We invite interested parties to contact us by February 5, 2008:
Susan Frohlick frohlick@umanitoba.ca
Julia Harrison jharrison@trentu.ca
Peril, politics and prospect of tourist ethnography/ies
Format: two back-to-back sessions
The centrality of tourists as social actors in late-capitalist
consumer societies with growing global disparities between the rich
and poor, and uneven regulations of persons and things, and so forth
call out for increasingly nuanced studies of the "lifeworlds" of
tourists—yet for various reasons they remain difficult and unseen
research subjects. We call upon anthropologists who have been
conducting ethnographic research with tourists to discuss what we see
then as a "rupture" in anthropological understandings of tourism
processes, which tend to centre on local perspectives and take for
granted "the tourist." Yet, this category is hardly homogenous, and
remains pivotal to understanding what Kathleen Adams has called
"tourist mania" in the global era. We want to consider the peril,
politics, and prospect of what might be productively termed "tourist
ethnography" in the recent context of what the conference organizers
aptly refer to as the "entanglement and ruptures" of ethnography, to
participate in a double session roundtable panel.
Session A Panel Discussion
4-6 presenters
Presenters in this session will address questions centered on the
intertwined stages of ethnographic tourist research: the
'complexities and tensions of doing fieldwork with tourists; and the
politics of 'construction/representation' of tourists in ethnographic
texts.
· How does the ethnographer retain/create critical distance from
research subjects situated in the same 'lifeworld' as ethnographer,
i.e. tourists like/as "us"? In maintaining this distance, do tourist
ethnographies presume the western dominance of both anthropologists
and tourists in the political economy of global tourism? Are tourist
ethnographies just another example of 'anthropology at home'? Or are
they somehow different?
· To what degree does anthropology sustain its imperialist legacy of
gazing at the 'Other' as sedentary and impoverished by focusing on
western tourists and ignoring growing middle-class consumers of
tourism such as in China and India? Or, does this predominance of
studies on western tourists simply reflect what's going on in the
world, which we ought to be problematizing more in our work?
· How do ethnographers maintain a sympathetic stance towards
tourists and touristic practices we find troubling (such as sex
tourists )? Is it possible to maintain a 'relativistic posture' here
as the ethnographer? Is such a posture desirable considering the
larger political, social, and economic inequities consistently
embedded in the logics of global tourism?
· How far do derisive stereotypes of tourists infiltrate the
fieldwork practices and ethnographies of tourists?
· In the long run, who cares about what anthropologists have to say
about tourists? Are our representational practices (peer reviewed
monographs/book length ethnographies) reaching anyone but 'the
converted'? Are our research methods too particular, too localized to
be seen to have global implications? Should we, could we confront
what appear to be 'western cultural assumptions' of the right to
travel in an era of global warming, the effects of which will most
devastatingly felt in places constructed in western discourses as
'most desirable' to visit? Should we seek to engage directly the
absence of a critical tourist discourse in business and management-
driven tourism studies programmes, and the representation of the
tourist in industry promotion generally? What are the risks here?
What are the benefits?
Session B: Roundtable
Drawing on issues raised in Session A organizers, panelists, and
audience members will be invited to participate in an roundtable
discussion framed by the following questions:
· What generalizations can we articulate about the "peril, politics,
and potential" of tourist ethnography/ies? and to what end are these
worth considering?
· How can tourist ethnography as both methodology and representation
strategy be more "engaged" in terms of providing a critique of
tourism more generally given the overwhelming evidence which
challenges assumptions that tourism is a progressive social movement?
