Simone Abram

Tourists and tourism: identifying with people and places.

Contents: Simone Abram Jacqueline Waldren, Introduction -- Tamara Kohn, Island Involvement and the Evolving Tourist -- Simone Abram, Performing for Tourists in Rural France -- Jacqueline Waldren, We Are Not Tourists: We Live Here -- Sara Cohen, More than the Beatles: Popular Music, Tourism and Urban Regeneration -- Connie Zeanah Atkinson, Whose New Orleans? Musics Place in the Packaging of New Orleans for Tourism -- Hazel Tucker, The Ideal Village: Interactions through Tourism in Central Anatolia -- Donald V.L. Macleod, Alternative Tourists on a Canary Island -- Niels Sampath, Mas Identity: Tourism and Global and Local Aspects of Trinidad Carnival -- Ken Teague, Representations of Nepal -- Michael Hitchcock, Nick Stanley Siu King Chung, The Southeast Asian Living Museum and its Antecedents -- Mark Nuttall, Packaging the Wild: Tourism Development in Alaska

Planning the Public: Some Comments on Empirical Problems for Planning Theory

This paper addresses the notions of communicative and participative planning through an examination of some empirical difficulties in the case of a British planning process. It focuses on the different understandings found amongst participants to a local plan process in terms of the aims and methods of planning and of the future. Two particular problems are considered: the notion of representativeness required for participants to achieve legitimacy, and the disconnections between process and outcome. The paper further considers the rituals of planning as a form of institutionalized thought that supports a particular sort of governance and lends weight to certain epistemologies and technologies. This also challenges the Habermasian notion that participants can somehow set aside their own interests or power during discussions, since this assumes that power and interests are attributes that can be shed, rather than flowing from intrinsic ways of thinking and being in the world.

The social construction of ‘Middle England’: The politics of participation in forward planning

Abstract In this paper we wish to examine how social actors represent the rural community and the rural environment in the context of the planning system, specifically within the review process of a development plan. In particular, we focus on the role residential, environmental and amenity groups play in stabilizing certain features of rural society and environment and their reasons for seeking such stabilization. We explore their motivations for engaging in political activity of this kind, some of the constraints they encounter along the way and how they attempt to overcome these in order to shape their own local environments, and, in the process, their community.

Dilemmas of Implementation: ‘Integration’ and ‘Participation’ in Norwegian and Scottish Local Government

Recent shifts in local governance across Europe have emphasised ‘more public participation’ and ‘closer integration’ between the bodies involved in policy formulation and delivery. Researchers have only started to examine the mutual compatibility of these agendas. The focus of this analysis is a cross-national comparison between Norway and Scotland, using ethnographic methods to chart how various actors have used strategic planning (kommuneplan in Norway, community plans in Scotland) simultaneously to promote participation and integration. A study of local implementation practices reveals tensions between these agendas, but also the various contextually embedded ways in which local officers, politicians, and publics talk past, negotiate, or otherwise manage the problem. These are manifest in the balance between participatory and integrative activities in drawing up the plans; in the role of elected members; in combining steering and representative roles for partnerships; and in pressures for rationalisation. In the final analysis, we argue that these problems cannot simply be considered as local managerial muddles, but as reflecting deeper tendencies in ‘Third Way’ politics and the practical consequences of its emphasis on ‘what works’.

Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.

Class, countryside and the ‘Longitudinal Study’: a response to Hoggart

Abstract Hoggarts review of the literature on ‘middle class rurality’ raises a number of serious questions about the use of class and the study of localities. Whilst being favourite topics of theoretical discussion, researchers are rarely prompted to question their motives and intentions, or the visibility of the political stance that the use of ‘class’ serves. This paper examines how ‘class’ is used to represent a number of different social processes, and suggests that as a model of structure, it must cede to contemporary notions of class as social outcome (i.e. as verb, not noun) as the model is restricted and normative, limited by its generality and stasis. The paper thereby reveals how Hoggarts use of LS cannot address discussions of forms of organisation and ideology, nor of perceptions of ‘countryside’ or of environmental, social or political consciousness.

Anthropological Perspectives on Local Development: Knowledge and sentiments in conflict

This collection examines the conflicts and realities of development at a local, empirical level. It provides a series of case studies which illuminate the attitudes and actions of all of those involved in local development schemes. The material is drawn from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. All the contributors use rigorous anthropological methods of analysis to shed light on the place of feelings of personal sentiment and identity in reactions to planned development schemes. In a world where direct action and public protest are routine responses to local development schemes, they show how protesters, developers and politicians often hold very different fundamental views about the environment, society, government and development which go beyond partisan economic and political interests.

6 The time it takes: temporalities of planning

State planning has been a defining means for modern subjects to regulate the passage of time. In practice, it is the focus of multiple conflicts and doubts, which planners attempt to mediate. In this paper, I address the regimes of time that planning both promotes and encounters, and tease out what these imply for anthropology. Using ethnography of Norwegian and Swedish planning offices and their encounters with participatory planning, I question recent claims that there has been an evacuation of the near future or a retreat of administrative intervention. I also suggest that recent anthropological concerns with time have been confined by their attempts to characterize the changing timescapes of specific modal shifts, such as from the modern to the neoliberal. Instead, in my ethnography, I focus not on tracking epochal breaks in time, but on demonstrating how time is manipulated, and how multiple temporalities are performed in ongoing projects of democratic planning.

The Norwegian Trekking Association: Trekking as Constituting the Nation

Abstract This article takes a performative approach to understanding the significance of hiking practices in ‘wilderness’ landscapes. It examines the role of the Norwegian Trekking Association in nationalising hiking practices in Norway through the use of technologies of governance and by incorporating people into particular practices of movement. The paper thus shows how the Association was implicated in the production and continued re-production of anationalised landscape, and how the performance of route-making and route-following have prioritised certain kinds of activities, and hence certain kinds of people, over others.

Personality and Professionalism in a Norwegian District Council

A great deal of current planning literature is concerned with the behaviour of public sector planners and their roles within organizations. What is lacking, however, is a more nuanced understanding of what ideas or concepts people use to think about their roles in organizations, and how their very personalities have become tied into the creation of professionalism. This article looks at the dilemmas for public servants in a Norwegian municipality and shows how structural dilemmas may be internalized by individual employees. The emic concept of ‘loyalty’ is shown to symbolize attempts to individualize such dilemmas and render them subject to personality, rather than recognize them as conceptual problems.