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Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism

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The first edition of Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, published in 1977, was a pioneering work that legitimatized the American academic study of tourism, and provided both a preliminary theoretical perspective and twelve case studies documenting the impacts of tourism. The book owed its genesis to the first national academic symposium on tourism, held in conjunction with the 1974 Mexico City meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Also in 1977, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) was created to replace the International Union of Official Travel Organizations, which had functioned since 1925 for the purposes of promoting and developing tourism in the interest of economic, social, and political progress of all nations. However, the authors of the first edition must admit to some myopic ethnocentrism in their 1974 "discovery" of the impacts of tourism. As we soon learned, there was a significant body of knowledge in Europe, dating to as early as 1899 (Cohen 1984), for that continent was the first to experience mass tourism.

The first edition of Hosts and Guests was well-received and widely cited. This work and several others that appeared almost simultaneously--notably DeKadt (1977) and MacCannell (1976)--sparked research in several disciplines. The result has been a far greater understanding of the nature of tourism and its effect on the structure of society. In 1978 it was suggested to each author that a second edition might be feasible in a decade (Smith 1978); that idea has been realized here.

This second edition of Hosts and Guests assesses some of the many changes that have occurred in tourism in the past decade. By retaining the original studies' salient elements and updating them through fieldwork and a more recent theoretical perspective, this edition provides a historical framework for examining the nature of tourism in a series of global examples. To date, no other comparative tourism study exists, with time depth documentation by the same author(s)--in fact, it is even rare within the discipline of anthropology as a whole.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

RD 380.14591 HOS

Publisher

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press., 1989

Collation

xi + 341 pp.; 14 x 20 cm

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

8812212800

Classification

380.14591

Content Type

digital text

Media Type

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Carrier Type

-

Edition

Second Edition

Subject(s)

America
Tourism

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Valene L. Smith

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