This collection of essays brings together writings on tourism and travel by the anthropologist Edward M. Bruner. In the introduction Bruner recalls how he was fired from a job as an “anthropological tour guide” in Bali back in 1987. His ambition to produce a more reflexive tourism, questioning narratives of authenticity, did not go down well with the tour organizers. The uniting theme of the book is to develop this kind of cultural reflexivity further. The essays follow the production of tourist events and sites over the world and discuss how they become contested arenas of different interpretations and experiences, not only for tourists but also for tour guides, marketing people, and participating locals. The essays make a nice global mix, as the reader travels from Maasai warriors dancing on the lawn in a Kenyan plantation, to visitors moving through the dungeons of a former slave castle in Ghana or the Masada fortress on the shores of the Dead Sea, to families experiencing the mix of theme park and museum in the historical village of New Salem, as well as to ethnic theme parks in Indonesia and China. The book ends up on a more personal note, revisiting field sites in Northern Sumatra, where Bruner has been going since the late 1950s.
Many of the essays argue against the kind of classic postmodernist discussions of authenticity and simulacra developed by scholars like Jean Baudrillard, and I like the ways in which Bruner dismantles the concept of authenticity, avoiding the stifling polarity this concept has been trapped in. He argues for dividing the concept into four meanings: verisimilitude, genuineness, originality, and authority.
In the pieces on New Salem and the Indonesian ethnic theme park of Tramin, Bruner challenges the traditional reading of museums and theme parks as cultural texts, frozen statements about The Past, The Nation, or The Folk, which has become a too predictable genre, and instead focuses on the creative interaction between these settings and their different visitors.
In the days when Disneyland was the most overstudied and overinterpreted cultural site in tourism research, I remember reading a rather Foucauldian analysis of this theme park as an iron cage of fixed hegemonic representations. I had visited the park the week before with my four-year-old son, and the ways in which he appropriated that setting provided a healthy antidote to this kind of one-dimensional analysis (he found the flapping lids of the wastepaper baskets the most interesting attraction). What you see and how you interpret it is very much shaped by the position from which you come; visitors move through the same landscape but within very different mindscapes. In his discussion of such processes, Bruner draws on the theoretical tradition of performance studies, in which the actors are found not only on or behind the stage, but also in the audience.
Bruner’s focus on tourist sites as contested arenas in which multiple audiences have very different experiences is rewarding, but at times he could have taken his ethnography a step further. Reading his discussion of what visitors experience in theme parks, I am reminded of the work of the Norwegian ethnologist Kirsti Hjemdahl-Mathiessen, who explored the very diverse ways in which visitors actually use theme parks. [1]
As a reaction against many years of reading tourist sites as “cultural texts” or focusing on “tourist gaze,” we have had a number of new turns in tourist research: the sensual, the emotional, the material, and the corporeal, but in spite of these new perspectives we still lack a more intensive ethnography of what tourists actually experience. Bruner wants to focus not only on tourist narratives but also on the tour as a lived experience—“images, feelings, desires, thoughts and meanings that emerge in individual consciousness” (19). However, I could have wished for more examples of the physical and material aspects of the tourist experience: the boredom, the aching feet or the stifling heat, the daydreaming, the hangover from last night’s poolside fiesta, and the interaction with other tourists as well as with all kinds of tourist technologies, from sunglasses to camcorders.
On the whole, Bruner’s collection is a stimulating read and sums up his long and creative involvement in the anthropology of tourism, travel, and globalization. His broad mix of cases and perspectives is a good illustration of the importance of not confining research on tourism within the often too narrow terrain of tourism research.
[1] See for example her contribution in Jonas Frykman and Nils Gilje (eds), Being There: New Perspectives on Phenomenology and the Analysis of Culture (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2003).
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[Review length: 761 words • Review posted on November 7, 2006]