Social and Cultural Anthropology

Discusses the current (2007) status of Korean communication research. For a summarizing article of the report see Jouhki, Jukka: Korean Communication and Mass Media Research: Negotiating the West’s Influence International Journal of Communication 2 (2008), 253-275.

The article is a reaction to the newspaper article dealing with Tintin published in The Times on 7th January (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5461005.ece ). The fact that the perception of Tintin changed during the last decades is a proof of the changing collective memory in the Western Europe. The 20th Century finished on 7th January when the suspicions of Tintin´s homosexuality was published. The signs of the collective memory were transformed and now they are related to the current values and problems of the European society,

THE DAY OF BRAHMA presents Indian mythology as an organic whole which resembles the Tree of Life whose branches are the seven major fields of knowledge. The fundamental myths of India are fascinatingly retold as a saga of the human psyche’s light and dark sides.
This is a new idea, a new light upon the meaning of life, with which humans can work towards a larger understanding of themselves and their relation to the Universe. It gives us a healing vision of order underlying the apparent chaos and emits soothing vibrations of unity to tune us up into the spirit of time.

The book combines the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell’s understanding of comparative mythology. Stefania Dimitrova explores the evolution of the human “psychic genome” from the dawn of human consciousness to the modern era of Integration. The images of our inner realms personified by gods and goddesses of Indian pantheon emerge as universalities of human experience across time and cultures.

Suitable for both specialists and the general reading public.

As in other European countries, funeral practices have changed in Belgium in recent decades. In urban areas, traditional practices, including wakes, funeral hanging, mourning clothes, and funeral processions behind the hearse, have almost completely disappeared, and new practices have emerged. Much has been said and written about this evolution, which has generated a number of questions and worries. For many years, researchers in the social sciences have analyzed it in a very critical way, warning about its negative consequences. They have argued that the disappearance of traditional funerary practices is a sign that people nowadays refuse to confront the reality of death. This evolution was associated with a rejection of traditions and rituals, with the disappearance of religious practice and beliefs, and with the disentanglement of social and family links. Emerging funerary practices were suspected of being empty and ineffective and were accused of exposing individuals to an everlasting grief. This thesis was popular in public opinion too, and as a result several initiatives were taken to confront what was called the “taboo of death” in an attempt to “resocialize death.” Slowly, however, probably partly as a result of these social initiatives and partly because new funerary practices became more and more widespread and socially accepted, this taboo thesis has been questioned.

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This paper is based on two community reconstitution studies (Soure and Lousã) in early modern Portugal (17-18th centuries), that demonstrate the value of analyzing networks of relations, specially the "apadrinhamento", for understanding social structures and the individual strategies that they encompass.

A central aspect of the methodology used is the concept of "event of relative social positioning": an action, traceable in the sources, by which an actor makes explicit his perception of the social position that he has relatively to another actor. The relationship of "apadrinhamento", in which someone asks another person to be the godfather or godmother of a child, is the main source of social positioning events used in our research. It will be demonstrated that people never invite as godfather or godmother someone they consider socially inferior.

This simple principle produces surprising results when a global reconstitution is made at the community level and the relative social position of a large number of frequently interacting individuals is obtained. The resulting network has interesting formal characteristics suggesting self - organization e high connectivity, and constitutes and example of what modern network theory calls "small worlds".

The reconstituted web of relations allows us to put into context information from different sources, providing surprising  insights on social mechanism otherwise invisible. Specific case studies will be shown to illustrate the explanatory power of this approach, with a focus on socially determined patterns of moral behavior (Soure), and the impact of an early manufacture in a traditional community (Lousã).

In an era of increasingly contentious identity politics and growing tensions over whose narrative should predominate at heritage sites, public interest anthropology offers a valuable approach for scholars engaged in heritage research. As the articles in this issue illustrate, not only does public interest anthropology offer more nuanced insights into the complex social dynamics surrounding these sites, but this more engaged approach also offers promise for finding the common ground necessary for constructive dialogue between the varied stakeholders and for ameliorating social inequalities at these heritage sites.

-Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for discipline of “The Social Sciences” from the Assoc. of Jesuit Colleges and Universities & Alpha Sigma Nu (for 2006-2009 period)

Art as Politics explores the intersection of art, identity politics, and tourism in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic research from the 1980s to the present, the book offers a nuanced portrayal of the Sa’dan Toraja, a predominantly Christian minority group in the world’s most populous Muslim country. Celebrated in anthropological and tourism literatures for their spectacular traditional houses, sculpted effigies of the dead, and pageantry-filled funeral rituals, the Toraja have entered an era of accelerated engagement with the global economy marked by on-going struggles over identity, religion, and social relations.

In her engaging account, Kathleen Adams chronicles how various Toraja individuals and groups have drawn upon artistically-embellished “traditional” objects—as well as monumental displays, museums, UNESCO ideas about “word heritage,” and the World Wide Web—to shore up or realign aspects of a cultural heritage perceived to be under threat. She also considers how outsiders—be they tourists, art collectors, members of rival ethnic groups, or government officials—have appropriated and reframed Toraja art objects for their own purposes. Her account illustrates how art can serve as a catalyst in identity politics, especially in the context of tourism and social upheaval.

Ultimately, this insightful work prompts readers to rethink persistent and pernicious popular assumptions—that tourism invariably brings a loss of agency to local communities or that tourist art is a compromised form of expression. Art as Politics promises to be a favorite with students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, ethnic relations, art, and Asian studies.

“A dynamic, informative and refreshing book. . . . Scholars, students or anyone interested in Indonesia, the Toraja peoples, artistic processes, national and global forces upon local societies, good storytelling and impressive cultural anthropology will appreciate this book. It is quite an accomplishment.” —Pacific Affairs (81:2, summer 2008)

“The clarity and color of Adams’s writing conveys a ‘you-are-there’ quality; the reader sits next to her, drinking coffee, learning the latest news of family, major happenings since she last visited, and carefully crafted interpretations of customs and beliefs. She relegates her meticulous ethnographic explication and theoretical references to footnotes, keeping the narrative lively. This ‘experience-near’ writing strategy renders the fieldwork process seemingly transparent, offering up the challenges and deep pleasures of doing anthropology in a local place with multiple strands of translocal connections. Scholars and students at all levels will find Adams’s work engaging and a major contribution to our understanding the dynamics of art, ethnicity and identity, tourism, and the politics of place in the contemporary world.” —American Anthropologist (109:4, 2007)

“The Sa’dan Toraja come to life in this sympathetic, richly painted, and authoritative portrait. . . . Adam’s study makes a major contribution to the anthropology of tourism and to the understanding of cultural politics in Southeast Asia. More than this it adds significantly to that body of work, now well-represented in Indonesia, on cultural flows and transformations at the margins, contact sites and border-zones of the Javanese dominated nation-state.” —Association for Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom News (summer 2007)

Solitamente la figura di Claude Lévi -Strauss (che comprende le sue opere e la sua scuola di pensiero) viene immediatamente affiancata al ramo strutturalista dell'antropologia; in alcuni casi lo studioso francese viene addirittura definito il "padre dell'antropologia strutturale". Per comprendere i motivi che hanno portato l'opinione scientifica e non ad attribuirgli questo grado, riteniamo utile approfondire quelle che sono le sue influenze epistemologiche e, soprattutto, il concetto stesso di struttura sul quale poi baserà l'intero apparato teorico che prenderà il nome di "Antropologia Strutturale". Il percorso formativo di Lévi -Strauss non può essere considerato lineare e, soprattutto, non propriamente diretto verso l'approfondimento delle scienze etnografiche. In effetti, lo stesso Lévi -Strauss sottolinea il suo essere un autodidatta dell'etnografia, e di essersi distaccato dalle fumose nozioni metafisiche della sociologia positivista di Compte e Durkheim proprio per ottenere un contatto più ravvicinato con la realtà empirica e la diversità culturale (Comba, 2000:20). Un desiderio che gli è stato esaudito dall'antropologia anglo -americana.

