An Introduction to Tourism and Anthropology

Peter Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415186261
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134664337
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

This introductory text explains how anthropology is integral to the study of tourism dynamics. Starting with an overview of the development of anthropology as a social science, the author uses a wealth of international examples, including the UK, USA and Australia, to bring practical relevance to complex theories. With its lucid writing style, summaries, sample questions and suggestions for further reading, this book will be an invaluable teaching resource in this area.

Part I
Anthropology, tourism and tourists

Part I consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 gives an overall context to the book by briefly examining the development and history of anthropology as a science. The chapter ends by discussing some of the current trends in anthropology. Chapter 2 reviews some of the attempts at theorising tourism and explains how it is useful to think of tourism as a system rather than simply as a process or set of phenomena. Following on from this, Chapter 3 looks at ways in which tourists have been defined and discussed in the academic world, and discusses some of the more complex motivations that cause people to become tourists, while Chapter 4 threads this together by examining the building block of society: culture.

1
Anthropology

Plate 1: This picture follows on from the front cover illustration. It shows a group of Pentecost islander men and boys wearing traditional dress (the penis sheath or namba) and preparing themselves for the land dive. A picture of tribal peoples is one readily associated with anthropology, although as the chapter will reveal, anthropology is about much more than far away, remote people. It is now used to help understand sectors of society and institutions in Western culture. The picture could easily have been of new age travellers, elderly people in a nursing home or farmers at a cattle market.

Overview, aims and learning outcomes

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It seeks to understand and explain how human societies work. This chapter traces some of how anthropology has evolved since its beginnings in the mid nineteenth century. The key schools of thought and approaches that arise from conducting anthropological research in a world of escalating complexity are discussed. The specific aims of the chapter are to:

• chart the evolution of social anthropology;
• discuss the main approaches to anthropology; (and)
• identify some of the future directions that anthropology might take.

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• differentiate between the key approaches to anthropology;
• evaluate the implications arising from these approaches; (and)
• describe some of the ways in which anthropology is shaping up to meet future challenges

Introduction

Living in London, there are certain rules by which I interact with my fellow Londoners. When buying food in a supermarket, I know what most of the foods are and that I have to line up at a queue in order to purchase them; I will probably not engage in conversation with other shoppers whom I do not know. When travelling on the London Underground, I know not to talk to my fellow passengers, nor even, for the most part, to look them in the eye. Thus, when I went to live in Fiji with my family, we were overwhelmed with friendliness as people said good morning to us in shops and on the streets. Travelling on the buses with our young children, we wereamazed when our babe-in-arms was taken from us and passed round the bus so that the Fijian women could get a close look and kiss the baby. My family and I had to learn how to say yes to offers of food (so as not to offend), not to admire material things too openly (or we would find the item wrapped up and given to us) and teach our children not to ask for things (as they would inevitably be given them).

The social rules were different, and we had to learn to operate within them. We suffered a mild sort of ‘culture shock’ albeit a particularly pleasant one. On reflection, it is not difficult to see why, at one level, things are different in London and Fiji. On the one hand, London has a population of 6.8 million, the whole of Fiji has a population of about 730,000. London is a frenetic, post-industrial mega-city while Fiji remains largely rural. In addition to learning ‘how to behave’ in the streets, on the buses, in the shops, we also had to learn about the complex culture that frames relationships between indigenous Fijians and the Indian population bought to Fiji as part of Britain’s colonial policy. That wasn’t the end! There was also the question of the ‘expat’ culture. At the time there were about two hundred expatriate families from Australia, New Zealand, Britain etc. This community had its own culture with both formal and informal rules governing behaviour codes and leisure patterns.

It is these complexities, social interactions, rules, conflict resolution, food habits, attitudes towards strangers, belief systems and a host of other elements that make up culture that holds the attention of anthropologists.

