Tourism Ethnographies

Ethics, Methods, Application and Reflexivity

Hazel Andrews, Takamitsu Jimura, Laura Dixon, Hazel Andrews, Takamitsu Jimura, Laura Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351667388
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

How is ethnography practiced in the context of tourism? As a multi- and interdisciplinary area of academic enquiry, the use of ethnography to study tourism is found in an increasingly diverse number of settings.

This book is a collection of essays that discuss the practice of ethnography in tourism settings. Scholars from different countries share their work. Reflecting on their experiences, each author presents an individual insight into the complexities of ethnographic practice in destinations from around the globe, including Amsterdam, Angola, Bali, Greece, India, Namibia, Portugal, Spain and the UK. The book explores a range of themes including obtaining institutional ethical approval; the ethics of fieldwork in-situ; the use of oral histories; the role of memory; and empowerment and disempowerment in field relations. It looks at gender issues in negotiating entrance to the field, the use of collaborative fieldwork in teaching, team ethnographies, and reflections on writing up.

This is the first book to bring together several tourism scholars using ethnography as their research method. It gives insight into the experience of this unique technique and will be a useful guide for those new to the field, as well as the more seasoned ethnographer who may recognise similar experiences to their own.

1 Doing tourism ethnography

Hazel Andrews, Takamitsu Jimura and Laura Dixon

DOI: 10.4324/9781315162164-1

This book is a collection of essays that consider the experience of undertaking ethnography within the subject field of tourism. As will be discussed later in this introduction, ethnography is closely associated with the academic discipline of social anthropology. The study of tourism is also part of the anthropology canon as it can yield many insights about the nature of the social world, questions of identity, host–guest relationships, development and sociality, which are all subjects at the heart of anthropological enquiry. However, this book is not intended to be restricted to anthropology because, as we shall see, ethnography is used by an increasingly diverse range of academic disciplines. The ‘rolling out’ of ethnography beyond the boundaries of social anthropology has continued the discipline’s self-examination, as we will outline in this introduction. So, we proceed with caution in terms of not wishing to plant our flag firmly within the boundaries of the discipline of anthropology wherever they might be drawn; nevertheless, we cannot be (and nor should we be) completely de-coupled from the anthropological context. It is with this that we begin.

Commenting on a number of papers first submitted to the Association of Social Anthropologists annual conference in 2007 and later written as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (Andrews and Gupta 2010), which considered reflexivity and gender within the context of tourism ethnography, Marilyn Strathern argued in relation to the stories that the writers laid out ‘so many of the issues … are generic to social anthropology’ (2010: 80). That is, reflecting on the practice and being aware of the emotional investment that fieldwork requires ‘forces us to think through the consequences of our relations with others’ (ibid: 82). However, as Pamila Gupta argued in her reflection on the ‘dilemmas’ of her position in the field as an Indian American scholar (raised in the United States by parents of Indian descent), these dilemmas were not seen as problems to be addressed but as ways of accessing ‘domains of knowledge’ that could be used as ethnographic data in their own right and bring insight into the nature of social relations. This present volume is in many ways a continuation of that project; although not focused on gender, it nevertheless invites reflexivity, the recounting of dilemmas and the experiences of undertaking this type of research, and in so doing gives voice to a group of people who would identify their research practice as being ethnography.

This opening chapter will continue by briefly outlining the practice of ethnography in general. From there it will consider this practice in the very specific field of the study of tourism. This will then be followed by an outline of the book, and the chapter’s closing remarks.

Ethnography

As noted, the collection of data through ethnography has long been associated with the discipline of social anthropology. As the subject moved from the ‘armchair’ anthropology of James Frazer to an arguably more engaged practice of living among the subjects of enquiry, ethnography became established practice for anthropologists. Moreover, as Jon P. Mitchell attests, ‘anthropologists defend it as a method that generates theoretical insights that could not have been generated in any other way’ (2010: 1). It is the obtaining and processing of these insights that make an anthropological contribution to knowledge so unique. However, and especially since the publication in 1967 of the private fieldwork diaries of Bronisław Malinowski – the early pioneer of the method – the use of ethnography has been the subject of much scrutiny and analysis within anthropology, especially in relation to the role of the ethnographer and her/his fieldwork relationships. This was not least because the diaries revealed a tension between his desire to claim ethnographic (and therefore anthropological) objectivity and his struggle with his own subjective antipathy towards the people and society he was studying.