Let me begin with examination of a few of the common procedural traps that may ensue from our attempts to create the completed conceptualized and deep-originated National history originated from realities of East Central Europe.
We are beginning with the most distinguishing feature of our regional intellectual tradition.  The single ontological history of East Europe has generated the qualitatively various types of interpretations through the different national narratives. Thus,  the common philosophical, historical, political and legal heritage, which was formed within Eastern European spatiality from approximately the beginning of the eleventh to the middle of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, admits valuable, shared and parted of the cultural tradition of the Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Polish nations. On the other hand,  the descriptions of this heritage is very depended from national affiliation of  the  researchers  who  represent  often  the practically independent interpretations to be  crossed sometimes in the particular traits, but never to do this in the cardinal sense.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: We have previously reported a reduction in risk of diarrhoeal disease in children who used solar disinfected drinking water. A cholera epidemic, occurring in an area of Kenya in which a controlled trial of solar disinfection and diarrhoeal disease in children aged under 6 had recently finished, offered an opportunity to examine the protection offered by solar disinfection against cholera. METHODS: In the original trial, all children aged under 6 in a Maasai community were randomised by household: in the solar disinfection arm, children drank water disinfected by leaving it on the roof in a clear plastic bottle, while controls drank water kept indoors. We revisited all households which had participated in the original trial. RESULTS: There were 131 households in the trial area, of which 67 had been randomised to solar disinfection (a further 19 households had migrated as a result of severe drought). There was no significant difference in the risk of cholera in adults or in older children in households randomised to solar disinfection; however, there were only three cases of cholera in the 155 children aged under 6 years drinking solar disinfected water compared with 20 of 144 controls. CONCLUSIONS: Results confirm the usefulness of solar disinfection in reducing risk of water borne disease in children. Point of consumption solar disinfection can be done with minimal resources, which are readily available, and may be an important first line response to cholera outbreaks. Its potential in chorine resistant cholera merits further investigation.

Recently I came across an email from the American writer, Yar Habnegnal, in which he mentioned rhetorical phenomena that he referred to as “amok discourse” and the “amuck manifesto” as the use of language to violently subvert the dominant order of
language. I wrote to ask him to elaborate on the concepts, and this was his response.

Cross-cultural encounters can provide an excellent opportunity for
personal growth by placing us in situations where our understanding
of self and world, and of how we believe things “are” or “should
be,” is severely challenged. In this article, the authors argue that in
the United States, the cultural dimension is often overlooked in our
understanding of personal growth because U.S. individualism
obscures the role of culture in the constitution of the self and that
understanding this dimension makes a vital contribution to self-understanding.
They also view cross-cultural encounters as potentially
creative and draw on the psychology of creativity to explore
the implications of this view. The authors conclude by arguing that
to have the greatest effect, humanistic psychology must both return
to its roots in existential-phenomenological psychology and philosophy
and tackle its own understanding of the self as a culturally
situated phenomenon.

On se demande parfois ce qui a bien pu pousser Diderot à choisir une forme littéraire pour exprimer ses idées (Dieckmann CXLII-CXLII) Dialogue defines Denis Diderot's oeuvre. It structures almost all of his writings from the earliest to the latest and appears in different forms. His youthful and relatively free translation of Shaftesbury speaks back to the text itself. The Encyclopédie's cross-referenced entries converse with each other. His more mature contes nest dialogues within dialogues. Diderot's predilection for this literary form has rightly been emphasized and widely theorized. Herbert Dieckmann maintains that Diderot turns to dialogue to fulfill a personal need, for it "permet à Diderot de saisir le mouvement spontané de ses pensées" (Dieckmann CXLVI). Peter France contends that

"Reviews of The Making of Psychotherapists:

“An insightful study of the training of psychoanalytic psychotherapists from an anthropological perspective…[and] a valuable contribution to ethnographies of professional socialization.”
- Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

“A remarkable anthropological study via participant observation of the world of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Davies has produced a tour de force of critical yet compassionate engagement covering all aspects of our institutional life, including the institution of the clinic itself…. Anyone involved with training or other work of any kind in psychoanalytic organisations who cares about the degree of self-knowledge and social awareness they bring to their jobs should read this work.”
- Professor Andrew Samuels (Analytical Psychology), University of Essex


"According to James Davies's fascinating book, the medicalized mental health landscape in which English psychoanalytic institutes currently operate...further discourages analysts from critically assessing their institutional systems, theoretical assumptions, and professional practices....This thought-provoking book, which is suitable for teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate level, should make even the most unreflexive analyst question traditional institutional practices. If such questioning ultimately leads to better patient care, then we all stand to benefit"
- Medical Anthropology Quarterly

“James Davies has produced an unprecedented book that is stimulating, challenging and unequivocal in its claims.”
- The United Kingdom Association for Psychotherapy Integration.

