Anthropology of Tourism

Travels to an Ancestral Past: On Diasporic Tourism, Embodied Memory, and Identity (2005)

by Naomi Leite

Antropológicas 9:273-302

This paper explores “roots tourism” as a diasporic identity practice. Drawing on accounts of voyages made by members... more This paper explores “roots tourism” as a diasporic identity practice. Drawing on accounts of voyages made by members of several different diasporic populations, I demonstrate that attention to individual tourist experience reveals a subjective focus on the sensing body as a key component of touristic “return” to ancestral homelands. Through sensory engagement with their physical surroundings, travelers undertake commemorative practices that somatically and imaginatively unite them with their forebears, thus bridging the diasporic rupture of past and present, ancestors and selves, homeland and exile.

Materializing Absence: Tourists, Surrogates, and the Making of “Jewish Portugal” (2007)

by Naomi Leite

In Things That Move: The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel, ed. Mike Robinson. Leeds: Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change.

Tourism unfolds in and through encounters with the material world. But what is the role of the material when the... more Tourism unfolds in and through encounters with the material world. But what is the role of the material when the tourist attraction is an absence? How does one tour a world that no longer physically exists? I explore this question in relation to Portugal, a country with a burgeoning Jewish heritage tourism market but little material evidence of past Jewish settlement. The historical narrative that draws thousands of tourists each year highlights the country’s once-thriving medieval Jewish population, wiped out by mass forced conversions and three centuries of the Catholic Inquisition (1536-1821). The medieval community’s synagogues, cemeteries, and ritual objects were also destroyed, leaving few easily identifiable “Jewish” remains for tourists to visit today. And yet package tours of “Jewish Portugal” abound. This paper examines the practices through which tourists and tourism providers imaginatively engage the physical world of the present as a means to experience an invisible past, collaboratively creating their destination in the moment of the tourist encounter. Of particular interest are the ways in which buildings, neighborhoods, and museum objects stand in as surrogates for the medieval material heritage that was lost. The Museu Luso-Hebraico, until recently Portugal’s sole Jewish museum, provides a key example. Housed in the country’s only remaining pre-Inquisition synagogue, its ad hoc collection is made up largely of everyday Jewish items from around the world, sent by tourists who were moved by the lack of Portuguese objects to represent the long-absent medieval Jews.

Anthropological Interventions in Tourism Studies (2009)

by Naomi Leite

in The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies, ed. Mike Robinson and Tazim Jamal. London: Sage, pp. 35-64, 2009 (first author, with Nelson Graburn).

A critical survey of the anthropology of tourism, past and present, and a discussion of emerging areas of future... more A critical survey of the anthropology of tourism, past and present, and a discussion of emerging areas of future research. Written for the interdisciplinary Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies.

Visual identity and Indigenous tourism: power, authenticity, hybridity and the Osoyoos Indian Band's Nk'Mip Desert Cultural Centre

by Katie Bresner

Masters Thesis

The tourism industry is particularly reliant on the use of imagery to create a brand for a destination or attraction... more The tourism industry is particularly reliant on the use of imagery to create a brand for a destination or attraction in order to effectively market its product. In the case of Indigenous tourism, a paradox often exists between maintaining a level of recognition and familiarity that mirror the expectations of the public imagination, and conveying a representation that is locally meaningful and emblematic. Investigation into the visual representation and communication of identity through tourism is a means to illustrate three overlapping issues that are prevalent throughout the literature on Indigenous tourism. These are: control, authenticity, and hybridity. This research project addresses these issues through an extensive review of anthropological and tourism-related literature and its application to the specific case study of one Indigenous tourism business, the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre (NDCC), owned and operated by the Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB) in Osoyoos, British Columbia (BC), Canada. Semiotic and visual analyses are used to elucidate the messages about OIB identity communicated through the Centre’s visuals, in order to bring the example of the OIB and NDCC into conversation with the larger issues found within Indigenous tourism.

En los bordes de la nación: cultura regional y nuevas formas de ciudadanía en el Caribe Mexicano norte [Prolegómenos]

by Luis Alberto Velasco Ruiz

Informal Encounters La Havana

by Valerio Simoni

Riding Diversity

by Valerio Simoni

Scaling Cigars

by Valerio Simoni

Seducing Bodies

by Valerio Simoni

Verbal Performances Ladakh Festival

by Valerio Simoni

Global Affinities: Portuguese Marranos (Anusim), Traveling Jews, and Cultural Logics of Kinship (2011)

by Naomi Leite

Ph.D. dissertation, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 2011.

This dissertation explores issues of identification, relatedness, and belonging on a global scale, through an... more This dissertation explores issues of identification, relatedness, and belonging on a global scale, through an ethnographic study of Portugal’s urban Marranos (descendants of fifteenth-century forced converts to Catholicism) and foreign Jews who travel from abroad to meet them. Although not Jewish according to Jewish law, given centuries of intermarriage, Marranos are nonetheless widely considered to be part of “the Jewish family,” “lost brethren” who should be welcomed back to the Jewish people. Many Jews view them within the metanarrative of Jewish destruction and survival, the “eternal spark” that remains despite the Inquisition’s attempted elimination of Judaism from the Portuguese landscape. However, for numerous local reasons the present-day Marranos are not welcomed by Portugal’s tiny normative Jewish community. As a result, the urban Marranos, who feel strongly that they are Jews by descent, turn to foreign Jewish travelers as sources of educational, spiritual, and material assistance in their bid to join the Jewish world and attain recognition as Jews in the present.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Marrano organizations in Lisbon and Porto and traveling alongside Jewish tourists and outreach workers, the dissertation undertakes a processual analysis of the constitution of ancestral Jewish identity and of the role of transnational, cross-cultural affective ties in affording a sense of global Jewish belonging. The primary questions driving this work are, first, how and why do far-flung people come to feel that they are related to one another, and what terms do they use to characterize and think through that feeling of relatedness? Second, to what extent are their perceptions of essential connection disrupted or transformed by face-to-face contact? By interrogating the cultural logics of kinship writ large—the language and conceptual frameworks people use to articulate and make sense of their feelings of relatedness to one another—and then examining how those logics play out “on the ground,” this study provides a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the mechanisms through which global and ancestral imaginings become concretized in social interaction. Ultimately, I argue, physical proximity remains the productive sphere for identification and belonging, even as global interconnection provides new opportunities for encounter.

