The topic chosen for the 2007 conference, 'Thinking Through Tourism', will provide an opportunity to review the place of anthropology in the interdisciplinary study of tourism, and the impact of tourism on the methodology, theoretical development and practice of anthropology as a discipline. Panels and papers are invited which address the following themes:
Cultural ownership: encompassing the political mobilisation of culture within tourism; the study of 'cultural landscapes' and museums, and the representation of cultural objects, in terms, not only of the cultural ownership of the objects themselves (an issue of increasing concern in an age of discussions about the legitimacy of possession and restitution), but of the narratives that the objects, and the explanatory texts used to explain them, tell the visitor.
Tourism, politics and development: questions of power and development, and their accompanying discourses, as they emerge in interactions between global markets, state and non-state institutions, through social movements and grass-roots opposition to tourism, and in anthropological perspectives on the relationship between tourism, political violence and terrorism, post-conflict reconciliation and development.
Enchantment: the imaginative and symbolic structures of tourism; processes of cognitive and emotional transformation, as evidenced, for example, in the 'totemic' quality of tourist attractions and sites; exploration of the competing systems of aesthetic and commercial value at tourism's heart, which also bear on questions of the nature and formation of pleasure.
Tourism as ethnographic field: applications of ethnographic method to tourism processes, and reflections on tourism as an object of anthropology; the kinship between anthropologists and tourists, ethnography and travel writing.
Mobilities: tourism as a particular category of mobility, and as a field within which the meanings and practices associated with a wide range of mobilities are subject to transformation, redefinition, and renegotiation.
For more on the conference themes, and online submission of panel and paper proposals, please visit the conference website: www.theasa.org/asa07
Deadline for panel proposals Please submit your 250 word abstracts on-line by 8th November 2006
Call for papers from mid-November