postsocialist City analyzes the particular imaginaries of Hungarian culture that are produced and circulated through alternative tourism a generation after state socialism. Susan Hill records the everyday work of business owners and tour guides at four Budapest alternative tourism companies that lead tourists to areas not typically visited by travelers, and she considers the significance of alternative tourism work for processes of identity-making and cultural production in Budapest. This ethnographic study is recommended for scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, and political science.

Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion introduce the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage to help explain why performers travel to places both near and far in an attempt to increase both their skill and their legitimacy within various genres of art and activity. What happens when your skill-level surpasses local training opportunities, whether in dance, martial arts, or other skills and practices? Apprenticeship Pilgrimage provides a new and exciting model of apprenticeship pilgrimages—including local, regional, opportunistic, and virtual—that practitioners undertake to develop embodied knowledge, skills, and legitimacy unavailable at home. For most people, there is a limit to how much training is available from the teachers and classes at home. As skill and know-how increase, the resources and training opportunities available become limits on one’s learning. Similarly, a practitioner’s legitimacy may be suspect without exposure to appropriate cultural context, such as ties with the homeland of certain dance forms or martial arts. Whether for skill alone, or activity-specific legitimacy, individuals may feel compelled to travel for training. Such travelers see themselves quite differently from other tourists, and the seriousness with which they pursue their journeys makes it appropriate to call them pilgrims. Given the goal of learning from and developing their own skills by training with experts at their destinations, apprenticeship pilgrims is even more appropriate. Rather than focus on specific geographic regions or genres of apprenticeship, this book builds a robust theoretical framework for understanding the role of travel for developing expertise in embodied genres. This book links and expands on the existing scholarship concerning anthropologies of education and tourism, but takes new strides in exploring the global circumstances wherein skill development requires travel. Throughout, the authors use apprenticeship pilgrimage as a robust new framework for considering the interrelated roles of going, learning, and doing for identity construction within contemporary globalization. For more information, check out A Conversation with Lauren Griffith and Jonathan Marion

B-drinking is a strategy whereby dancers, waitresses, and otherwise legally employed women illegally solicit drinks from tourists for pay. Unique to the ethnographic literature on strip clubs, Bourbon Street, B-Drinking, and the Sexual Economy of Tourism focuses on the role of alcohol sales in the sexual economy of Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Relying on historical material, Demovic reveals that the intimate encounters B-girls have provided have been a part of the tourism service economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. The evolution of “B-girldom” as an imagined identity created through changing representations of the practice over the decades have both reflected and constructed the experiences of women working in New Orleans’ nightclubs. The B-drinker is an iconic character found in fictional and nonfictional accounts of the city. B-girls inhabit an ambiguous structural position in the performance of heritage tourism in New Orleans. Participant observation and interviews reveal that by the 1990s women who worked as B-drinkers were significant stakeholders in French Quarter tourism, able to use their informal networks to seize power over working conditions in the tourism economy of Bourbon Street. Demovic focuses on how these marginalized but critical workers have responded to stigma by creating tight knit groups which continue to support one another decades after leaving their work on Bourbon Street. This book adds the New Orleans example to a broader understanding of how sex work evolves in ways that reflect regional history and culture. Widening the ethnographic lens, Demovic looks past strip tease itself and to the economic activities of such workers when they are off the stage. For more information, check out A Conversation with Angela Demovic, Bourbon Street, B-Drinking and the Sexual Economy of Tourism

In Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: Bridging Worlds, Sabina Owsianowska and Magdalena Banaszkiewicz examine the limitations of the anthropological study of tourism, which stem from both the domination of researchers representing the Anglophone circle as well as the current state of tourism studies in Central and Eastern Europe. This edited collection contributes to the wider discussion of the geopolitics of knowledge through its focus on the anthropological background of tourism studies and its inclusion of contributors from Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Poland.

Within tourism studies, the cosmopolitan potentials of tourism have often been situated within a broader conversation about globalization, an approach that implies that cosmopolitanism is a predictable by-product of globalization and becoming more cosmopolitan should be the goal of travel. And yet a fundamental value of a cosmopolitan outlook—namely, to not only to be “at home in the world” but also to experience the world in an authentic sense—depends on the culturally embedded, parochial, and particular world views which it rejects. In Cosmopolitanism and Tourism: Rethinking Theory and Practice, contributors take this as a starting point. What does a “worldly” consciousness mean to people situated in different cultural landscapes and to what extent might these intersect with cosmopolitan values? How is cosmopolitanism marketed in tourism and tourist-related industries such as service learning and study abroad? And finally, what roles do social and economic class, educational background, gender, and other factors have in cosmopolitan claims? The contributors to this edited collection address these questions in a series of case studies that range from Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ireland to China, India, and Dubai.For more information, check out A Conversation with Robert Shepherd, author of Cosmopolitanism and Tourism: Rethinking Theory and Practice.

