Apologia Pro Turismo: Breaking Inter- and Intra-Disciplinary Boundaries in the Anthropological Study of Tourism and Pilgrimage
Apologia Pro Turismo: Breaking Inter- and Intra-Disciplinary Boundaries in the Anthropological Study of Tourism and Pilgrimage

Summary/Abstract: Nearly forty years have passed since anthropologists began linking tourism and pilgrimage, yet there still exist inter-and intra-disciplinary boundaries impeding a robust exchange of data and theory between them. Likewise, the literature by practitioners in these fields reveals an astonishing ambivalence towards the oft-critical and theoretical contributions of anthropologists. Building on the work of Bourdieu, the author asserts that such divides are contingent on historical and cultural forces within and between various groups of stakeholders that are brought together in a “field of touristic production.” Informed by divergent ideologies and research interests, tourism and pilgrimage scholars have taken different pathways towards developing their respective fields, leading to a pervasive dualism that often privileges pilgrimage and neglects tourism. Drawing on a wide breadth of scholarship from numerous disciplines to illuminate definitional, conceptual, and methodological issues related to the anthropological study of tourism and pilgrimage, the author interrogates the logic of such dualities and focuses on their shared phenomenological attribute of perspectivalism, a particular way of perceiving the value and use of a destination. Offering a new apologia for the study of tourism as a “global cultural form” produced through a “field of production,” the author advocates greater consideration of this phenomenological definition to bridge disciplinary divides, and for extending anthropological tourism research into academic and practitioner-related fields.

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