Paper short abstract:

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Paper long abstract:

Following 30 years experience of teaching undergraduate lecture courses and graduate seminars on ‘the anthropology of tourism’, it has become obvious that we often do not nor cannot differentiate between the ‘anthropology of’ tourism and the sociology, geography, cultural studies, and so on, of tourism. When readings are assigned we rarely care about the ‘disciplinary’ base of the author. What are the causes, the methodological and the long-term pedagogical implications of this interdisciplinarity? The paper commences with an examination of ways in which anthropologists first engaged in tourism studies: empirical discovery in the field, by seeing that other scholars were writing about tourism and thinking that anthropological models could do it better, or by seeing anthropology as a comparative discipline. It continues with a look at how the ‘anthropology of tourism’ is practiced now. The question is posed whether this by the anthropologically trained using ‘anthropological methods’ (participant observation, holism, ethnography), or by researchers trained in other disciplines using some version of ethnographic methods. It concludes with a brief attempt to understand which topics are least bound to particular disciplines and why this should be.