After more than sixty years of occupation by the U.S. Navy and intensive community struggles, the Puerto Rican island of Vieques was finally returned to civilian control in 2003. But, as this book documents, the Viequenses’ struggles were far form over after the departure of the Navy. The Viequenses were left to contend with the devastating effects of sixty-two years of bombing; the environment and health of the population had been severely harmed. Yet this was a minor issue in comparison to the effects of the newly instated tourism industry on the island. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted between 2004 to 2016, Luis Galanes Valldejuli captures the larger social conflict derived from the arrival of tourists, who brought change to the island in the form of land speculation, work conflicts, racism, language barriers, and neoliberalism. A close observer of the Viequenses, Valldejuli details the deleterious effects of tourism on the voice of the Viequenses: they were no longer heard. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, tourism studies, linguistics, cultural geography, political science, and history.

After more than sixty years of occupation by the U.S. Navy and intensive community struggles, the Puerto Rican island of Vieques was finally returned to civilian control in 2003. But, as this book documents, the Viequenses’ struggles were far form over after the departure of the Navy. The Viequenses were left to contend with the devastating effects of sixty-two years of bombing; the environment and health of the population had been severely harmed. Yet this was a minor issue in comparison to the effects of the newly instated tourism industry on the island. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted between 2004 to 2016, Luis Galanes Valldejuli captures the larger social conflict derived from the arrival of tourists, who brought change to the island in the form of land speculation, work conflicts, racism, language barriers, and neoliberalism. A close observer of the Viequenses, Valldejuli details the deleterious effects of tourism on the voice of the Viequenses: they were no longer heard. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, tourism studies, linguistics, cultural geography, political science, and history.

In Tourism and Prosperity in Miao Land, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has reshaped the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Feng examines the cultural reconstructions of space, ethnicity, gender, and morality within changing power structures. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, Asian studies, and tourism studies.For more information, check out A Conversation with Xianghong Feng.

Tourism and Wellness: Travel for the Good of All? enhances academic understandings and analyses of tourism as a social and worldmaking force by situating broad questions of well-being, health, and equity within the scaffolds of critical tourism studies. Contributors touch on power and politics, space and place, reflexivity and relationships, values and affect, and inequality and equity as viewed through critically informed and social justice perspectives. This collection of cutting-edge, critical tourism analyses contextualizes and disrupts how wellness is understood in tourism.For more information, check out A Conversation with the Editors of Tourism and Wellness: Travel for the Good of All?

In Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World, Sergio González Varela examines the mobility of capoeira leaders and practitioners. He analyzes their motivations and spirituality as well as their ability to reconfigure social practices. Varela draws on tourism mobilities, multisited ethnography, global networks, heritage, and the anthropology of ritual and religion in order to stress the commitment, dedication, and value that international practitioners bring to capoeira.For more information, check out A Conversation with Sergio González Varela.

In Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism, Sagar Singh draws on anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, religious studies, literature, and the study of mysticism, among other disciplines, to arrive at an understanding of love that is free from theoretical biases. Utilizing data from South Asia, India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, Singh newly defines tourism, tourism anthropology, tourism studies, and ecotourism. This book is an indispensable guide to all involved and interested in tourism.For more information, check out A Conversation with Sagar Singh: Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism.

With contributions from anthropologists and cultural theorists, Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experienceexamines the culture and cultural implications of student travel. Drawing on rich case studies from the Arctic to Africa, Asia to the Americas, this impressive array of experts focuses on the challenges and ethical implications of student engagement, service and volunteering, immersion, research in the field, local community engagement, and crafting a new generation of active, engaged global citizens. This volume is a must-read for students, practitioners, and scholars.For more information, check out this presentation by Michael A. Di Giovine, coeditor of Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience, or these podcast episodes: Sustainable Study Abroad with Dr. Michael Di Giovine by ODLI on AirStudy Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience by Meaningful Journeys

