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Tourism Research As "Global Ethnography", Michael A. Di Giovine

Anthropology & Sociology Faculty Publications

Tourism is a topic that has traditionally been treated with great ambivalence in anthropology, particularly compared to related issues such mobility and globalization. This is certainly curious considering that tourism continues to be the largest and fastest-growing industry in the world, even in the post-9/11 environment of terrorism fears and economic recession. This may explain why business schools, hospitality departments and management programs—particularly those outside of the United States—have embraced tourism studies, but it does not explain its relative neglect by, for example, economic anthropologists and others who are concerned with global flows of money, peoples, or information. (To be …