Dean MacCannell

Reconstructed ethnicity tourism and cultural identity in third world communities

Abstract The thesis of this paper is that ethnicity is produced by group-level interactions and ethnic forms evolve as a result of changing structural relations between groups and rhetorical explanations and accounts of inter-group similarities and differences. The evidence for this argument is composed mainly of statements made by leaders and representatives of one group about other groups, and responses to such statements. These statements and associated behaviors are analyzed semiotically in that no distinction is made between the words of movement leaders and such matters as the wearing of an Afro hair style: they are both read as statements about group structure and the history of inter-group relations, although one may be in a more accessible idiom than the other. The paper concludes that the institutions associated with modern mass tourism also function as powerful shapers of ethnic identity.

On the Ethical Stake in Tourism Research

As academic research on tourism enters its fourth decade, the field has become amorphous, sprawling all over the place, and not just geographically. We have reached no agreement on basic questions, concepts, hypotheses or theories. Collectively, tourism research can be characterized as following any tourist whatsoever, doing anything whatsoever any place whatsoever. In my new book, The Ethics of Sightseeing (MacCannell 2011), my aim is to provoke concern among tourism researchers about fundamental conceptual definitions, first principles and meta-theoretical matters. I believe that energetic discussion and debate about the basics of what we study is overdue. The results of a scattershot research agenda are sometimes useful for practical applications in local situations, but they do not converge into an articulated body of knowledge with general agreement on what we know, and do not know, about tourists and tourism and what are the next important research questions. What five core concepts in tourism research are comparable to ‘class’, ‘status’, ‘role’, ‘norm’ and ‘institution’ in sociology? Can anyone answer? Name ten important recurring empirical regularities that emerged from the past forty years of research reports on tourists and tourism? Even though empiricism would certainly benefit from having answers to these questions, increasing empiricism will not answer them. If we continue on our current course we have no way of determining what is significant in the enormous heap of findings we are producing. The Ethics of Sightseeing does not fill in the above blanks. It is not a roadmap to what I think are our key concepts and noteworthy findings. Rather, it is a prolegomenon to the kind of debate and discussion that potentially lead to answers to these questions.

The tourist and the local

The seven case studies in this Special Issue were originally presented at the 17th Berlin Roundtable on Transnationality in the summer of 2013. Our work at the Roundtable was generously supported by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation. It was a pleasure and an honor for me to direct the Roundtable and to continue to work with this group of young researchers as they developed their presentations for publication. Each case illustrates one or several ways that tourism inflects local community arrangements—life styles, identities, politics. Together, these cases provide an empirical brief that calls into question the utility of existing conceptual models of the human community derived from the major traditions in the social sciences—sociology, anthropology, geography, political science. That the arrival of tourists alters the local community has been a theme from the earliest years of tourism research. These modifications in the name of tourism have not yet been identified as the defining theoretical challenge of tourism studies that distinguishes our research from work in older fields and disciplines from which we continue to draw concepts and methods. They have been treated idiosyncratically and descriptively: for example, the “Golden Hordes’ brought chain stores in their wake and destroyed the uniqueness of a place that was the source of its attraction.” Or, “the arrival of tourists opened up opportunities for cash income from women’s work and disrupted traditional gender hierarchies,” and so on. What we aim for in this Special Issue is to raise the level of awareness of this unique and defining characteristic of tourism research and inaugurate discussion of it. Transnationality, in general, and tourism, in particular, challenge epistemological assumptions that are implicit in existing models of society, culture, politics, and human interaction. Existing models of the human community assume that social compacts are a function of the dominant local economic activities, political arrangements, class hierarchies, religious and ethnic composition, internal to the community. At minimum, tourism research alerts us to the fact that these paradigmatic social and cultural features of communities are increasingly susceptible to being reframed as “local color” as providing imagery in the grand spectacle of global tourist desire. The studies in this Special Issue, from small resorts on the Adriatic to major urban centers like Hiroshima and Detroit, reveal that localities are shaped and dominated by their imagined relations with putative tourist desire. Each case demonstrates conclusively 618120 TOU0010.1177/1468797615618120Tourist StudiesMacCannell research-article2015

Geographies of the unconscious: Robert F. Heizer versus Alfred Kroeber on the drawing of Indian territorial boundaries

This paper revisits a disagreement between two celebrated anthropologists concerning the ways native American groups established their territorial boundaries. A.L. Kroeber suggested that native peoples had fluid limits, with one group’s space blending into neighbouring territories. R.F. Heizer argued differently: that native peoples had clear borders around their territories, lines that unambiguously marked ownership and separated lands. The two different models of marking territory do not fit with what is known about the personalities of Kroeber and Heizer. In his academic and administrative affairs, Kroeber had a highly developed sense of property, propriety, and what constituted ‘crossing the line’. Heizer, on the other hand, was more flexible and liberal. This paper proposes a solution to the puzzle of why the two men adopted theoretical positions against character.