Re-Centering Women in Tourism: Anti-Colonial Feminist Studies addresses tourism as simultaneously empowering women and reproducing colonial hierarchies. This volume contributes to conversations on the engagement of women in tourism by centering women’s multivalent lived experiences—as hosts, liaisons, vendors, performers, producers, and consumers—in tourism projects. Examining eco-tourism, craft production, and food tourism initiatives, the contributors embrace the building of new knowledge and advocate for change. By centering women and their experiences through epistemological lenses that encompass colonial histories and economics, this collection reframes the very presuppositions on which tourism initiatives are based and helps imagine sustainable and regenerative alternatives.For more information, check out A Conversation with Frances Julia Riemer, Editor of Re-Centering Women in Tourism: Anti-Colonial Feminist Studies

In Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, A. Lynne Bolles examines Jamaican women tourist workers and their workplaces in Negril, Jamaica. A major component of Negril’s tourism success is the labor of women tourist workers, ranging from housekeepers to hotel and business owners. Bolles’s ethnographic research examines key aspects of women’s labor in the tourist industry through the lenses of class, color, education, and training. Through the narratives of thirty interlocutors, Bolles focuses on the prescience of emotional labor and face-to-face encounters, investigating these women’s ideas about tourism on the local level and their wariness of the changing physical environment as a result of tourism expansion.For more information, check out A Conversation with A. Lynn Bolles: Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica.

In Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, A. Lynne Bolles examines Jamaican women tourist workers and their workplaces in Negril, Jamaica. A major component of Negril’s tourism success is the labor of women tourist workers, ranging from housekeepers to hotel and business owners. Bolles’s ethnographic research examines key aspects of women’s labor in the tourist industry through the lenses of class, color, education, and training. Through the narratives of thirty interlocutors, Bolles focuses on the prescience of emotional labor and face-to-face encounters, investigating these women’s ideas about tourism on the local level and their wariness of the changing physical environment as a result of tourism expansion.For more information, check out A Conversation with A. Lynn Bolles: Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica.

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners’ aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkers—most of them women —but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission.For more information, check out A conversation with Laura E. Klepinger, author of Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots

In Encounters across Difference, Natalia Bloch examines tourism encounters in the informal sector in India and their potential to empower subaltern communities. Drawing from ethnographic evidence in Hampi and Dharamshala, Bloch explores the potential of tourism to promote political engagement, volunteering, sponsorship, local entrepreneurship, and women’s empowerment. Contrary to the frequent criticism of tourism to the Global South as a colonial practice, Bloch argues that workers and small entrepreneurs in displaced communities see tourists as allies in their political struggles and, on a more individual level, as an opportunity to build better lives.For more information, check out A Conversation with Natalia Bloch, author of Encounters across Difference: Tourism and Overcoming Subalternity in India.

In Medical Tourism and Inequity in India, Kristen Smith explores Indian private hospitals and their role in the global healthcare service supply chain within various religious, social, cultural, historical, and economic contexts. Drawing on critical medical anthropology theories as well as health and human rights perspectives, Smith problematizes the assumed independence between the medical tourism industry, the commodification of the Indian healthcare system, and the local populations facing critical health issues, while highlighting the rapid transformation of healthcare services into merely another global commodity.For more information, check out A Conversation with Kristen Smith, author of Medical Tourism and Inequity in India: The Hyper-Commodification of Healthcare

In Medical Tourism and Inequity in India, Kristen Smith explores Indian private hospitals and their role in the global healthcare service supply chain within various religious, social, cultural, historical, and economic contexts. Drawing on critical medical anthropology theories as well as health and human rights perspectives, Smith problematizes the assumed independence between the medical tourism industry, the commodification of the Indian healthcare system, and the local populations facing critical health issues, while highlighting the rapid transformation of healthcare services into merely another global commodity.For more information, check out A Conversation with Kristen Smith, author of Medical Tourism and Inequity in India: The Hyper-Commodification of Healthcare

The book presents a long-term ethnographic study of arguably the largest environmental protest action in Australian history: The Walmadany / James Price Point conflict. Carsten Wergin offers a detailed account of how local community members, Indigenous custodians, heritage preservationists, environmentalists, and tourists collaboratively joined forces to successfully oppose the construction of a $45 billion (AUD) liquefied natural gas facility on sacred Indigenous land. Tourism, Indigeneity and the Importance of Place is a close reading of Aboriginal ‘country’ and its living heritage. It follows the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, an Indigenous Tourism experience that would have been destroyed by the LNG project, to offer a timely discussion of the sociocultural and political relevance of heritage and tourism for ecological preservation and the wider decolonial project in Australia and beyond.For more information, check out A Conversation with Carsten Wergin, author of Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place: Fighting for Heritage at Australia’s Last Frontier