Studying tourism means going to have a look for yourself: co-research, vulnerabilities and opportunities after the pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourism Studies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the desire to know worlds, to contribute to human togetherness across differences, economic disparity, languages, faiths, and political inclinations. Thus, calling for engagement with the political, postcolonial, and ontological concepts of anthropology, including multi-site ‘fieldwork’ methodologies, reanimates tourism studies via the critical idealism of study as priority for anthropologists, workers and tourists. Alongside questions of privilege, re-booting tourism studies through anthropology in the service of knowledge posits tourism as much more than study tours, finding out about heritage sites, or guides with stories to tell. Crick’s credo of ‘going to have a look for yourself’ could be a rallying cry for participatory ethnography in tourism. In a more vulnerable world, anticipating future ethnographic work in Vietnam, the paper seeks insights and opportunities for a new engagement in the study of anthropology as tourism studies and tourism more widely.