Being Toured While Digging Tourism: Excavating the Familiar at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

by Rebecca Graff

Published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology Volume 15, Number 2, 222-235, DOI: 10.1007/s10761-011-0138-x

Chicago’s Jackson Park witnessed intense and sustained tourism during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Recent... more Chicago’s Jackson Park witnessed intense and sustained tourism during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Recent archaeological survey and excavation produced information about the tourist experience of the Fair in a somewhat familiar artifactural form. The dig drew local tourists whose appetites for the Exposition were whetted by a bestselling book. At the heart of these multiple touristic consumptions in, and of, Jackson Park lies the central issue—the way that tourists create themselves as modern subjects through the practice of tourism and how this process can be both helped and hindered by the presence of familiar objects.

Narrating Instability: Political Detouring in Jerusalem

by Dana Hercbergs

This paper contributes to the ethnography of guided tours in politically contested spaces by interrogating their use... more This paper contributes to the ethnography of guided tours in politically contested spaces by interrogating their use for political advocacy by Palestinian guides in the Old City of Jerusalem. It advances the guided tour genre as a potentially transformative encounter for tourists, while offering reflection on its possibilities and limitations for solidarity. Analyzing the narrative framework of the tour vis-à-vis the cityscape shows that guides strategically employ both discourse and movement to convince tourists of the injustice of the Israeli occupation through a practice called political detouring. It reveals how guides manipulate the tour genre’s dynamic nature by spontaneously altering its trajectories to expose the corresponding instability of Palestinian lives in Jerusalem.

De los “no lugares” a los espacios sociales conminados: una cartografía de la identidad laboral en un hotel “todo incluido” del Caribe Mexicano

by Luis Alberto Velasco Ruiz

Pygmic tours

by Stan Frankland

The Legal Adaptation of British Settlers in Turkey

by Prakash Shah

Co-authored with Dr. Derya Bayir

This article is based on a fieldwork project conducted by the authors in the Muğla region of western Turkey. The... more This article is based on a fieldwork project conducted by the authors in the Muğla region of western Turkey. The region is the locale for a significant level of settlement by British people, within the wider context of settlement by groups of other EU nationals in western Turkey. Based on a series of interviews with British settlers and Turkish locals, it examines the factors which affect the process of legal adaptation of the former group. It identifies and discusses the place of British settlers within the larger Turkish legal order, their integration into Turkish life, and the extent to which different socio-legal disabilities and advantages affect this process. The article also casts some light on the extent to which, given the level of British immigration into the area, Turkish officialdom is prepared for their presence.

Ode to a Chuño: Learning to Love Freeze-Dried Potatoes in Highland Bolivia

by Clare A. Sammells

2010. In: Adventures In Eating: Anthropological Tales of Dining Around the World. Helen R. Haines and Clare A. Sammells, eds. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 101-125.

Maiali per i turisti. Turismo e attività agro-pastorali nel "pranzo con i pastori" di Orgosolo

by Gino Satta

(2002) Maiali per i turisti. Turismo e attività agro-pastorali nel "pranzo con i pastori" di Orgosolo, in V. Siniscalchi (a cura di), Frammenti di economie. Ricerche di antropologia economica in Italia, Cosenza, Luigi Pellegrini, pp. 127-157.

An Irish Spiritual Pilgrimage and the Potential for Transformation

by Ann Swartz

Co-authored with Mira C. Johnson and Elizabeth Tisdell
Proceedings of the 50th Adult Education Research Conference, 2010, pages 212 - 218.

This paper discusses spiritual pilgrimage from a cultural-spiritual perspective on transformative learning, and... more This paper discusses spiritual pilgrimage from a cultural-spiritual perspective on transformative learning, and analyzes the experiences of the three co-authors via an autoethnography methodology.

The purpose of this autoethnographic research was to explore the possibilities for
transformative learning within the spiritual/cultural experience of pilgrimage.  Several writings
within and beyond adult education address transformative learning (TL) in relation to spirituality
as it intersects with culture and/or environment  (Brooks, 2000; Dei, 2002; Kovan & Dirkx,
2003; Miller, 2000; Tisdell, 2003, Taylor, 2008), and women using story for change  (Wiessner,
2005). Davis (2007) presented research on experiential learning via Holy Land pilgrimage of 40
pastors.  But there is little research using the cultural-spiritual perspective of transformative
learning.  Neither has an anthropologic perspective been incorporated.  This research addresses
this gap, by centering three women’s stories of their pilgrimage to a holy mountain in Ireland
when they connected with place, history, story, spirit and each other.   

Materializing Inequality: The Archaeology of Citizenship and Race In Early 20th Century Los Angeles

by Stacey Camp

(2009) Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University, Department of Anthropology.