“His careful and well-written examination of the training process and the insights that he brings from anthropology offer us a timely and valuable contribution to meeting the many challenges now threatening the vitality and even very existence of our profession…. This groundbreaking new book dissects the way that the profession is taught and asks whether its very vitality is at stake.”
- The Foundation for Psychotherapy

“A wise, thoughtful, careful examination of a world often shrouded in secrecy. Davies is both a trained psychotherapist and a trained anthropological observer. As a result, his observations have a quite different feel than most of the literature in either field. Not only psychotherapists, but their clients (not to mention anthropologists) can look to this book to understand how this profession learns to see and respond to human pain.”
- Professor Tanya Luhrmann, (Anthropology and Psychology),
Stanford University

“Combining narrative and analytical skills, Davies provides a gripping story of life among trainee and professional psychoanalytic therapists and their patients. The clinic is the participant anthropologist's village and the dramatis personae are the individuals he studies, whose ambitions and problems punctuate their learning and experiences of psychotherapy.... While laying bare the sometimes unpalatable essence of such training, Davies conveys warmth and empathy for his fellow participants. The value of the study goes beyond the particular instance of psychoanalysis and tells us how small groups meet all kinds of unanticipated consequences as they transmit the knowledge on which their profession depends”.
- Professor David Parkin (Social Anthropology),
University of Oxford.

“I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the field of psychoanalysis, in
the culture of institutions, and in how institutions foster change in their constituent members.”
- Contemporary Psychology (American Psychological Association).

“James Davies’ ‘The Making of Psychotherapists: An Anthropological Analysis’ is a thorough and thought provoking anthropological study of the culture of psychoanalytic training…. On his impressive juxtaposition of mastery of both anthropological and psychoanalytic theory, Davies points out that in a parallel development psychoanalysis developed the notion of countertransference and anthropology that of self-reflexivity….Davies’ book is well written, thoroughly and academically resourced and describes with acute detail the striving for the establishment of the doctrine of psychoanalysis…. It is essential reading for anyone involved in the therapy world who is interested in the understanding of the philosophical, historical, social and political implications of the construction of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century.”
- The European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling."

The Big Five Inventory (BFI) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, the BFI was translated from English into 28 languages and administered to 17,837 individuals from 56 nations. The resulting cross-cultural data set was used to
address three main questions: Does the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicate across cultures? How valid are the BFI trait profiles of individual nations? And how are personality traits distributed throughout the world? The five-dimensional structure was robust across major regions of the world. Trait
levels were related in predictable ways to self-esteem, sociosexuality, and national personality profiles. And people from the geographic regions of South America and East Asia were significantly different in openness from those inhabiting other world regions. The discussion focuses on limitations of the current data set and important directions for future research.

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and
egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These
findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality
differences between men and women may be attenuated.

The reputation of Franz Boas as a scientist declined in the decades after his death in 1942, but his reputation as a champion of human rights and an opponent of racism remained intact. More recently, however, some writers have questioned the sincerity. the results. and the political implications of his anthropology and his work against racism and ethnocentrism. Others have been critical of his relations with colleagues and students such as Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. In this essay I discuss some of these claims and present a more positive view. Franz Boas was passionately and consistently concerned about human rights and individual, liberty, freedom of inquiry and speech, equality of opportunity. and the defeat of prejudice and chauvinism. He struggled for a lifetime to advance a science that would serve humanity, and he was as much of a humanitarian in private as he was in public. [Boas, political struggles, human relatiorns My aim has been to conjure up "neither the pure grammatical subject nor the deep psychological subject," as Foucault himself once put it. "but rather the one who says 'I' in the works, the letters, the drafts, the sketches, the personal secrets." -James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault W x then a group of scholars believes that they have a IVtnew and better way to understand reality than vY V their teachers and predecessors, it is quite natural that they turn on those forerunners and try to demonstrate their superiority. To them the previous generation seems hopelessly old-fashioned, wrongheaded, and on the wrong track This was the case in anthropology in the mid-1950s when a group of dynanic young scholars entered the field. They were convinced of the necessity to turn anthropology into a "real" science, one that could deal with regularities, causality, and law. The answers were to be sought in the core features of material culture and technology. the organization of economies, and the relations between culture and environment. Leslie White and Julian Steward were the gods; Morton Fried. Marvin Harrs. Robert A. Manners, Marshall Sahlins the Younger, Elman Service, and Eric Wolf were among their prophets.

