Cosmopolitanism and Tourism

Reviews / Votes

This book is a much-needed intervention into academic debates about the production and consumption of travel, allure, place, otherness, and the multiple registers and resonances of tourist encounters as worldly experiences in the volatile and unsteady worlds of late-capitalist ruins. It is a notable and timely collection that makes an original contribution to the anthropology of tourism, travel, and cosmopolitanism. Using the very rich and distinctive perspectives, ethnographic locations, and subject matters of its authors the book troubles liberal assumptions about cosmopolitanism, as the world rapidly becomes a more complex and traveled place. This superb volume promises to become a key text in the field of tourism and travel studies. -- Kenneth Little, York University If cosmopolitanism imagines a world where humanity might transcend the fictions of cultural categories-where people are no longer arbitrarily defined (and confined) according to nation, ethnicity, religion, class and gender-then how does tourism conform to this hope? In this collection of compelling case studies among both international travelers and their hosts, constructions of difference stubbornly remain but the complexity of encounters across cultural frontiers also intensifies. A worthy addition to an anthropological exploration of a vital topic -- Nigel Rapport, St. Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies; author of Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology With its rich ethnographic examples, this volume illuminates the often misunderstood intersection of tourism and cosmopolitanism. It makes a strong contribution to the theoretical discourse in both fields, while remaining accessible and engaging to those unfamiliar with either field. Its wide-ranging ethnographic work alone makes this a useful for volume for undergraduate classroom use, but taken together, they develop a sophisticated understanding of how individuals involved with tourism, both as consumer and producers, construct cosmopolitan identities. -- Simon Hawkins, University of Arkansas, Little Rock