Using international tourism as an analytical and ethnographic entry, this
study explores the intricate ways in which local to global processes
intersect, overlap, and clash. Destinations worldwide are adapting
themselves to the homogenizing standards of global tourism while at the
same time trying to maintain, or even increase, their local
distinctiveness. Central to these deeply intertwined processes are tourism
imaginaries, understood as representational systems that mediate reality
and form identities, and their (re)production by local tour guides, key
agents in the selling and telling of natural and cultural heritage.
Drawing on 25 months of multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork in
Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Arusha, Tanzania, this study addresses the
following issues: (1) the representation of peoples and places in globally
circulating tourism imaginaries; (2) the perceived, officially sanctioned,
and actual roles of local tour guides in this representational practice;
(3) the formal schooling and informal learning of guides to appropriate
images and discourses of tourism; (4) the (re)production and contestation
of fashionable tourism imagery in guiding narratives and practices; and (5)
the ways in which dominant imaginaries and personal imaginations of tourism
stakeholders are (dis)connected. The methodology used, labeled as glocal
ethnography, involves a mixed-methods approach including extensive
observation, interviews, questionnaires, and the collection of secondary
data. The comparative and discourse-centered analysis of the data reveals
how local guides in Yogyakarta and Arusha act as 'mechanics of
glocalization', assuring the continued circulation and localization of
tourism fantasies, but also using the encounter with foreigners to foment
their own imaginations of 'paradise on earth' and to accumulate
cosmopolitan knowledge. These findings add not only to the current
theorizing on tour guiding and tourism, they demonstrate the potential of
glocal ethnography as a methodology to move global studies from mere
description or critique to grounded holistic analyses that unravel the
complex human mechanisms underlying processes of glocalization. The
study's focus on the human aspects of globalization, on cosmopolitanism,
and on the role of the imaginary in giving people's lives meaning,
illustrates some creative ways in which anthropologies of tourism and
travel can contribute to ongoing theoretical and methodological debates
about the local-to-global nexus.
|
E-mail this message to a friend