Although politics are meant to be of the future, the very material practices that are essential to the practice of politics impose a temporal fixity upon then, making them not of the future, but of the present. Scholarship focusing on the effects and possibilities of performativity has largely attended to individuals unmoored from the specificity of the places within which they exist, focusing instead solely on material practices that are removed from their spatial peculiarities; by examining the way in which places “perform,” it can be shown how actors within those places are limited in their possible performances. In this article, I offer the case of Arise!, a Marxist-Anarchist bookstore and resource center located in Minneapolis . By examining the ways in which the place of Arise! itself performs, Arise! can be shown to circumscribe the performances of those who participate in the place and the way it wards off potential participants in the Arise! community.

""This article treats the topic of a collective property regime of forests in Romania, named obste, in the light of anthropology of law and tries to identify rules and principles that put order in this system. It focuses on the interaction between statutes and laws that come from the state, on one hand, and customary laws and interpretations from the local communitites, on the other hand.
""
Articolul trateaza tema obstilor de padure in zona Vrancei, oferind o analiza a cadrului legal si a celui cutumiar ce reglementeaza pe hartie si in practica functionarea acestor forme de proprietate colectiva. Autorul face si o comparatie detaliata a situatiei si statutelor obstilor dinainte de 1950 - utilizand datele publicate de Henri H. Stahl, cat si documente pastrate in comunitatile locale - cu cele ale obstilor reinfiintate dupa 2000 - utilizand date de teren.

The system of collective property over forests that we find in Vrancea Region, obstea, has participation of all community members as fundamental principle. In this context, the sense of property that the members of the entitled communities manifest towards their collective forests is an element that becomes important, in addition to other elements, such as institutional arrangements or economical issues. This article tries to grasp affective and material elements that are part of the defined sense of property. Moreover, it offers theoretical insights for the study of “hidden transcripts”, the less obvious part of property, which is not sufficiently treated in the sociological and anthropological literature.

Culture underlies human energy use at many different levels, and it drives and contextualizes consumption in modern society. Energy consumption must be placed in a broad cultural context, which includes systems of meaning and communication.

The theoretical approach of this study concentrates on the images of the Other manifested in Orientalism and its counterpart Occidentalism. Orientalism as a discourse was first described by Edward Said who in his book Orientalism defined it as hegemonic Western popular and academic discourse of “the Orient.” Said analyzed the relationship between European colonialism and the intertwined discursive formations constructing the European experience of “the Orientals.” Occidentalism, respectively, is a more recent field of study of the discourse constructing Europe or “the West.” My study of Orientalism and Occidentalism is based on ethnographic fieldwork during which I collected material on the relationship between Europeans and Tamils in Auroville, a multinational intentional community and Kuilapalayam, a rural Tamil village in India.

According to the material gathered, the Europeans of Auroville followed the traditional Orientalist discourse in desribing their Tamil neighbors. In accordance with Said’s findings, I found Europeans emphasizing certain key elements of “being Tamil,” namely the ancientness of Tamil people and the image of Tamil culture as a significantly confining entity. On the other hand, in the discourse images of Tamil intuition, spontaneity and freshness were applauded although they were seen viewed as in opposition with Western qualities like organizational capabilities. The Occidentalism of Tamil villagers, in which “the West” was interpreted mainly through observing the behavior of other Tamils living in Auroville, constructed an image of Europeans as a highly financially oriented group with little or no spiritual qualities. The cultural impact of Auroville was lamented but its economic impact was welcomed. On the whole the two discourses seemed to produce a simplified and exaggerated image of the Other. The traditional Orientalist binary ontology was visible in European discourse whereas in Tamil discourse perhaps the lack of Occidentalist tradition and thus the significantly limited archive in the Foucauldian sense was reflected in less binary views of Europeans and Tamils.

