Paper long abstract:

Within anthropology and tourism studies, debates on reflexivity and the positioning of the ethnographer have highlighted the challenges that can arise during fieldwork in terms of (stereotypical) assumptions and interpretations of the researcher by the researched, competing obligations towards informants, and the various problematic negotiations involved in trying to shift perspectives and subjectivities and reach meaningful interpretations (Bruner: 1995, 1996; Hume and Mulcock (eds.) 2004; Narayan 1993). In this paper we discuss some of these issues in relation to field work in two different touristic contexts: from detailed, enduring participant observation of informal encounters between locals and tourists in Cuba, to the intermittent, snap-shot participant observation at a mass participation football game held over two days each year in the UK. The focus of our discussion will be on the ways in which we were both primarily framed (one as a local person returning 'home' and the other as a tourist outsider) by the subjects of our research, and on the dynamics and subsequent tensions arising out of our strategies to breach and negotiate these tropes, to manoeuvre between shifting standpoints and subjectivities, either by chance or by design. We consider the kinds of relationships we could establish with our informants and how these (often transient) relationships give us access to differing interpretations. We discuss how these issues restrained/enabled our research, and what are the more general implications in terms of meaningful collection, analysis and interpretation of field study data on tourism. We raise a number of issues which are likely to emerge in tourism research, including some ethical dilemmas related to covertness/overtness, reciprocity, and competing obligations towards our informants. We conclude by suggesting propositions and strategies which we hope will contribute to debates on ethnographic data collection in anthropological research on tourism.

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