The Native Tourist

Domestic tourism in developing countries is rapidly outstripping international tourism and could soon involve ten times the numbers. This is an examination of the numbers involved, their profile, behaviour, impacts and the relevant policy responses. The volume looks at the impacts of local mass tourism in various socio-economic and environmental contexts and on diverse social groups. It provides analysis and overviews of seven of the main countries involved in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This is the delightful story of an eighteen-day bus pilgrimage to sixty pagodas across Myanmar. As the author settles into her seat, the aisle blocked with luggage, she trains our eyes on the collection of characters that, like it or not, will be her traveling companions for the whirlwind tour. This native tourist amuses us with her adventures of eating at roadside cafes, climbing up pagodas, bathing in rivers, shopping at markets, and sleeping on temple floors. Along the way, she encounters deeply rooted cultural values and develops camaraderie with strangers that become like family for the duration of her travels. Ma Thanegi is a painter, writer, and journalist who was born and educated in Myanmar. She lives in Yangon (Rangoon) and is a contributing editor of the Myanmar Times and editor of Enchanting Myanmar, a travel magazine. She was detained for three years in Insein prison for her involvement in the 1988 uprisings as a personal assistant to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. From the Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Pendleton, Oregon, to outdoor dramas like Tecumseh! in Chillicothe, Ohio, and Unto These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina, locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, this incisive book reveals how they constituted what Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism"—a set of practices paralleling so-called salvage ethnography, which documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing. Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development.

Previous editions of Native Tours provided a much-needed overview and analysis of anthropology's contributions to tourism as an emerging field of study. Such a cultural perspective illuminated key ideas surrounding worldwide host–guest relations and informed discussions of political and economic influences and the impacts, both negative and positive, of tourism as one of the world's largest industries. Applying a characteristically uncluttered, authoritative writing style alongside an exceptional command of the relevant literature, Chambers updates, refines, and extends his earlier work. He retains a focus on the social, cultural, economic, and environmental consequences of tourism, and provides a framework for understanding tourism initiatives in their particular circumstances. Three detailed case studies originating in the American Southwest, the Tirolean Alps, and Belize illustrate the varied costs and benefits of tourism.

This book, The Stranger, the Native and the Land: Perspectives on Indigenous Tourism, shines a critical light on the opportunities and constraints that indigenous people face when engaged in tourism, while trying to maximize the benefits and minimize the threats to their culture, their land, and their communities.

So, How Long Have You Been Native? is Alexis C. Bunten’s firsthand account of what it is like to work in the Alaska cultural tourism industry. An Alaska Native and anthropologist, she spent two seasons working for a tribally owned tourism business that markets the Tlingit culture in Sitka. Bunten’s narrative takes readers through the summer tour season as she is hired and trained and eventually becomes a guide. A multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, cultural tourism provides one of the most ubiquitous face-to-face interactions between peoples of different cultures and is arguably one of the primary means by which knowledge about other cultures is disseminated. Bunten goes beyond debates about who owns Native culture and has the right to “sell” it to tourists. Through a series of anecdotes, she examines issues such as how and why Natives choose to sell their culture, the cutthroat politics of business in a small town, how the cruise industry maintains its bottom line, the impact of colonization on contemporary Native peoples, the ways that traditional cultural values play a role in everyday life for contemporary Alaska Natives, and how Indigenous peoples are engaging in global enterprises on their own terms. Bunten’s bottom-up approach provides a fascinating and informative look at the cultural tourism industry in Alaska.

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John "If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ." So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.

Explores key aspects of the relationship between native peoples and tourism in a variety of international settings.