CONFERENCE REPORT: ANTHROPOLOGY OF TOURISM INTEREST GROUP (ATIG) PANEL AT THE 117th ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION (2018)

-

The Theory of Risk Perception Geared to Tourism and Hospitality Fields

In this chapter, the author lays the foundations to a new debate about risk perception and the securitization process within the constellations of tourism fields. The chapter represents not only a critical insight on the already-established paradigms but also to the ethnocentrism of English-speaking scholars who have developed an economic-based paradigm of risk perception. The chapter explores the dichotomies and differences among risk, threat, danger, security, and fear while gives a new fresh insight to forge a new sub discipline in tourism: the anthropology of tourism security. While the economic-based theories enthusiastically accept quantitative-related methods, this position reached a state of stagnation. Qualitative-led methodologies as ethnography and analysis content would fill the gap in the years to come. Today, the emergence of some alternative theories as post disaster or post-conflict theories evinces that the doctrine of precautionary principles rested on shaky foundations.

Urban tourism via dispossession of oeuvres

Most of the anthropology of tourism has focused either on authenticity or on the commoditization of culture. Furthermore, tourism has been looked at as a service sector and, at most, as an urban strategy. Few authors have investigated the organization of (in)formal labor in the tourism industry outside the wage form. I address this gap by looking at the living and dead labor that the production of cultural heritage is about. I argue that the tourism industry transforms long-labored spaces and existing collective use values into commodities. After illustrating this argument with sketches from the Ciutat de Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain), I conclude that the relation between the dead labor and the living labor that produce heritage determines people’s differential access to its commoditized outcome.

Anthropology of Tourism: Researching Interactions between Hosts and Guests

This study focuses on the theoretical analysis of social interaction and relationship between guests and hosts from the perspective of anthropology of tourism. In the 1960s and 1970s, attention was paid predominantly to anthropological reflection of negative socio-cultural impacts of tourism on host communities. However, towards the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s the research focus began to shift towards an analysis and interpretation of the influence of commodification on the perceptions of identity and authenticity of the host culture, while the positive aspects of tourism began to be recognized as well. This study aims to present an overview of the basic approaches within the anthropology of tourism to social interaction between guests and hosts. The objective of the study is to provide a summary of miscellaneous approaches to and views on this issue.