Tourism and the Power of Otherness

Seductions of Difference

Edited by David Picard, Michael A. Di Giovine

Publication date:

20 January 2014

Publisher

Channel View Publications

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781845414160

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

List of Contributors Introduction 1. David Picard and Michael A. Di Giovine: Through Other Worlds Part 1: Travels into a Past Golden Age 2. Camila del Mármol: Through Other Times: The Politics of Heritage and the Past in the Catalan Pyrenees 3. Paula Mota Santos: Calling Upon the Lost Empire: The Evocative Power of Miniatures in a Portuguese Nationalist Theme Park 4. Mathilde Verschaeve and Hannah C. Wadle: Tourism and Postsocialist Heterotopias: Eastern Europe as an Imagined Rural Past Part 2: Tourism and Others in Dialogue 5. Pamila Gupta: Frozen Vodka and White Skin in Touristic Goa 6. Noel B. Salazar: Seducation: Learning the Trade of Tourist Enticement 7. Clare A. Sammells: Bargaining under Thatch Roofs: Tourism and the Allure of Poverty in Highland Bolivia Part 3: Travel, Other and Self-Revelation 8. Sanne Scheltena: Mediterranean Fields of Love: Embodied Encounters between Male Tourism Workers and Female Tourists in a Coastal Town in Turkey 9. Marcela Knapp and Frauke Wiegand: Wild Inside: Uncanny Encounters in European Traveller Fantasies of Africa 10. Christian Ghasarian: Journeys to the Inner Self: Neo-Shamanism and the Search for Authenticity in Contemporary New Age Travel Practice

Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference is an excellent source for scholars new to the "otherness" debate as its structure is easily accessible with clear linkages between theory, praxis, and well-researched ethnographic evidence. This text is also a great resource for those wanting empirical ethnographic evidence, albeit mainly in the European context, which helps to untangle the complex relationship between host and guest in their eternal quest for a realized Eden as a tourism destination.