The beginnings of anthropology

Anthropology as we think of it today emerged during the mid nineteenth century: a very interesting and lively period of history.¹ At this time (more-or-less coinciding with the Victorian era) at least three major themes were present in the thinking of educated Western society. These were colonialism, missionary societies, and Darwinism. Their proximities to each other are shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1: Issues in mid nineteenth century Western society

The three main elements shown in the model above were all interconnected. The missionaries were bringing God and ‘civilisation’ to the native populations of the colonial world. In their earliest days (say, the mid to late eighteenth century, roughly during the Age of Enlightenment²), these missionaries might have carried the ‘romantic’ idea that the societies being ‘discovered’ through imperialism and its political tool, colonialism, were the archetypal Rousseau-esque³ ‘noble savages’ unspoilt and living a simple life, just as God intended. In later times, as the nineteenth century arrived, they may well have held the view that such peoples were ‘primitives’ low down in the hierarchy of society who needed to be civilised. The colonial officials were, very likely, convinced of their racial superiority over their subjects (a reflection of the unreconstructed attitudes at that time) and popular misinterpretations of Darwin’s theory strengthened the idea of a unilinear evolution of species where only the fittest survived (the biological evolutionist school of thought). This was not quite what Darwin, who emphasised the randomness of nature, intended. Given this powerful mix of cultural politics, the sense of superiority in Western society brought about by industrialisation (i.e. bringing nature under control) it is hardly surprising that a scientific response to the study of the human species emerged. Figure 1.1 is one interpretation of the state of things at that time, a version of events that reflects current mainstream thinking on the history of anthropology. It should not be taken as the only way of looking at the sociopolitical structures that existed. Edward Said, a Palestinian-born intellectual and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, describes this era as having four elements:

1. an expansionist one, packed with imaginary utopias, and an increasing sense of European cultural strength;
2. ‘a more knowledgeable attitude towards the alien and exotic was abetted not only by travellers and explorers but also by …confront[ing] the Orient’s peculiarities with some detachment and with some attempt at dealing directly with Oriental source material…[letting] Muslim commentators on the sacred text [the Koran] speak for themselves (1978:117, italics added)’;
3. ‘sympathy’ or ‘Popular Orientalism’ where ‘true’ knowledge about Other could only be gained by suspending all prejudice whereupon one might ‘see hidden elements of kinship between [oneself and the Orient’ (1978:118);
4. finally, ‘the impulse to classify nature and man into types… there [was] everywhere a similar penchant for dramatizing general features, for reducing vast numbers of objects to a smaller number of orderable and describable types’ (1978:119, italics in original).

These four points are important because it is an early introduction to some of the problem areas we shall be examining later in this book.

Table 1.1 is a chronology which traces some of the key dates important for early anthropology. The purpose of compiling

Table 1.1: Some important dates for early anthropology

this list is simply to put into chronological order some of the names that are frequently referred to so that you can see what events followed what. In their own way, each of the names and events listed made important contributions to the development of anthropology. However, if we had to choose those with a particular influence on the shape of anthropology, Boas, Haddon, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown are of particular interest because of their attempts to develop systematic ways of collecting data through personal observation, and their emphasis on explaining customs and beliefs within the context of their social and cultural settings. They set the idea of fieldwork⁴ as being of indispensable for anthropology.

In this way, with their emphasis on participant observation⁵ and extended periods in the field, they differentiated anthropology from its early ‘armchair’ roots. For example, Frazer’s seminal work on the evolutionary nature of human life and the origins and characteristics of religion, The Golden Bough (published in thirteen volumes from 1890 on), was not based on empirical research or field observations, but rather on academic reflection, sometimes rather simplistically referred to as ‘armchair anthropology’.

To place the dates listed in Table 1.1 in a slightly more reflective context,figure 1.2 shows the main themes of early anthropology and some of the philosophies behind them. The words ‘deterministic’ and ‘hierarchical’ in this context mean a belief in a natural, unchangeable, or even divine order of things, for example the role of women in society being somehow ‘pre-ordained’ or that some cultures are ‘naturally’ better (more important) than others. In general, the view of the world expressed in Figure 1.3 could be described as both deterministic and hierarchical.

During the mid to latter part of the twentieth century the key theoretical framework has been structuralism⁶ most closely theoretical framework has been structuralism6 most closely associated with the Belgium anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss. Central ideas that helped him develop his theory of structuralism were that:

Figure 1.2: Themes in early anthropology

• humans endlessly rearrange and categorise and classify the world about them;
• all human minds, and therefore all thought processes, are basically a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Anthropology, Tourism And Tourists
• Part II: Anthropology Of Tourism, Globalisation And Development
• Notes
• Bibliography