Tourism is now commonly seen as one of the exemplary manifestations of global flows that blur traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries, and create hybrid forms. Destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to rapidly changing global trends and markets while trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. This competitive struggle to obtain a piece of the tourism pie becomes a question of how ‘the local’ is (re)produced through the practices of touristified representations. On the one hand, global marketing companies and national as well as local authorities play a crucial role in manufacturing and selling images and imaginaries of destinations. On the other hand, tourism stimulates localization, a dynamic process characterized by the resurgence of competing localized, socio-culturally defined identities.
The most important contribution which the anthropology of tourism can offer the social sciences in general is not an empirical insight into the socio-cultural dimensions of tourism . Rather, it is the theoretical challenge that the phenomenon of tourism has the potential to contribute to contemporary attempts to rethink the conceptual frameworks by means of which anthropology perceives, conceptualizes, and analyses cultures and societies. Current debates within anthropology have not sought much inspiration from tourism – which may in part be because the contributions from the anthropology of tourism to these debates have been negligible.
