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Dissertation research: Envisioning Eden - A glocal ethnography of tour guiding
Using international tourism as an analytical and ethnographic entry, this study explores the intricate ways in which local to global processes intersect, overlap, and clash. Destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to the homogenizing standards of global tourism while at the same time trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. Central to these deeply intertwined processes are tourism imaginaries, understood as representational systems that mediate reality and form identities, and their (re)production by local tour guides, key agents in the selling and telling of natural and cultural heritage. Drawing on 25 months of multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Arusha, Tanzania, this study addresses the following issues: (1) the representation of peoples and places in globally circulating tourism imaginaries; (2) the perceived, officially sanctioned, and actual roles of local tour guides in this representational practice; (3) the formal schooling and informal learning of guides to appropriate images and discourses of tourism; (4) the (re)production and contestation of fashionable tourism imagery in guiding narratives and practices; and (5) the ways in which dominant imaginaries and personal imaginations of tourism stakeholders are (dis)connected. The methodology used, labeled as glocal ethnography, involves a mixed-methods approach including extensive observation, interviews, questionnaires, and the collection of secondary data. The comparative and discourse-centered analysis of the data reveals how local guides in Yogyakarta and Arusha act as “mechanics of glocalization”, assuring the continued circulation and localization of tourism fantasies, but also using the encounter with foreigners to foment their own imaginations of “paradise on earth” and to accumulate cosmopolitan knowledge. These findings add not only to the current theorizing on tour guiding and tourism, they demonstrate the potential of glocal ethnography as a methodology to move global studies from mere description or critique to grounded holistic analyses that unravel the complex human mechanisms underlying processes of glocalization. The study’s focus on the human aspects of globalization, on cosmopolitanism, and on the role of the imaginary in giving people’s lives meaning, illustrates some creative ways in which anthropologies of tourism and travel can contribute to ongoing theoretical and methodological debates about the local-to-global nexus.
Public interest ethnography: Theory, practice, and action
Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association
December 2, 2005, Washington, D.C., USA
(Invited Session sponsored by the AAA Committee on Public Policy and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology)
The papers in this panel reflect various components of an emerging public interest paradigm. The panel members are working collaboratively on developing a framework for engaging ethically with critical social issues in urban, national, and transnational public spheres. The ethical stance evolves from a commitment to social justice, equity, environmental well-being at the macro-social level and sensitivity to local traditions at the micro-social level.
The explicit attempt to formulate a theoretical, methodological and action-based paradigm focused on the concepts of "publics" and "interests" differentiates our efforts from the more general genre labeled "public anthropology." The framework conceptualizes culture as a creative force as well as an ordering principle. Problem selection includes a focus on the social creativity of groups, publics, and institutions acting with respect to certain interests. PIE identifies genealogies of interests tied to specific publics or institutions by examining the social imaginaries consolidating or motivating local interests. Data analysis also includes considering the political and economic context of interests as well as their differential impact on health, social well-being, and the environment. Writing accessible thick description is another key component.
At a time when academic knowledge finds itself fashioned at the behest of larger societal or theoretical trends, each member of the panel is committed to the classical ethnographic project of examining "meaning making." In addressing specific public issues, each author is also concerned with the question of how research results are presented so that they do not just elucidate patterns but change them as well. As such, PIE is about cultural production and cultural reproduction.
The different meaning-making sites, paths, and histories considered by panel members highlights the analytic flexibility of the overall paradigm. The first presentation examines the way global activists deploy new technologies in an effort to both democratize the media and build a transnational social movement. The second examines the interests articulated by the unsatisfied citizen-consumer in Cuba and Costa Rica. The third describes a transnational dialogue between tourist guides in Tanzania and Central Java wherein essentialized notions of culture are appropriated from "old-style anthropology" to market places and people as authentic destinations. The fourth describes the intersection of global, national, and market concerns motivating the manner in which China interacts with its citizens on food issues in the interest of "the hygienic state."
Taking a different approach, the fifth paper examines common relational structures of gendered violence in male bonding rituals and globally circulating representations of pop culture. The last paper challenges traditional boundaries separating activists and scholars by creating a space in the academy for bringing them together. Although encompassing different sites of cultural production and reproduction, these papers share a common commitment to developing an ethnographic paradigm that combines knowledge production with social relevance and engagement in local, national, transnational, and global public spheres.
Tourism, Pilgrimage, and the sacred: Exploring boundaries, contesting discourses, rethinking identities
Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association
December 16, 2004, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
(Reviewed by the National Association for Student Anthropologists)
This session is a contribution to the general conference theme of this year's AAA meeting, “Magic, Science, and Religion”. It will focus on the relationship between tourism, pilgrimage and the sacred.
The conceptual and empirical interplay between pilgrimage and tourism has been explored in relation to ritualized practices of the quest for the sacred. Some scholars see pilgrimage as a forerunner of modern tourism and understand tourism to be a modern substitute for religion. For others, contemporary mass tourist compares poorly to the spiritual journey of the pilgrim. The various analytical arguments concerning the complexities of tourism, pilgrimage, and the sacred provide a useful background for thinking about these issues. At the same time, they draw attention to the need to explore these links in new directions.
