Nelson H. H. Graburn

The anthropology of tourism

Abstract This paper considers some of the issues in the anthropology of modern tourism, emphasizing comparative and dynamic perspectives. Building on the works of MacCannell, V. Turner, and E. Cohen, the relations of tourism to ritual, play, and pilgrimage are considered. Two kinds of tourism are identified: periodic or annual vacations, paralleling cyclical rites of intensification, and arduous, self-testing tourism, paralleling rites of passage. The relation of tourism to class, life style, and cultural change are examined, focusing on the factors; discretionary income, cultural self-confidence, and socio-symbolic reversals. The paper concludes with an examination of research methodology and suggests important avenues for further research, including studies of non-Western tourism, of tourism in relation to such institutions as museums, festivals, and theme parks, and of individual biographical recreational and tourist growth patterns.

Tourism as an Anthropological Subject [and Comments and Reply]

This paper provides a critical evaluationof the growing number of anthropologically oriented studies of tourism and proposes a conceptual framework for future studies. A cross-culturally viable definition of tourism is offered. This definition, which conceives of the tourist as a person at leisure who travels and of tourism as a variety of leisure activity, suggest a transactional view of tourism that involves an encounter between tourist-generating and host societies. Such an encounter may be conceived of as a process or a system. Following this definition, it is possible ot identify tourism at all levels of sociocultural complexity. At present it does not seem possible to discover the causes of tourism, but one can begin to account for intra-or intersocietal touristic variability. Anthropological consideration of this latter is not well developed. Rather, interest has been centered on the consequences of tourism for host societies, particularly in the developing world. So far, thought, these studies have not demonstrated much methodological or theoretical sophistication. Though some variety of exchange theory may ultimately prove the best way of organizing an overview of the touristic process or system, less ambitious perspectives would seem to be, for the moment, indicated.

Inuit Sex-Ratio Variation: Population Control, Ethnographic Error, or Parental Manipulation? [and Comments and Reply]

Historical censuses of Inuit (Canadian and North Alaskan Eskimos) often contain highly male-biased juvenile sex ratios that have been interpreted as evidence of female infanticide. We use model life tables to estimate elements of historic Inuit population structure missing from the censuses themselves and use these estimates to examine the major explanations for Inuit sexratio bias found in the literature. The argument hat sex-ratio bias is primarily an artifact of incorrect age assessment due to early marriage of females is not upheld, although this factor appears to account for some proportion of the bias. Psychological exklanations based on male dominance fail to explain variation among Inuit populations. Functional explanations that portray fe male infanticide as a form of population regulation or as a device for balancing the numbers of adult men and women are inconsistent with empirical evidence as well as ecological and evolutionary theory. We conclude that estimated rates of female infanticide (ranging from o to 40% and averaging 2i% for the ten populations analyzed) are best explained as consequences of parental efforts to match the number of sons with locally prevailing but regionally variable rates of sex-specific mortality and eco. nomic productivity. We argue that these findings have broad significance for the analysis of sex-specific parental investment in many human populations. The most glaring consequence of the struggle for existence is manifested in the way in which [the Netsilik] try to breed the greatest possible number of boys and the fewest possible girls. For it is solely economy that lies behind the custom that girls are killed at birth.... The reasoning that lies behind infanticide is as follows: A female infant is only a trouble and an expense to the household as long as she cannot make herself useful. But the moment she is able to help she is married and leaves her family; for it is the rule that the woman goes with the family into which she has married. For this reason they try to regulate births in order to get as many boys as possible. KNUD RASMUSSEN, The Netsilik Eskimos, I93I

The Myth of Reciprocity

In anthropology, the concept of reciprocity has received great analytic stress. In part, this is because many analysts have placed a high ethical value on reciprocity, and have felt it worthwhile to study this phenomenon. In part, this is because reciprocity has been tied to certain notions about social stability. For instance, Marcel Mauss (1925) argued that various types of reciprocal exchange serve not only as a cohesive force internally, but also as a substitute or a replacement for war externally. Curiously, most anthropological analyses of reciprocity have focused on rather vague ethnographic impressions, rather than any type of quantitative evidence (a major exception is Henry, 1951). And few of the theoretical discussions about reciprocity have been accompanied by empirical evidence which permits any type of rigorous hypothesis testing. In this essay we hope to take steps in remedying this situation.

A quest for identity

The competing demands on museums will increase as the number and diversity of visitors continue to grow. As they vie as never before with a broad panoply of new centres of interest, museums face a host of demands from a clientele ever more avid for stimulation, entertainment and challenge. The implications of such a transformation of the museum-going public are described by Nelson Graburn, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1964, and, from 1972, Curator of North American Ethnology at the Hearst (formerly Lowie) Museum there. Among his books are Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976) and Catalogue Raisonne of the Alaska Commercial Company Collection (1996), both published by the University of California Press.