One concern is the question of how knowledge is produced through the chosen data collection instrument. As Collins and Gallinat point out, in the early days of anthropology the discipline was seen as a science characterised by objectivity and detachment in which the anthropologist as person was little considered. They argue that ‘the anthropological endeavour gained legitimacy from “being there” so long as evidence of “doing there” was eradicated’ (2010: 2). As noted, the exposure of Malinowski’s thoughts about his research informants in his diaries brought reflection on the questions of ‘who’ the anthropologist is and how she/he relates to the field and those who inhabit it into sharper focus. This reflection began in the 1970s with the ‘growing recognition … that the anthropologist can never be an entirely neutral “device” for describing and explaining other cultures’ (Collins and Gallinat, 2010: 3). The need for reflexivity was also illuminated by the highly influential book Writing Culture by James Clifford and George Marcus. First published in 1986, the book critically examined the way in which representations of other cultures were written as part of ethnographic accounts based on the ‘authoritative’ voice of the fieldworker. Chapter 11 in the current volume, by Burcu Kaya Sayari and Medet Yolal, picks up the theme of the writing of ethnographic accounts in the context of tourism. Their work, like that of Clifford and Marcus, shows that the writing is as much a part of the craft of ethnography as the fieldwork itself.

However, this still does not get to the nub of what ethnography is. Mitchell states that it ‘means, literally, “writing people” and is therefore rooted in the notion of description’ (2010: 2). Tim Ingold echoes this definition, arguing, ‘quite literally, it means writing about the people’ (2014: 2, emphasis in original). We will return to Ingold’s discussion of what ethnography is in due course; but for the present we can say ethnography is closely connected with doing fieldwork that mainly involves (but is not restricted to) spending a lengthy period of time living among the people of the community under study, with the idea that it will allow for deeper social relationships with community members to be developed and thus a more in-depth understanding of the social life therein. In terms of the timeframe, a lengthy period is of course relative, ranging from several months to years. This need not be in one ‘chunk’ of time, but may be spread out over a course of time. Even short-term or micro-ethnographies can prove insightful; see, for example, Passariello’s (1983) ‘micro-ethnography’ of Mexican city dwellers’ touristic practices at rural beaches during the weekends. Once ‘in the field’, the ethnographer may use a variety of methods to collect data (Mitchell, 2010), perhaps the best known being participant observation. Participant observation exists on a continuum that includes other forms of participation, including complete participant; complete observer; and observer as participant. The time in the field is likely to comprise all these states of participation and observation as the fieldworker ethnographer responds to the field (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995: 104). Before moving on, it is worth noting that the field need not be one place or space, and that it can now also be virtual. Indeed, as George Marcus (1995) identified, the emergence of multi-sited ethnographies that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries and utilised a variety of techniques for collecting data meant that data could be collected from a variety of sources. For example, Trapp-Fallon (Chapter 9 in this volume) argues the case for the use of oral histories alongside ethnography.

At this juncture, it is worth pausing to consider the notion of ‘the field’. The traditional view of the field is about the idea of a bounded space, a locus of action in which we can find a community or specific culture. In the Malinowskian take on the field, we have a bounded space which the anthropologist arrives at, enters and takes up their position as fieldworker to observe (with or without participation) what happens. We then discuss ‘our time in the field’ and our number of ‘field visits’, we reflect on ‘the field’ both as a source of data and as a form of practice. In Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga’s (2003) work, they discuss the idea of ‘locating’ culture. With this goes the baggage of effectively fixing or tying cultural practices to a place. In our locating of a field in which we gather the data, we serve to also make that space and often give categorisation to different types of space – see for example Appadurai’s (1996) identification of different types of ‘scapes’ including, for example, ethnoscapes, mediascapes and technoscapes; and Ingold’s (2000) taskscapes. However, tying culture or cultural practices to a bounded location, as Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga seem to imply, becomes problematic in as much as life is practised in a world increasingly infused by networks, flows and various forms of mobility. In addition, ‘the field’ where ethnography takes place also comprises what we as ethnographers take to it, how we remember it, and how we ‘write it’ as it is composed of those who are the ‘objects’ of our enquiry. Stasja Koot (Chapter 4 in this volume) draws our attention to this. Indeed, as Tilley and Cameron-Daum (2017: 5) note in a discussion of landscape (a term that might be substituted for field as it also contains notions of a backdrop against which, or within which, action might take place), ‘landscape is part of ourselves, a thing in which we move and think … It is not a blank slate for conceptual or imaginative thought.’