"Bernstein has written an excellent book. It is full of insight, carefully researched, and casts a particular light on Taman culture."—Victor T. King, Borneo Research Bulletin

"Bernstein makes an important contribution to the ethnographic literature of what some may see as a disappearing world of traditional societies located in out-of-the-way places."—Steve Ferzacca, American Ethnologist

"Not only does it present an incisive analysis of a socio-cultural group of which we have little knowledge, [but] it is particularly rich in ethnographic detail ... providing valuable comparative material for Southeast Asian scholars."—Amanda Harris, RIMA

"Bernstein's important book is full of insight, is carefully researched and casts particular light on Taman culture. Bernstein's data are so admirably detailed that they permit us to recast our interpretations in slightly different terms.—ASEASUK News

"Rich in ethnographic detail, it additionally raises issues that transcend the Taman, making it of interest not only to Borneo and Indonesian specialists, but to all, including general readers, who are seriously concerned with shamanism and ritual healing."—Clifford Sather, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

"Well-written and thought provoking. It will capture the attention of anyone interested in shamanism, comparative religion, and Indonesian anthropology."—David Hicks

"The author has carefully integrated ethnographic detail into a debate about cultural relativism and the advantages of accepting indigenous truth claims and beliefs in local context. The book is empirically strong, ethnographically rich, and written in clear prose. "—Gretchen G. Weix

DESCRIPTION
This fascinating case study focuses on shamanism and the healing practices of the Taman, a formerly tribal society indigenous to the interior of Borneo. The Taman typically associate illness with an encounter with spirits that both seduce and torment a person in dreams or waking life. Rather than use medicines to counter the effect of these discomforting visitors, the shamans—called baliens—use stones that are said to contain the convergence of wild spirits that have come into being during the initiation ceremony.

Jay Bernstein argues that shamanism continues to flourish not merely because of tradition, but because it meets real needs for therapy that are not otherwise satisfied. He stresses the exchange of objects in shamanic ceremonies and argues for the relevance of psychology and symbolic and social processes in explaining the identity of shamans. Finally, he situates Taman shamanism in the context of the pluralistic medical system of interior Borneo, which includes the traditions of the nearby Malay Muslims and Iban Dayaks.

Written in a style that will engage the interest of both scholars and beginning students, Spirits Captured in Stone is a valuable contribution to contemporary debates in cultural and medical anthropology; the anthropology of religion, as well as magic and ritual; folklore; and Southeast Asian ethnography.

En los estudios sobre el turismo, globalización y localización se conciben a menudo en oposición binaria. En este trabajo se muestra una etnografía de un grupo indonesio de guías de turismo para ilustrar cómo lo global y lo local están íntimamente entrelazados a través de lo que se ha descrito como el proceso de "glocalización". Los guías estudiados son buena muestra de ese fenómeno de glocalización. Participan plenamente de una cultura popular global y en sus vidas privadas hacen uso de las nuevas tecnologías. Por contra, en su trabajo representan con maestría la vida “glocalizada” que les rodea como distintivamente "local", adaptada a los gustos de los diferentes grupos de turistas. Se concluye pues que el turismo ofrece excelentes oportunidades para estudiar el fenómeno de la glocalización, aunque aún es necesaria una mayor cantidad de investigación empírica.

Combining reflections on my personal experiences regarding tourism with an analytical review of key concepts, this essay addresses the question whether and how tourism contributes to building a global ‘culture of peace’. Setting the scene, I first situate myself vis-à-vis tourism and the peace-through-tourism idea. The next section of the paper provides an in-depth analysis of the terms culture, peace, and tourism. After having defined these concepts, I illustrate how my own research project contributes in innovative ways to the current debate. I conclude with a plea for more collaboration and open dialogue between policy makers, industry representatives, and scholars in order to facilitate ‘peace through tourism’ as well as ‘peace within tourism’.

El presente artículo examina las teorías del turismo internacional en países en desarrollo, inspiradas en la perspectiva antropológica. Esto se hace analizando las interrelaciones entre tres conceptos teóricos centrales: la cultura, el poder y la identidad. Los primeros intentos antropológicos de teorizar sobre el turismo contemporáneo se inscribieron en el marco de la economía política y se centraron en las desigualdades a escala macro. Enlazando el turismo con la dependencia y la dominación, dichas teorías estaban muy influenciadas por la teoría marxista. El mismo marco se ha usado más recientemente para analizar las llamadas formas de turismo «alternativas», las cuales hacen énfasis en lo auténtico y la sostenibilidad. Basados en el paradigma «anfitrión-invitado», los antropólogos han explorado tradicionalmente la interacción personal entre los turistas y las personas que habitan los destinos turísticos. Esta perspectiva se ha combinado con un enfoque en la relación entre el turismo y las políticas identitarias. Los académicos del tema han añadido recientemente una perspectiva foucaultiana y una crítica feminista. Con el propósito de sintetizar esta amplia gama de elaboraciones teóricas, la antropología del turismo tiene una apremiante necesidad de un marco teórico integrador, que entrelace los diferentes niveles en los que entran en juego las culturas, los poderes y las identidades.

