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- Convenors:
-
Hazel Andrews
(LJMU)
Catherine Palmer (University of Brighton, UK)
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- Track:
- General
- Location:
- Schuster Lab Rutherford
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores anthropological approaches to the interrelationship between tourism, embodiment and the senses.
Long Abstract:
Embodiment is a significant and ever developing area of study in social anthropology. Of particular interest to anthropologists is the relationship between embodiment and tourism. Indeed, the interrelations between tourism, tourist practices and embodiment have grown in significance in terms of their contribution to the field of tourism anthropology to the extent that they are now of central importance to the study of the subject. Notions of an experience economy and the engagement of the senses in various aspects of touristic interpretation and encounters indicate the importance of informed discussion about embodiment to the tourism and leisure sectors. The idea of embodiment encompasses a number of key areas of both scholarly activity and touristic practice, some with significant theoretical lineage in the social sciences and humanities in general and in social anthropology in particular. These include, but are not limited to: performance, the social body, gender, identities and experience. Such facets of embodiment are applicable to the wide range of both traditional and emergent tourist activities including, for example, charter and package tourism, backpacker tourism, cultural tourism as well as activities within these, for example music and arts festivals, food and wine tourism, sports tourism, rituals, pilgrimages and other sites of touristic practice. To this end this panel invites papers that consider any aspect of the social anthropology of tourism, embodiment and the senses.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -Pablo Garcia (GIEDEM-Interdisciplinary Group for for the study of Development and Multiculturalism, University of Lleida (Spain))
Paper short abstract:
The relationship between archaeological heritage, embodied memory and tourism is in the forefront of the debates in the Anthropology of tourism. The paper looks at the new dynamics introduced by tourism in the rural Andes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates current changes brought by tourism and development in the Peruvian highland village of Chinchero. Its aim is to contextualize present events in historical terms by interpreting them in relation to previous processes of transformation and continuity that pervade the history of the Andes. The ways in which people are coping with these changes address the problem of "tradition" and interrogate current notions of indigeneity. My research looks specifically at the relations between the people and the landscape through material culture and archaeological heritage, and privileges for its study Andean worldviews of the land as reflected in the ethnohistoric and the ethnographic sources. My main research question asks how tourism is changing the traditional ties between the people of Chinchero (Peru) and the land with its "other-than-human" entities. Among other things, this project explores transformations and persistances in meanings attached to the landscape, as well as in the social practices that take place within it.
The theoretical direction of this paper is informed by two primary strands. The first strand looks at previous Andean ethnographies which have explored the landscape as the physical embodiment of social memory and local history. These ethnographies have considered the critical role of materiality and performance in the shaping, the articulation, and the reenactment of people´s ties not only with their past, but with their (re)productive present as well. The second strand is made of current anthropological engagements with the phenomenon of tourism, in particular with its political economy and its ideological implications.
Yujie Zhu (Heidelberg University)
Paper short abstract:
Using the transformative tourism process in Lijiang, China as a case study, this article explores how the tourism imaginaries are embedded within the circuits of tourism including representation and promotion, service provision, multi-sensory practices of consumption, remembering and sharing. It is not a spontaneous process, but a complex embodiment and interaction between tourists and local groups, as well as national and international forces.
Paper long abstract:
Imaginaries are conceptualized as socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with peoples' personal imaginings. Tourism imaginaries of destinations and travels are increasingly produced and consumed by diverse populations around the globe through expanding forms of media and opportunities for travel. Tourism imaginaries usually reproduce representations created by the tourism industry and mass media, but tourists also harness their purchasing power to feed their imagination and their consumption preferences back into the production of heritage landscape and, thus, contribute to the ways in which places are represented and constituted. Through tourists' bodily practices like gazing, photographing, living, and listening, tourism imaginaries are not solely semiotic but "thoroughly embodied". It is expressed through virtual body enactments, and is co-constructed through the interaction of service providers and receivers.
Taking the tourism development of Lijiang, China, especially the transformation of its varied images as a case study, this paper aims to explore how tourism imaginaries are produced, negotiated, and transformed to intersect and establish the network of actors including different individuals and groups in the tourism industry. It elaborates the argument by examining how the historic trade town is transformed to the commercial heritage site, and how the theme of love is constructed with the presentation of romance in the bars. This paper argues that through the flow of actors in the tourism network, the imaginaries are more than embedded in the tourist's mind. Rather, imaginaries constitute "the flow of relations among things, people and human purposes" through embodied practices to construct identity and make social meanings.
