Department of Anthropology

Abstract

Today’s world, characterized by networked agencies, global flows, cultural hybridity, andmovements of people within and across borders, contextualizes tourism in many ways. Paying close attention to the multiple translations and circulations of the concept of “tourism” across the globe, this symposium endeavors to elaborate both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the conceptual history of tourism. With this theme in mind, the symposium will deal with the following questions: How has the western concept of tourism (primarily Anglophone and French) traveled to non-Western contexts in Asia (including the Middle East), Africa, or South America, thereby imposing a discursive hegemony of a conceptual lexicon? Which native/local concepts of hospitality have been displaced by this conceptual globalization or have transformedit? Do newly emerging forms of tourism across the globe contribute to the intellectual discussion of the “decline of the West” and the “provincialization of Europe,” or they are just furtherexamples of westernization?

 Keywords: Tourism; theory; concepts; world anthropologies