Honoring Valene Smith, our prescient foremother

Abstract

Written by the Convenor of the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG) at the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Board and membership, this memorial article celebrates the life and multifaceted work of Dr. Valene Smith, the pioneering founder of the subdiscipline of the anthropology of tourism. It examines her prescience throughout her life that made her the pathbreaking scholar, teacher, traveler, and tourism practitioner that she was. Such foresight led to her convening the first anthropology of tourism panel at the AAAs in Mexico City in 1974, the product of which became the classic volume, Hosts and Guests. his and her subsequent publications are put into broader context of other classic tourism-focused social scientific works at the time, revealing her role in the development of tourism studies more broadly. As anthropologists are particularly keen on tracing kinship and lineage, the article argues that she rightly is considered anthropologists’ and tourism scholars’ “foremother”, or ancestral mother, who paved the way for generations of anthropologists to begin taking tourism seriously, recognizing its nature as a “total social fact” that can shed light on the holistic human experience.