Themes and Issues

This new study and research group, located at the Centre of Oriental Studies in the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, investigates those activities and phenomena that are connected with tourism in African and Asian countries. While economic dimensions of tourism – the world’s largest industry today – undoubtedly form an important background to the questions that the group will investigate, its focus will be more on the social, cultural and historical dimensions of tourism.

What are the motivations and expectations of tourists visiting foreign countries? What is their impact on the lived-in realities of their hosts? How do host societies change their cultural and social environment to match the “tourist gaze”, with all its preconceived ideas, wishes, fears, etc? How do tourist excursions, and especially experiences in the “contact zones” of tourists and hosts, change and influence the tourist (gaze) in their turn? What is the importance of tourism for the creation of new and/or the re-creation of apparently old customs, art forms, mentalities and pieces of material culture, which often appear in the form of a “(re-)invention of traditions”. What kind of images and myths of "the Orient" and "the Exotic Other" are created and produced in tourist promotions and advertisments; in broschures, postcards and travel literature? How are these images important in both choice of destination and for the destination itself? How is it possible that tourist myths and images have displayed strong continuities despite tremendous political, economic and social change in the respective regions? How do the images of “the Orient” that are brought into Asia and Africa by tourists in their search of an “authentic other” lead to the actual establishment of such an (previously only imagined) Orient, if only in the form of imported palm trees or waiters dressed as Mogul servants? And how does the Orient, thus conceived, invented and finally constituted, not only comply with, and make real, tourist imaginations of the orientalist and orientalizing kind, but also “hit back” and “occidentalize” its own Other, namely the tourists and their cultures of origin? In brief, therefore, this work group will seek to investigate and study all those socio-cultural issues of a steadily interlocking and interacting world in which tourism presents one of the most forceful, if not the most forceful agent of globalization today.

Organizational

The study and research group will meet once a month during term time (dates for winter term to be fixed). During its meetings, postgraduate students and more senior scholars from Halle and beyond will present (preliminary) data or the results of their research activities relevant to the themes and issues outlined above. In addition, seminal texts will be read and discussed together. In the medium term, it will also be considered to set up a larger research project with outside funding, formed on the basis of the interests and qualities of those who come together in this group.

The research and study group “Tourism and the ‘Oriental Other’” will have its intellectual and organizational home at the “Centre of Oriental Studies”. It is led jointly by Professor Dr. Burkhard Schnepel, Dr. Anja Peleikis and Dr. Carsten Wergin of the Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle. While there is thus a strong anthropological focus, we explicitly wish to invite postgraduate students and scholars who are dealing directly or indirectly with one or more of the issues indicated above, no matter which discipline they come from. These may be individuals with regional expertise in an African and Asian country or coming from disciplines, such as history, geography, sociology, philosophy and others dealing with tourism and related phenomena from their own perspectives. Hence, the regional focus on Africa and Asia can and must thus be extended, because in order to “orientalize” the other as a tourist, one does not necessarily need to travel far: a visit to the museum (“the past is a foreign country”), or making a nostalgic visit to a nearby, but “lost” or left-behind country and past (“roots tourism”), or listening to the record or attending the concert of an ‘authentic’ world music band, may raise very important problems and issues with respect to the overall intellectual challenges to be addressed and investigated by this group.

For questions or intentions to join the group as active participant, please contact Anja Peleikis (peleikis<at>eth.mpg.de) or Burkhard Schnepel (burkhard.schnepel<at>ethnologie.uni-halle.de).