Paul Cleave (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
Food as a component of the tourism experience and means of embodiment connecting tourists' to place.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to show how the embodiment, and experience of tourism and place is frequently enhanced, and motivated by food, whether ingredients, dishes or food related activities. Archival resources will be utilised to demonstrate tourists' evolving interests in regional and local food.
The county of Devon in South Wesy England, a long establisheed tourist region provides numerous instances of tourists' embodiment through connections with its past, and current food experiences. A rich legacy of farming, landscape, foodstuffs, food production (and their attendant elements of mystery, culture and folklore) together provide varied opportunities to explore the relationship between embodiment, the senses and tourism.
The interest in Food Tourism, is suggested by Hall and Sharples (2003: 10) as a desire to experience the attributes of specialist food production regions. Many tourists appear to be interested in food and culture, and the experience of consumption. Visits to farms, vineyards, farmers' markets and restaurants provide interesting prospects for food encounters. Gibson (2010: 521) indicates that tourism encounters are immediate, embodied and geographical, and perhaps a need for social interaction. The examples of food presented in this paper reveal that this may be through consumption, exploring the past, or a quest for autenticity and tradition.
Crouch (200o: 63)proposes that embodiment denotes the way in which individuals understand the world around them. Through food encounters tourists are enabled to discover more about the development of a cultural and regional identity. Emergent tourism activities, for example food tourism present researchers with new and exciting ways to study the anthropology of tourism.
Nupur Pathak (Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Tibetan offerings (embodied, inseparable from bodily senses) and bodily practices generate embodiment among the tourists who seek to explore its meaning and travel to India. This paper argues that this perception reveals the needs of the place and travel.
Paper long abstract:
This paper attests the meanings of offerings, bodily practices in Tibetan Tantric rituals as performed by the immigrants in Dharamsala (India), are conducive for igniting a sense of embodiment amongst the tourists who seek to unravel its meaning and its relevance in contemporary scenario.
This paper argues that the act of offerings (preparation and offerings to the divinities), bodily practices in devotional rituals generates a sense of embodiment which directs a practitioner to grasp divine power relieving the beings from sufferings leading to ultimate pleasure.
This tradition is transmitted from a spiritual practitioner to a disciple and its legacy can be traced back to 8th century in Tibet. As a quest for spiritual pleasure tourists travel to Dharamsala and search for meaning of this tradition.
The study explores how the above mentioned practices enable a tourist to generate a mode of embodiment as well as to reveal the concept of compassion through beneficial activities for the Tibetans which provides ultimate bliss. The tourists also realise that bodily senses need to be purified through the act of offerings and bodily practices to attain ultimate truth.
My paper challenges that experience gathered by the tourists from various offerings, bodily practices in Tibetan devotional rituals is revealed through the acts of welfare for the migrant Tibetans. This realisation and its revelation through their devotional service can be represented as an expression of embodiment which unfolds a state of tranquility among the tourists who thrive for it.
Tom Selwyn (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper responds to the call to engage with cultural tourism (including music and art productions) embodiment and the senses, by discussing a theme of enduring human interest and, as such, one with is of central importance to the nature and efficacy of cultural tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Rubens' (1636) painting, The Judgement of Paris and Monteverdi's (1645) opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea are taken as starting points in a discussion of the ways visual and musical representations of male and female bodies have classically been used to provoke debates about relations between beauty, power, and morality. As judge in the competition to decide who should be recognized as the most beautiful goddess, the god Paris chose Aphrodite, thus seeming to equate her qualities (freedom, spontaneity, sexual availability) above those of her rival Hera, goddess of marriage and fidelity. In a rather comparable way the opera tells the story of the time in his life when the emperor Nero clearly considered his concubine, Poppea, to be more beautiful than his faithful wife Ottavia. In both painting and opera, feelings of injustice are manifest in the expressions of those rejected by their male counterparts and viewers/audiences are drawn to sympathise with them. Such narratives, and the enduring hold they have over contemporary audiences and viewers, are fruitful subjects for anthropologists concerned with the underlying structures of cultural tourism.