Anthropology of Tourism

‘Lifestyle travellers’ is the name coined by Dr Scott A. Cohen to describe this ‘distinctive subtype within backpacker tourism’ for whom travel is a ‘way of life’.

This lifestyle involves, primarily, individuals travelling the world with no plans of returning home. They have rejected the corporate career ladder and switched to temporary jobs abroad and/or self-employed online work. They have discarded most of their possessions. In sum, they have left their sedentary lifestyle to adopt a mobile one.

Drilling into Dr Cohen’s research, where he cites in broad terms anomie and self-actualisation as travel motivations before embarking on constructionist discourse, this paper fills in the gap by examining the emic perspective via blogs.

It identifies specific push-pull factors and frames them within existential works of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology to provide a multilayered, holistic understanding of lifestyle travellers. Before its conclusion, comparisons are drawn between lifestyle travellers and late colonial Tswana peoples.

Ultimately, it reveals lifestyle travellers’ raison d'être is self-development framed within a Western conception of being ‘fully human’.

Existe un debate sobre la validez del turismo rural comunitario como estrategia de desarrollo en el mundo rural-campesino. En ese debate, los investigadores suelen contraponer experiencias concretas sobre el que han hecho trabajo de campo. Pero al tratarse de casos concretos, que tienen sus propias características y están envueltos en sus coyunturas particulares, se hace difícil establecer elementos comunes o generalizables. El presente texto propone enfrentar esta limitación a partir de un modelo de análisis estructural, intentando descubrir si el turismo rural comunitario tiene características intrínsecas que expliquen algunos de los problemas y riesgos que la literatura académica ha detectado. Y de esta manera, ayudar a la teorización sobre el turismo rural comunitario.

In this essay we discuss the change of the paradigm of the category of tourist arts and try to explain why there is such category and what  distinguishes it from other arts and crafts. We use theoretical samplings and case studies on tourist arts by some important researchers of this topic and add our critical review on these past researches.

This article focuses on friendship and its controversial enactments in touristic Cuba, paying particular attention to its moral implications. It starts by considering how the issues of authenticity, transience and inequality played out and informed the possibilities for friendship between foreign tourists and members of the Cuban population, leading the protagonists involved to formulate their moral assumptions about friendship, outline its main challenges in the tourism context, and envisage possible solutions to those challenges. The second part of the article examines how notions and experiences of friendship were worked over in response to such difficulties, most notably the tension between ‘interest’ and ‘affection’, alternatively leading to the formation of ‘hybrid’ or ‘purified’ versions of friendship. By drawing attention to the moral, idealistic and aspirational qualities of friendship in touristic Cuba, the article contributes to the current anthropological literature on friendship, showing some of its limits as well as possible analytical pathways for the future research.

The work explores contemporary Antarctic tourism practices through the lens of the dramaturgic concept of ‘plot’. Plot refers to a socially construed narrative structure that allows social actors to frame their participation in social life through socially held scenarios, stories and cosmologies. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Argentinian harbor town of Ushuaia, the authors demonstrate that Antarctic tourists, despite the variety of their experiences, existences and travel motifs, follow, to a very large degree, the same ‘plot’. This leads them through a dialectical journey, departing from a ‘modern’ life-world of home towards and beyond the presumed boundaries of ‘civilization’, to become immersed in a magical, weird, and wonderful ur-nature found in the White continent, and then back home. The authors argue that this plot, through its specific dramaturgic configuration and settings, pulls to the surface a wider ontological and cosmological order underlying modern tourism and social life at large.

Building on tourism scholarship on existential authenticity, touristic intimacy, and the limitations of the tourist role, the article provides an empirically grounded analysis of how the value of intimacy was expressed and negotiated in the course of encounters between foreign tourists and members of the visited population in Cuba. Tourism-related identifications in this Caribbean country are shaped by local notions of tourism hustling and pose a challenge to the development of mutually gratifying relationships between tourists and Cubans. The exploration of Cubans' concerns and informal ways of approaching tourists, and of the ways in which friendships, partying, and sexual engagements between them were enacted, highlights the efforts of the protagonists of these encounters to achieve relationships that could help them move beyond negative identifications and lead to the recognition of their individuality and shared humanity as persons. Intimacy appears as a fundamental regime of value informing these processes. The reflections that the article develops on the concrete manifestations of intimacy in touristic encounters and the kind of alliances it prompted open the way for further research on the role played by international tourism in the diffusion and actualization of this regime of value.

Tourists have been labelled, metaphorically, in multiple ways. This includes descriptions of tourists as (secular) pilgrims in a quest of authenticity but also as travellers on a sacred journey. In contrast, the stereotypical image that tourists are hedonists is related particularly (but not exclusively) with sun, sand and sex, and is associated with, sometimes unbridled, consumerism (cf. Salazar 2010a). This research probe deals with the question whether a tourist is a ‘secular pilgrim’ or a ‘hedonist in search of pleasure’. Both descriptors refer to a debate among tourism scholars that started back in the 1970s. It is important to put the question and possible answers to it within the historical context of this discussion.