Michael Harkin

Modernist anthropology and tourism of the authentic

Abstract Tourism, in addition to being big business, is a strategy for framing and interpreting cultural difference. The driving ideology behind tourism is a form of exotopy, or appropriation of otherness. It shares this exotopic function with anthropology, which is Western cultures official discourse of alterity. Semiotically, tourism and modernist anthropology are oppositionally linked. That is, while their experiential and narrative strategies are opposed, they can both be mapped onto the same general space, by means of semiotic square, and can be shown to overlap. In the postmodern era, both anthropological and touristic ideologies are breaking down, as ethnographic and touristic practices increasingly overlap.

Staged Encounters: Postmodern Tourism and Aboriginal People

The scholarly study of tourism as a cultural phenomenon, in the modern anthropological sense, arguably began in  with the publication of DeanMacCannell’s seminal book The Tourist: A NewTheory of the Leisure Class. As the title implied, MacCannell’s interests were with the tourists and their motivations, with the possibilities of class formation that this practice entailed. As with Thorstein Veblen’s study of conspicuous consumption, which providesMacCannell’s subtitle, the foibles of the modern bourgoisie are the subjects of amused and bemused scrutiny. The most significant contribution of MacCannell’s work is not, however, the rather conventional sociological analysis of class and the solidarity that is allegedly engendered by tourism. Rather, it is the key insight that tourists seek experiences of authenticity amid the anomie of late capitalism (see MacCannell ). This was prescient, coming at a time when all tourism was thought to be superficial by definition. Indeed, if we examine tourist practice today, we see that a significant portion of it is explicitly involved in the seeking of authentic experience, especially of that which Larry Nesper (this volume) terms the ‘‘Paleolithic.’’ Destinations on the fringe of the developed world, such as Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, and lately eastern Europe, have long been favored by wealthier, better-educated tourists. More exotic destinations have become increasingly popular, as markers of taste andwealth. Note, for example, theNewYorkTimes’s use of the phrase the ‘‘sophisticated traveler’’ or ‘‘The Savvy Traveler’’ carried on many public radio stations. Such sensibilities are combined with a pseudoethnographic praxis.When I taught at Emory University in the earlys, I took great pleasure in listening to the reports of my students returning

Feeling and Thinking in Memory and Forgetting: Toward an Ethnohistory of the Emotions

Emotions are an important, but hitherto underexplored, component of historical consciousness and ethnohistorical practice. Extreme negative emotions evoked by traumatic historical events have strongly shaped collective memories of those events, occasionally repressing the memory altogether. More generally, understanding the past requires comprehending emotion and its cultural component. Two schools of thought in psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology and psychodynamic approaches, are discussed, with the applicability of each to ethnohistorical scholarship evaluated. Two examples drawn from the Northwest Coast illustrate the significance of emotion to ethnohistorical analysis.

Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions, and Visions

The Northwest Coast of North America was home to dozens of Native peoples at the time of its first contact with Europeans. The rich artistic, ceremonial, and oral traditions of these peoples and their preservation of cultural practices have made this region especially attractive for anthropological study. Coming to Shore provides a historical overview of the ethnology and ethnohistory of this region, with special attention given to contemporary, theoretically informed studies of communities and issues. The first book to explore the role of the Northwest Coast in three distinct national traditions of anthropology- American, Canadian, and French-Coming to Shore gives particular consideration to the importance of Claude Levi-Strauss and structuralism, as well as more recent social theory in the context of Northwest Coast anthropology. In addition contributors explore the blurring boundaries between theoretical and applied anthropology as well as contemporary issues such as land claims, criminal justice, environmentalism, economic development, and museum display. The contribution of Frederica de Laguna provides a historical background to the enterprise of Northwest Coast anthropology, as do the contributions of Claude Levi-Strauss and Marie Mauze.

Power and Progress: The Evangelic Dialogue among the Heiltsuk

The rapid success of Methodist missionaries among the Heiltsuk can be explained by two factors : the stresses facing the society in the late XIX e century, especially pandemic disease and witchcraft allegations, and the amenability of the Methodist evangel to Heiltsuk concepts of supernatural power. The main tenets of Methodism - bodily discipline and spiritual progress - became part of the ethos of the Heiltsuk community of Bella Bella, reinterpretation of and resistance to the evangel typify the Heiltsuk response to missionization. The ethnohistorical process is best characterized as dialogical.

Engendering discipline: Discourse and counterdiscourse in the methodist-Heiltsuk dialogue

The Heiltsuk village of Bella Bella converted en masse to Methodism in I880. It was the beginning of a process of missionization that affected all aspects of Heiltsuk life. Heiltsuk women were the primary objects of missionary efforts to modify behavior. Their responses to the missionaries included elements of both accommodation and resistance. Women forged a new synthesis of Heiltsuk and Methodist values and practices in the face of stressful changes in their world

Potlatch in Anthropology

‘Potlatch’ is a key anthropological concept, which has spread to many other fields of study. It refers to a ceremonial exchange system that arose in the nineteenth century on the Northwest Coast of North America. Although it takes various forms, most attention has been paid to the agonistic displays of the Kwakiutl potlatch.