This book considers how leisure and tourism acts as a major focus by which power may be understood in a geographical context.

Power and culture are inextricably bound up with tourism. The anthropological case studies in this groundbreaking book explore this relationship in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Australia and South East Asia. Two sections deal with tourism and the power struggle for resources; and tourism and culture: presentation, promotion and the manipulation of image. A concluding chapter investigates the relationship between tourism and power.

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism’s grip.

The Power of New Urban Tourism explores new forms of tourism in urban areas with their social, political, cultural, architectural and economic implications. By investigating various showcases of New Urban Tourism within its social and spatial frames, the book offers insights into power relations and connections between tourism and cityscapes in various socio-spatial settings around the world. Contributors to the volume show how urban space has become a battleground between local residents and visitors, with changing perceptions of tourists as co-users of public and private urban spaces and as influencers of the local economies. This includes different roles of digital platforms as resources for access to the city and touristic opportunities as well as ways to organise and express protest or shifting representations of urban space. With contemporary cases from a wide disciplinary spectrum, the contributors investigate the power of New Urban Tourism in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania. This focus allows a cross-cultural evaluation of New Urban Tourism and its dynamic, and changing conception transforming and subverting cities and tourism alike. The Power of New Urban Tourism will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, the political sciences, economics, history, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, ethnology and anthropology.

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

In Tourism and Prosperity in Miao Land, Xianghong Feng focuses on the intersection of tourism, power, and inequality in the southern interior of China. In this region, capital-intensive and elite-directed tourism has reshaped the social and cultural patterns of the ethnic Miao and other local residents. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Feng examines the cultural reconstructions of space, ethnicity, gender, and morality within changing power structures. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, Asian studies, and tourism studies. For more information, check out A Conversation with Xianghong Feng.