Paper short abstract:

A systematic literature review of journal articles is performed to explore recent thematic trends in the anthropology of tourism. Thereby, it is shown that host-oriented topics, which had prevailed at the beginning of the decade, could maintain their dominance over more guest-oriented themes.

Paper long abstract:

Since its beginnings in the 1970ies, the anthropology of tourism has seen a substantial accumulation of publications. Therefore, recently, the desire to review the so far published material has become increasingly pronounced. However, extant literature reviews have been rather unsystematic. This study complements the ongoing review-efforts by systematically analyzing anthropological journal articles on tourism. In detail, a sample of papers was retrieved by querying the Web of Science online database for the 80 most cited anthropological journal articles that were published between 2002 and 2011 and that include touris* in title, abstract or keywords.

The purpose of this systematic literature review was to investigate how the contributions of anthropology to the understanding of tourism are distributed among the various research foci and to see what changes this distribution was subject to. Thereby, thematic trends of the past were identified and taken as a basis for reflecting about future challenges in the anthropology of tourism.

A key insight from the systematic review is that host-oriented topics (impact of tourism, representation, culture and identity), which had already prevailed at the beginning of the decade, could maintain their dominance over guest-oriented themes (tourist motivation, tourist experience and authenticity). In particular, an increase in anthropological journal publications on the subject "representation, culture and identity" is brought to the fore.