Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

David Picard is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. His research interests include the anthropology of tourism and hospitality as well as land and resource tenure. Recent publications include Tourism, Magic and Modernity (2011).

Michael A. Di Giovine is Associate Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University (USA), the Director of its Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former tour operator who runs an annual field school in Perugia, Italy, his research in Europe and Southeast Asia focuses on tourism, pilgrimage, heritage, foodways, and religion. Among his publications are Tourism and the Power of Otherness (Channel View, 2014), The Seductions of Pilgrimage (Ashgate 2015), and Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience (Lexington 2020). Michael is the Convenor of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group, and the editor of Lexington Books’ series, The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility and Society. www.michaeldigiovine.com