Intersections of Tourism, Migration, and Exile

Winner of the 2023-2024 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the American Anthropological Association's Council on Heritage and the Anthropology of Tourism/Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group

This book challenges the classic – and often tacit – compartmentalization of tourism, migration, and refugee studies by exploring the intersections of these forms of spatial mobility: each prompts distinctive images and moral reactions, yet they often intertwine, overlap, and influence one another.

Tourism, migration, and exile evoke widely varying policies, diverse popular reactions, and contrasting imagery. What are the ramifications of these siloed conceptions for people on the move? To what extent do gender, class, ethnic, and racial global inequalities shape moral discourses surrounding people’s movements? This book presents 12 predominantly ethnographic case studies from around the world, and a pandemic-focused conclusion, that address these issues. In recounting and juxtaposing stories of refugees’ and migrants’ returns, marriage migrants, voluntourists, migrant retirees, migrant tourism workers and entrepreneurs, mobile investors and professionals, and refugees pursuing educational mobility, this book cultivates more nuanced insights into intersecting forms of mobility. Ultimately, this work promises to foster not only empathy but also greater resolve for forging trails toward mobility justice.

This accessibly written volume will be essential to scholars and students in critical migration, tourism, and refugee studies, including anthropologists, sociologists, human geographers, and researchers in political science and cultural studies. The book will also be of interest to non-academic professionals and general readers interested in contemporary mobilities.

Natalia Bloch is an Anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She specializes in the anthropology of mobility in the postcolonial context. She conducted research in Tibetan refugee settlements and among mobile workers and entrepreneurs of the informal tourism sector in India. She is the author of the book Encounters across Difference. Tourism and Overcoming Subalternity in India (2021). Her articles have appeared, among others, in Critique of Anthropology, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Refugee Studies, Critical Asian Studies, and Transfers. Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.

Kathleen M. Adams is an Anthropologist, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago. Her specializations include the politics of tourism and heritage, museums, arts, public interest anthropology, and the nexus of tourism and homeland migrant visits in Indonesia. She has authored five books, including two award-winning volumes, Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia (2006) and The Ethnography of Tourism (2019, coedited). Her articles have appeared in various journals, such as Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Geographies, Museum Worlds, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and American Ethnologist.