Abstract for Wageningen ISA-RC50 Interim Conference. Nelson Graburn

 

“The Meeting of East and West”

This research paper attempts an initial enquiry about how Western paradigms are applied to East Asian tourisms, and even more specifically what "Asian" paradigms East Asian social scientists have been using in their explication of contemporary tourisms. The research did not immediately produce clear results. I examined the works of my Asian colleagues (mainly Japanese), and I have talked with many of them*, and even held an open session on the topic in Japan in February with disappointing results.
I found that most Asian social scientists have been using Western concepts and paradigms in their analysis of contemporary tourism, some of them almost indistinguishable from Western scholars. Indeed some have made advances within those European paradigms outstripping their Western colleagues (e.g. Shinji Yamashita, Ning Wang). Conversely, I have successfully used Asian (Japanese) concepts or base concepts/metaphors, e.g. furusato, amaeru, by which to analyze Asian (Japanese) tourisms and this met with some grudging agreement from Japanese social scientists.
Most recently I have detected a pattern by which some Asian scholars have ways of writing about and analyzing (discourse) certain types of Asian tourisms, usually the most traditional, class bound, in their own terms, and yet they leave the analysis of "modern" (even traditionally derived) tourisms to "modern" paradigms and concepts such as "authenticity." There are some exceptions here; it was pointed out by Ying Peterson that in the 1980s Chinese authorities saw the development of China for Western tourists almost entirely in terms of traditional Chinese geo/cosmological views of China and that more recently a similar imposition of the “scenic spot plus modernity” discourse has been imposed on Europe by Chinese tourists and tour packagers (Nyiri, 2005); the same was said of Japanese when they first began to tour Europe in the 1960s (Moeran, personal communication). There are some crossovers in the sense of non-Western concepts used in the discourse on modern tourism in general such as Kanzaki's Tabi no bunka (the culture of tourism, not in Picard's sense) or Ishimori's niyo-nomadizumu.
The meta-paradigm that emerges is that of the discourse on certain types of Asian tourisms, usually the most traditional, class bound, in their own terms, occasionally projected onto early versions of foreign tourism. This is quite separate from the contemporary analysis of "modern" (even traditionally derived) tourisms using "modern" paradigms and concepts from the "modern" (imported, Western) social sciences.

*I have specifically examined the works of the following, or talked with them:
Japan: Kanzaki, Ishimori*, Yamashita**, Ohta*, Ikeda, Okuno,* Kobayashi*
Korea: Moon Ok Pyo** and Kwang Op Kim**
China: Sidney Cheung++, Ning Wang**, Zhang Xiao-ping*, Yang Hui*, Peng Zhoarong*, Yang Ying Petersen**, Wang Yu**
*One year or less of training overseas.
**PhD or extensive training in the West
++BA, PhD in Japan

Pál Nyíri, "Scenic spot Europe.", EspacesTemps.net, Textuel, 25.03.2005
http://espacestemps.net/document1224.html