Severe Child Abuse Among the Canadian Inuit

Irniguluk, aged 14, came into the house from playing outside. As he did so, he knocked over the rifle near the door. His father Ataataluk, called him stupid and knocked him reeling on the floor with a blow to the side of the head.... A few day later Irniguluk was complaining to others in the village about his terrible headaches, but he never mentioned the cause, and no one outside of the household knew of the outburst.... Someone had shot some caribou and one of the young men, Uvikak brought a frozen carcass to his father, Ataataluk’s house, for the usual custom of hospitality and distribution. Relatives and neighbors were invited to come with their knives to carve up and eat the caribou and take some home. As all squatted around the slowly thawing body on the floor, the 14 year old boy and his older sister were playing and eating pieces of frozen meat which were passed to them. In came their mother, Argnakallak with the two year old adopted son, Paatauyuk,1 whining and with a runny nose, as usual. Irniguluk and his older sister started to tease the toddler Paatauyuk, accusing him of being stupid, of not talking and eating properly, of still being a baby and peeing in his pants.

Tourism in (Post)socialist Eastern Europe

To most of us in Western Europe and North America, Eastern Europe has had a very special place in recent history. The focus of the Cold War between the ‘First and Second Worlds’ and immediately before that the most bitter center of the hot war between the Fascist and Communist regimes, life in Central and Eastern Europe has been far from ‘normal’ in the sense of now taken for granted aspects of human life such as mobility and tourism. Constrained by political positioning and citizenship, as in Maoist China (Graburn, 2002) rather than personal economic wealth, mobility was channeled by one’s employment and contacts (Keck-Szajbel, 2013; Keck-Szajbel & Stola, 2015). And within the Socialist countries much of the domestic tourism was regularized as ‘social tourism’, assigned holidays that were not bought but were the privilege of one’s employment or Party position. Obviously, the transitions from those systems and sub-systems have been almost total and transformational. But to the people of Central and Eastern Europe themselves, the centuries of history before World War II are probably more important and certainly more immanent and eras of civilizational movement, conquest and turmoil than most in the West are aware of. The early invasions of the Huns, Slavs, Mongols, and the Muslim Turks – the rise of early empires and colonization, by the Bulgars and Magyars and soon the Swedes and particularly the Russians and the spread of the powerful Hanseatic league along the North. The stability and even existence of the most important countries has fluctuated – Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Belarus and even more remarkably the very existence of Poland and Ukraine. Other regions or ethnic groups’ territories, came to the fore, changed names and receded – Bohemia, Galicia, Wallachia, Ruthenia, Moravia and many others. And to the survivors of this history, today’s ‘post-socialist’ Eastern Europeans, equally significant as we will see are the memories of displacements and movements within and across these unstable entities, the remains of biological and

Catalogue raisonné of the Alaska Commercial Company Collection, Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology

This book documents, with photographs and complete descriptions, the more than 2,200 Native Alaskan (Eskimo, Aleut, Northwest Coast, and Athapaskan) objects originally collected by the Alaska Commercial Company and donated to the University of California in 1897. Introducing the catalogue are essays on the historical background and cultural context and significance of the collection. Also included are indexes of personal and geographical names and a concordance.

Art, Anthropological Aspects of

Anthropologists assume art is a human universal, but have had to struggle with the cross-cultural identification of art, either by finding common forms and practices, e.g., painting, sculpture, and dance, or by exploring the aesthetic locus in each cultural system. All humans enjoy aesthetic appreciation, but their visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, and sensory preferences vary from place to place and over time. Anthropologists have examined the meaning of arts, in their psychological or psychoanalytic aspects and emotional power, as semiotic media of communication like language and signaling systems, or by examining their sociopolitical agency in guiding human relationships. Arts like other local practices have experienced cross-cultural exchange, colonization, and globalization. They have evolved both as symbols of specific ethnic identities, and as commercial and tourist arts. Crossing boundaries subjects arts to different audiences who make different interpretations, and meanings may be manipulated for power or commerce by mediators such as traders, anthropologists, and critics. As trade and travel erase barriers, artists of formerly separate peoples encounter metropolitan practices such as art school education, art galleries and museums, and the thriving and competitive mainstream art world. Many creatively enter that world while endeavoring to maintain ethnic distinctiveness, so that for instance, British, Inuit, Japanese, Spanish, and Maori arts are circulated and exhibited by the same or similar institutions. The contemporary world of dissolving boundaries, often called postmodernity, has allowed many practices formerly segregated as crafts, often made by women, to enter these same circuits and institutions; metropolitan artists have appropriated features of non-Western arts as their own, as non-Western artists take up metropolitan practices. There is a convergence as artists now engage in ethnographic research, and anthropologists emphasize the poetic (rather than the analytical) power of their works. Art historians emphasize the personal and contextual in art production while anthropologists extend their gaze at the metropolitan and global art world.

Recreational Tourism: A Social Science Perspective

The determinants of demand for tourism the tourist experience the tourist resort area the economic impacts of tourism the ecological impacts of tourism the social and cultural impact of tourism marketing issues in tourism.