Books in the The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society series

By recognizing tourism as a profound social force, this book engages with notions of power and perspectives of wellness in tourism and the contested conceptualizations of tourism spaces and places for wellness.

In Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism, Sagar Singh offers fresh insights on love and tourism. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, geography, ecology, economics, cultural studies, psychology, and history.

In Tourism and Language in Vieques, Luis Galanes-Valldejuli examines the fractured and heteroglossic dimensions of the Viequenses voice in direct relation to the occupation of the island from 1941 to 2003 and the tourism that became a primary driver of the economy in the post-Navy period.

Alternative Tourism in Budapest: Class, Culture, and Identity in a Postsocialist City analyzes the particular imaginaries of Hungarian culture that are produced and circulated through alternative tourism a generation after state socialism. Susan Hill records the everyday work of business owners and tour guides at four Budapest alternative tourism companies that lead tourists to areas not typically visited by travelers, and she considers the significance of alternative tourism work for processes of identity-making and cultural production in Budapest. This ethnographic study is recommended for scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, and political science.

In this book, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has disrupted the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents.

What happens when one's skill level in dance, the martial arts, or other activities surpasses local training opportunities? Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion provide a new and exciting apprenticeship pilgrimages model --including local, regional, opportunistic, and virtual--that practitioners undertake to acquire knowledge, skills, and legitimacy originally unavailable.

Combining historic and ethnographic research, Angela R. Demovic reveals the intersection of alcohol sales and stripteasing in the French Quarter. She demonstrates how B-drinkers-workers hired by bar owners to flirt with patrons who buy them drinks-maintain agency and create community in a tourism economy.

In Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World, Sergio Gonzalez Varela examines the mobility of capoeira leaders and practitioners. He analyzes their motivations and spirituality as well as their ability to reconfigure social practices.

This edited collection examines the emergence, development, and future of tourism ethnography, emphasizing the interpretive-humanistic approach honed by anthropologist Edward Bruner. Original chapters by thirteen leading anthropologists critically engage theories and concepts including authenticity, the touristic borderzone, and contested sites.

Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe explores traveling through case studies from Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Poland through an anthropological lens. The contributors of this volume touch on broader issues like identity, gender, visuality, memory, heritage, intercultural relationships, and globalization.

Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience examines the intersections and contradictions of study abroad and tourism, investigating how current study abroad practices engage with the promises of global citizenship. Contributors draw from their substantial experience in designing and running study abroad programs.

Deana L. Weibel explains the shifting identities of Rocamadour, a medieval Black Madonna shrine turned tourist attraction, which enchants both the devout and secular. Weibel analyzes how locals and visitors compete to define Rocamadour, arguing that the unusual properties of the cliff-hanging site make it a prize worth fighting for.

In Medical Tourism and Inequity in India, Kristen Smith explores Indian private hospitals and their role in the global healthcare service supply chain within various religious, social, cultural, historical, and economic contexts. Drawing on critical medical anthropology theories as well as health and human rights perspectives, Smith problematizes the assumed independence between the medical tourism industry, the commodification of the Indian healthcare system, and the local populations facing critical health issues, while highlighting the rapid transformation of healthcare services into merely another global commodity.

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkersmost of them women but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission.For more information, check out A conversation with Laura E. Klepinger, author of Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots