Anthropology 316 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TOURISM

Tourism is the largest sector of the global economy and growing rapidly. Tourism travel is now the primary vehicle through which people traverse cultural spaces and encounter ‘other worlds’. What do tourism encounters say about “otherness ” in a world where quickening flows of people and images continually threaten to dissolve differences? What are the aesthetics and politics of creating difference in today’s globalized tourism? What is the role of corporations, the state, and host communities in shaping the tourist imagination? This course will pose these questions with special reference to Paris, the world’s most famous tourist destination. The course will focus especially on sites of cultural tourism such as museums, historic sites, memorials, and theme parks, as well as events that put culture on display in bodies and performances. In these contexts, how have other peoples, times, and places been represented through history? What do these representations say about those doing the representing? In asking these questions, we will reflect on the ironic position of tourism today as a practice that depends on the maintenance of boundaries and difference at the same time as the constant flow of images and people threatens to collapse them