Book reviews
salazar, Noel B. and Nelson H. H. Graburn (eds.). 2014. Tourism Imaginarles. Anthropological Approaches. New York, oxford: Berghahn Books. 292 pp. Hb: $120.00/£75.00 IsBN: 9781782383673.
The book Tourism Imaginaries embraces the colourful range of different imaginative phenomena from an anthropological perspective and is, in its endeavour, both specific and general, and thus interesting for scholars of various fields such as sociology, geography, and anthropology. Even though all contributions are set in the context of tourism authors address processes and products that are relevant beyond the tourist encounter and tourism itself. The book also offers various formulations of imaginaries involving different imaginative phenomena, taking advantage of the specific moment in which, as stressed by Leite in the afterword, the imaginaries lack a conceptual unity and no single definition has yet become the norm.
The edited volume is divided into two sections of five chapters rounded by the introduction by Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn and the afterword by Naomi Leite. The first section, Imaginaries of people, brings to the light tourism encounters and their related imaginaries. Rupert Stasch's opening contribution seeks to advance the study of the imaginaries by arguing for symmetric attention to perspectives of tourists and visited people (in his case Korowai in Papua). Through an ethnographic approach, he stresses that such symmetry brings out more sharply what tourism imaginaries are, and what they do. He proposes a rather obvious empiric value of studying "all participants" perspectives' that is, despite its obviousness, still emerging in tourism studies.
The second contribution by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos brings to the light a different case study (the Emberá of Panama) but similar imaginaries. Theodossopoulos discusses the parallel layers of exoticisation: a positive idealisation and negative stereotyping of Embera people and similarly, as Stasch recognises, a touristic desire for cultural distance that finds expression in temporal displacement.
Alexis Celeste Bunten discusses indigenous people in Australia involved in the business of ethnic tourism. On the basis of her case, study Bunten argues that indigenous hosts respond to the tourist gaze through crafted commoditised persona that manipulate these stereotypes to subvert asymmetrical power relations. The idea of imaginaries as processes is accentuated in her contribution, proposing that tourism be the context from which the construction of new discourses of alterity is possible.
Margaret Byrne Swain presents a dialectic circulation of personal imaginings and institutional imaginaries. She uses the term "imaginariums" to name indigenous mythic tourism destinations and addresses the question of how indigeneity and cosmopolitanism became co-imagined identities for the Sani Yi and Axi Yi people of south-west China. Her case study particularly brings to the light a play of universal and culturally specific relations as she explains how the Sani Yi position themselves as a historical civilisation with their own intellectuals by contrasting their identity to "primitivist" imaginary attached to the neighbouring group of Axi Yi.
The first section concludes with the contribution of Joao Afonso Baptista reflecting on a powerful imaginative construction, again important in tourism and beyond, the "community". He investigates tourism in Mozambique showing how community is a positive feature of the Western imaginary (an ideal of a pure and pristine social bond) developed in response to the disappointment with modernity. With convincing, ethnographically anchored arguments, he presents tourists' expectations about this
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ideal but also a creative agency and performative engagement by the populations in the destination areas to meet such an ideal.
The second section of the book, entitled Imaginaries of Places, deals with local settings in relation with global iconography. The section opens with a contribution by Michael A. Di Giovine examining material and immaterial changes in an Italian village famous for a Catholic Saint Padre Pio being born there. A notion of process again plays a significant role in Di Giovine's contribution. His study of Pietrelcina is an example of how imaginaries are constructed, deconstructed and contracted anew in a process he coins "imaginaire dialectic" 'a complex process of presenting, imagining, re-presenting, and re-imagining site materiality within the field of touristic production at a site' (p. 150)'. He examines a complex competition for recognition in which people of the saint's birthplace (Pietrelcina) compete with those of his shrine (San Giovanni Rotondo) showing how imaginaries are formed in a process involving not just local inhabitants but numerous specialists such as architects, tourism operators, municipalities, TV producers, etc.
Federica Ferraris presents the exploration of the notion of tourist imaginaries revolving around a specific host-guest relationship between Italian tourists and Cambodia as a tourist destination. Particularly she presents the ancient and recent history of Cambodia as objects of tourist imaginaries: how these are presented in tourism discourse and what ideas they generate within a selected group of Italian tourists.
Paula Mota Santos presents a miniature theme park in Coimbra - Portugal dos Pequenitos, that was originally constructed in a fascist period. The chapter is focused not so much on the park's past as it is on its present, opening her contribution with a core question: how does a colonial place still entice visitors in a postcolonial era?
Kenneth Little's contribution works like a stimulus, as he starts his contribution poetically by reencountering a beer coaster, picked up at a beach party in Belize and stuck between two blank pages of his fieldwork diary. By introducing feelings evoked by a material souvenir, Little presents imaginary as a trace of something that is being felt as much as imagined. In his rich descriptions of selected moments from a tropical paradise he discusses imaginaries as uncertain, not (yet) representational assemblages. His ideas of an emergent imaginary are linked much more with affective forces of intensity and potentiality then with imaginaries in their representational form.
The second section concludes with a contribution by Anke Tonnaer discussing the development of Dutch Serengeti, an alternative name for a large nature reserve. She presents the tension between Dutch rewilding development projects and cultural landscape approaches, showing how different understandings produce different answers to the question: what is the tourist's place in a "wild" place?
The afterword by Naomi Leite rounds up the discussion nicely by reflecting on the ethnographic approach to the study of imaginaries, suggesting some possible future developments (such as the theoretical understanding of imaginary-imagination relationship) but also opening up the book to the broader audience by stressing rightly that 'tourism imaginaries are those imaginaries ... that are not necessarily particular to tourism, but in one way or another became culturally salient in tourism settings' (p. 264, orig. it.)'.
NATAŠA ROGELJA
Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)
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