The renewed interest in religion within the emergent global culture, economy, polity, and society gives the dynamics surrounding pilgrimage, tourism, and the sacred new urgency. A sustained and continuous flow of travel to holy sites and places of interest implies that tourism and pilgrimage may be integral to major world religions and their cultural contexts. How is this movement of people and the motivations that sustain it shaped by the perceived risks associated with travel? How are notions of what constitutes the sacred shaped by the larger global context? In what ways are individual and group identities molded and contested through these processes? How are the fluidities of tourist and pilgrim identities and the notions of the sacred played out through framing, performing, interpreting, and remembering places and people of these sites?
The session proposes to contextualize tourism, pilgrimage and the sacred in the dialectic between the sacred and the secular. On the secular side, pilgrimage can be contextualized in relation to the state, where the state is a site of identity struggles. These are often between the dominant cultures and newly empowered indigenous movements. As indigenous peoples migrate to the cities, new identities are created that find themselves attached neither to the dominant national cultures whose lifestyles they may emulate nor the indigenous cultures whose roots they share. When sites of struggles are historic places whose meaning is shared by multiple religions, the dialectic between the secular and the sacred becomes enmeshed not only with history but also with multiple new and old religious traditions.
Tourism also creates social and physical environments for novel experiences. Some sites provide a space where the sacred can be experienced as a dwelling. The notion of a dwelling can shape and move freely between our social definitions of what constitutes public and what is to be confined within the realms of private. In a different context, tourism is a space in which the profane can be desired. It becomes a venue for socially acceptable means of transgression. Such desires are often mediated through technology. Tourism can also be a vehicle through which the sacred is transformed into cultural capital. An overlay of these dynamics at a meta-level can open up new possibilities for understanding the complexities of these encounters.
Individual abstracts
Resolving conflicts in
heritage tourism: A public interest approach
Annual Meetings of the American
Anthropological Association
November 22, 2003, Chicago, Illinois, USA
(Reviewed by the National Association for Student Anthropologists)
We addressed the AAA conference theme, “Peace,” in a Saturday morning session, entitled “Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Approach.” The session explored the ways public interest anthropology (PIA) can address the proliferating conflicts arising in heritage tourism. A PIA approach to heritage breaks from “top down” institutional models of heritage, instead paying attention to the generative moments of local heritage discourse. Although tourists possess differing motives for visiting heritage sites, people who live in and around heritage sites hold their own representations and attachments that often go unrecognized. Instead, powerful local, national, and international interest groups impose formal representations that agree with their economic and ideological agendas. This process can lead to conflict between promoters, tourists, and local groups, possibly ending in alienation and, at worst, violence.
Given its sensitivity to dialogue within civil society, PIA is rightly poised to examine conflicts ensuing from heritage tourism. An important component of PIA is participatory-action research, where the scholar acts as both researcher and public advocate, investigating the reasons for conflict, presenting their findings to all parties, and participating –when invited—in consensus building. As scholarship and advocacy combined, PIA offers a powerful research design with which to explore heritage tourism anew, providing the scholar with a means to further the goals of anthropological inquiry while promoting conflict resolution and dialogue in civil society.
In the session, scholars from disciplines ranging from cultural anthropology, folklore, public policy, and archaeology presented nine case studies from diverse regions. Elizabeth Greenspan (University of Pennsylvania) explored the on-going memorialization of the World Trade Center site in New York City where domestic and international visitors imagine themselves part of a larger collective public sphere. Likewise, Guldem Buyuksarac (Columbia University) investigated similar processes at Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, where groups dispute the redefinition of public space into secular and religious venues. Vida Bajc (University of Pennsylvania) explored the politics of tour guides in Jerusalem, Israel, and Lisa Breglia (Rice University) focused on conflicts in site management and ownership at Chichén Itzá, Mexico. Linda Scarangella (McMaster University) described tensions arising from definitions of and participation in heritage practices in Salish dance performances in British Columbia, Canada; Cathy Stanton (Tufts University) explored similar themes in heritage movements and foodways presentations in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Archaeologists have ignored their role in producing conflicts in heritage and heritage tourism, and only recently has a public component been made commonplace in archaeological research design. Exemplifying this shift were three multiple-authored papers. Kelly Britt (Columbia University), Mary Ann Levine (Franklin and Marshall College) and James Delle (Kutztown University) described their public archaeological program in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, while Melissa Vogel (University of Pennsylvania) and David Pacifico (University of Pennsylvania) reported a similar project in Peru. Morag Kersel (Cambridge University) and Christina Luke (Boston University) presented a comparative project exploring agency and communities in the archaeological replica economy in Latin America and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Three discussants, Florence Babb (University of Iowa), Anne Pyburn (University of Indiana), and Kathleen Adams (Loyola University, Chicago) brought a critical perspective to the session themes. Adams praised the multi-disciplinary representation of session participants, pointing out such rarities at the AAA annual meetings. Aside for comments on individual papers, all three discussants discussed ways PIA can build on applied anthropology's achievements. This might include what Pyburn described as a shift away from questions of whether or not people are interested in heritage to an effort to getting people interested in heritage. No longer can anthropologists remain “professional strangers” to the communities in which they work, observing rather than affecting change. Rather, scholars much engage, collaborate, and work for a variety of vested publics in their attempts to understand and help resolve conflicts in heritage tourism. Session
and individual abstracts
Public
Interest Anthropology |