Equally, in the case of a tourism ethnography, the idea of locating the field, to borrow from Coleman and Collins (2006), must also recognise the ‘leaky’ nature of location. Where does tourism exactly take place? Is it the site of the holiday – the beach, the hotel – or does it start even before the tourist has left home as the imagination of the prospective tourist is infused with destination images, prior experiences and their own sense of habitus in relation to their gendered, sexual and class identities? (see for example Andrews 2009, 2017). Les Roberts in his book Spatial Anthropology explores, in much more detail, the idea that ‘Space [should be] understood as a performative field rather than a container of social action’ (2018: 27). Moreover, he argues that ‘Whatever the nature of the relationship between the body-subject and the space “being framed”, it is not one that can be characterised as mute or static’ (ibid: 29). He goes onto to argue that the relationship between ourselves and space is dialectical. In acknowledging the leaky porosity of ‘the field’, we follow Roberts’s call for the fieldwork location of tourism ethnographies to go beyond the location of where the action of tourism is thought to be located, whether that be places of transit or the holiday destination, and to consider how ‘the “why” is held together by the “what” and the “where”; [in which] the underlying “where” is thus by no means inconsequential to the positing of both the object of study (the “what”) and the case for study (the “why”)’ (2018: 21).

The idea of being responsive to the field brings into focus one of the difficulties associated with ethnography. That is, it is difficult to equip the first-time fieldworker with a ‘tool kit’ for exactly ‘how to do’ ethnography. As Hammersley and Atkinson argue ‘no set of rules can be devised which will produce good field relations. All that can be offered is discussion of some of the main methodological and practical considerations surrounding ethnographers’ relations in the field’ (1995: 80). The reasons why there is no certainty of method attached to ethnography is because, as was highlighted by George Dearborn Spindler (1970), each fieldwork place is different, and each fieldworker is different. As with life anywhere, there are no certainties to a given situation, or formulas for ways of doing or ways of being, that can be carried from one context to the next (Collins and Gallinat 2010: 12).

Without being able to equip ourselves with the implements of the trade, what might we learn from each other? We might take comfort from being able to identify similar experiences. As Filipa Fernandes explores, in her chapter with Francisco Martins Ramos (Chapter 6), she struggled with her role in the field in part because of ‘mistaken’ identity, a situation not unknown in tourism ethnography, as she draws on personal communications with both Dixon and Andrews to make her point, but also a situation not unfamiliar within other fieldwork settings. For example, Mitchell (2010) reminds us of Jeremy Boissevain’s (1970) experience of being mistaken as a spy when showing interest in the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Doing tourism ethnography
• 2. “This research project is not ready”: Ethics and institutional hurdles in a neoliberal era
• 3. Ethics of the ethnographic self in nightlife tourism arenas
• 4. Autoethnography and power in a tourism researcher position: A self-reflexive exploration of unawareness, memories and paternalism among Namibian Bushmen
• 5. ‘Crafting an entrance’: Gender’s role in gaining and maintaining access in tourism ethnography and knowledge creation
• 6. The permanent and the ephemeral in tourism fieldwork
• 7. Being in the field in Bali: A reflection on fieldwork challenges in community-based tourism research
• 8. Pilgrimage tourism and cultural route team ethnographies in the Iberian Peninsula: A collaborative study
• 9. Everyone has a traveller’s tale to tell: How oral history can contribute to tourism ethnography
• 10. Growing me growing you: Collaborative student fieldwork in tourism research
• 11. The postmodern turn in tourism ethnography: Writing against culture
• 12. Afterword: Less than easy tourism research in a world of fun
• Index