Natural and cultural heritage destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to the homogenizing culture of tourism at the same time as trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. While local and national tourism authorities and travel agencies package and sell so-called ‘authentic’ natural landscapes or ‘traditional’ cultures, what counts as heritage and the way in which it is interpreted are increasingly defined on a global scale (e.g. UNESCO’s World Heritage policies). By way of a comparative case study, this paper examines how local tour guides in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (cultural heritage tourism), and Arusha, Tanzania (natural heritage tourism), learn to tell their foreign guests seducing tourism tales. Combining an in-depth ethnography of the local tourism industry with a discourse-centred analysis of guiding narratives, the author explores the relationship between global tourism discourses and local tour guiding in both destinations. The focus is on how guides, through their interpretations of local heritage, act as key actors in mediating the tension between ongoing processes of globalization and local differentiation. Paradoxically, guides seem to rely on fashionable global tourism tales to interpret and sell their culture and heritage as authentically ‘local’. This is partly because tourists appear to appreciate interpretations that combine narratives about the particularities of a destination with well-known tourism imaginaries that are circulating globally. However, this does not mean that guides merely reproduce normative templates. In the interaction with tourists, they become themselves creative producers of tourism rhetoric.

Applying a combination of ethnographic and discourse-centered approaches to an exploratory case study in Arusha, Tanzania, this paper examines how global discourses are locally (re)produced. By acquiring specialized knowledge that is circulating through handbooks, magazines, websites, and videos, Tanzanian students learn how to become professional “local” guides. During their training they are instructed, both implicitly and explicitly, how to use global discourses to represent and sell their natural and cultural heritage as authentically local. However, in the personal interaction with tourists, guides do not merely reproduce the narratives and practices they were taught at school but become themselves creative storytellers, often subtly questioning or contesting the normative templates.

This introduction places the issue’s key themes of heritage, tourism, conflict, and the public interest in focus and illustrates their intersection in a brief case study from modern Jordan. Following this, the four ensuing articles are discussed with an emphasis on their contributions to the issue’s themes. Heritage and heritage tourism are long familiar terms to the journal’s readership and our goal is not to recapitulate what others have described so well elsewhere. In particular, we analyse a process of revaluation that objects, sites, and practices undergo before they are placed within the domain of heritage. Additionally, we explain why tourism is an ideal realm in which to investigate heritage and why the conflicts that erupt around heritage tourism are particularly volatile.

Introduction to a special journal issue on public interest anthropology applied to cultural heritage and tourism. All papers in this special issue on public interest anthropology applied to cultural heritage and tourism were originally presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The panel took up the general conference theme, ‘Peace', in an exploration of heritage, tourism, and the ways public interest anthropology can address proliferating conflicts arising in tourism at heritage sites. Each author addresses a diverse assortment of themes intersecting with tourism, heritage, and the public interest, analyzing how groups formulate heritage identities and translate these identities into representations and special interests.

In tourism studies globalization and localization are often conceived of as a binary opposition. The ethnography of an Indonesian group of tour guides presented here illustrates how the global and the local are intimately intertwined through what has been described as the process of “glocalization”. The guides studied are remarkable front-runners of glocalization. They fully participate in global popular culture and use new technologies in their private lives. While guiding, however, they skillfully represent the glocalized life around them as a distinctive “local”, adapted to the tastes of different groups of international tourists. It is concluded that tourism offers excellent opportunities to study glocalization, but that more grounded research is needed.

We gathered twenty scholars from different fields (European ethnology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology) for a workshop in December 2004 and asked them to invent (or re invent) an interesting cultural process, a fresh perspective for analyzing some kind of cultural dynamic. After the workshop we expanded the group and here is the result, 25 essays experimenting with very different approaches and reflecting on overlooked or understudied perspectives. Our aim is not to force 25 new concepts onto the world, but rather illustrate how different perspectives may enrich cultural analysis and allow a bit of playfulness and experimentation into the process. We are peeking into blind spots, peering around corners, looking under the furniture, and trying to understand how some kinds of social life become visible, while so many others remain unseen. The participants were sent out to invent a process, but luckily (and predictably) their quests took on very different forms. Our project became an experiment in finding different styles of cultural analysis.