Tourism Imaginaries ― Anthropological Approaches

This academic anthology involves contributors from a variety of peoples and countries. They use various approaches, most involving ethnography or critical theory, to look at how people come to imagine someone or someplace as a tourist destination. Contributors use the term “tourist imaginaries” for this idea, and place it within the context of anthropology. Some contributions are more interested in the hangover of colonialism; others are more focused on cross-cultural communitcation. Part one looks at imaginaries of people. These include pieces on how tourist groups imagine the groups they visit, how the visited groups imagine the tourists, and how the people who create and promote the tourism, who may or may not belong to either of the other groups, handle the process. Part two looks at imaginaries of places. Here the term may include analysis of objects, architecture, stories, images, and so on. These are often interpretive education materials and decor with an educational gloss. The book focuses on tourist imaginaries of parts of the world distant from the tourists, or on the way people imagine their own locales as tourist destinations for foreigners. One contributor looks at Chinese tourism and two Chinese minority groups. Otherwise, contributors deal mostly with international tourism, rather than how a group or site within the U.S. is imagined and built for U.S. tourists, for instance, or a site in India for Indian tourists. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Nelson H. H. Graburn is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is editor of Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976), Anthropology of Tourism (1983), Tourism Social Sciences (1991), Anthropology in the Age of Tourism (2009), Tourism and Globalization (2010) and Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads (2016), as well as many other monographs and papers. He is a founding member of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, and the Tourism Studies Working Group (www.tourismstudies.org).