Theoretical Perspectives on Anthropological Approaches to Tourism

 

This paper will start with a brief consideration of the evolution, over three decades or so, of anthropological work on tourism. This will be followed by an assessment of the present state of the art of the subject. The main body of the paper will be concerned with the various directions in which it may be going. With the help of selected contemporary ethnographic studies on tourism related issues, this section will highlight the continuing interest in such topics as the kinship between tourism, anthropology, and epistemology; the interpretation of images and objects; anthropological approaches to the relation between tourism and the body; tourism policy and planning; anthropological approaches to museums and oral history; anthropology and the global political-economy of tourism; anthropology and regional development; anthropology, tourism, and borderlands; tourism and nationalism. One overall argument will be that anthropological studies of tourism have become at once more ethnographic and more theoretical and that contemporary (and, speculatively, future) anthropological approaches to tourism are/will be framed by an interest in the way that the ‘raw materials’ of tourism (particularly land, labour, raw materials themselves, and the body) are transformed within processes which are either or both politico-economic and ideological in character.