Anthropologies of Tourism

Issue 2 Anthropologies of Tourism April 2011 Tourists at Cobá, Quintana Roo, Mexico 2008 – Photo by Ryan Anderson ~ Contents ~ Introduction to this issue  Ryan Anderson Tourism: Trinketization and the Manufacture of the Exotic John Hutnyk Arrivals, perceived and actual Sarah Taylor A San Diego Cultural Narrative  Conor Muirhead Tourism Research as “Global [...]

here and there: our leaders in the East

Angela Merkel in Saudi, Blair with Gadaffi, Obama with Mubarak, Cameron in Kuwait… presenting these pictures is also not without a certain exotica, but it tells a story that I think should be up front and centre – the uprisings in the Middle East are not just those people ‘over there’ struggling against ‘their’ despots, [...]

Stairway to Heaven

The resurrection of Led Zeppelin at their 02 Arena event evoked long suppressed memories that lurch from the awful to the wonderful. In the awful column: bad versions of ‘stairway’ being hacked out by spotty youths in guitar shops (and now, I am appalled to report, regurgitated by buskers on the London tube where everyone [...]

Kamata

Back in Tokyo. This time staying in Kamata, which is a sort of central urban junction town, hence interesting. Rows and rows of those little bars, sushi and sashimi shops, yakitori, izakaya (居酒屋) and yakiniku (焼肉) places to eat. Most of them with about 12 seats, especially near the station and west (NishiKamata), but there [...]

Nagoya-Bird&Rabbit-4-Tim Stelfox-Griffen

So I am posting these pics to Ellen, but they can also rest here for a while. Bird and Rabbit went to Japan. To Nagoya in fact. They came with me to give a talk at Nagoya City University – the talk was about Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian lad murdered by police on [...]

The Banana Pancake Trail

I’ve seen a lot of new discussion recently of comfort foods on the tourist trail. I thought I would excavate comments on this from my “Rumour of Calcutta” book. Hence the following reminiscence: From Chapter One: “The confusion which reigns in this kind of tourism derives from a predicament where the consumption of its product [...]

Karachi Tram

The Karachi Tram, in Melbourne, was hilarious fun – especially all those people who got on during a monsoon-style downpour and were stunned (ecstatic, bemused, one even annoyed) to find chai and samosas served up, loud beats, dancing and a film crew all rattling along the tramjatra route (there was a Calcutta tram sometime back [...]

Trinketization: ‘Third World Tourism’ and the manufacture ofthe Exotic

I am sort of stuck in my room. Somewhat foolishly perhaps, I agreed to write an entry on Exotica and Tourism for Jonathan Gray’s encyclopedia (getting so there are too many such things about) and I agreed to a deadline of Jan 1st, possibly forgetting that I should be indulging in some tourism myself at [...]

nothing to read

The airlines have gone insane, banning cabin luggage: – mobile phones and cameras to be crushed in the hold; ban on all liquids (though you can take on personal medications – see pic); baby food to be tasted by mothers before being carried on board (better check their nappies too eh – for baby bombs!); [...]

Mind The Gap

I am always suspicious of travellers’ tales, especially those I’ve heard (or told) before. They get refined and streamlined, they come to resemble one’s own version of the Lonely Planet guidebook. Jacques Derrida knew this, commenting on travel narrative – he identifies two ‘risks’ of travelogues in the possible meanings of the terms we use: [...]

Thoughts on ‘The Good Woman of Bangkok’ or, A Critique of the (mis)appropriation of Brecht.

This essay was written as what we call a ‘practice essay’ in Imogen’s third year at Goldsmiths. I had lectured on the films of Denis O’Rourke for nearly ten years and always asked a question something like ‘who spoke for who (or who xxxx’d who) in the Good Woman of Bangkok?’. After this effort, I [...]

Revolutionary tourism

Revolutionary tourism (notes for article for a Canadian magazine). I am watching television and Nepal is on screen. It is unusual to see anything other than documentary curios from the land locked Himalayan kingdom, but this week the place is news. Strikes, curfews, shoot to kill, the King forced to promise elections, a new interim [...]

THE RUMOUR OF CALCUTTA

THE RUMOUR OF CALCUTTA: TOURISM, CHARITY, AND THE POVERTY OF REPRESENTATION John Hutnyk 1996 Zed books, London. An original study in the politics of representation, this book explores the discursive construction of a ‘city of intensities’. The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and travellor-lore of backpackers [...]

Travel Worlds

Travel Worlds:Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics Edited by Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk Zed books, London 1999. Pb ISBN 1 85649 562 0 Price UK£13.95/US$22.50 (see below for ordering details) (cover photo Karoki Lewis) Everyone’s got a traveller’s tale, but TRAVEL WORLDS tells them with a sting: African-American musicians head East for Kung-Fu kicks while [...]