Tourism Research as Global Ethnography

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 fair, tourism is so ubiquitous that many of us cannot but deal with the topic, but often in a tangential way)

Rethinking development: Religious tourism to St. Padre Pio as material and cultural revitalization in Pietrelcina

This article re-conceptualizes processes whereby religious tourism is adopted to generate socio-cultural “betterment” in small-scale societies by presenting an in-depth case study of the Southern Italian village of Pietrelcina, the birthplace of recently canonized St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. “Tourism development” has long been considered central for economic development, employment, and poverty alleviation; it has also been criticized as fostering neocolonialism, inauthenticity and museumification. Arguing that the pervasive “development paradigm” creates a tautology whereby outside forces create and attempt to alleviate local tensions between maintaining tradition and transformation, the paper argues that such initiatives be organic and focused on tourism’s potentialities and intangible effects; an adaptation of Anthony Wallace’s classic anthropological model of revitalization movements is then proposed. In contrast to the “development paradigm’s” linear, top-down, and anti-organic approach, a revitalization movement posits society as a life-cycle, wherein members organically look to past practices to resolve present problems. Drawing on data collected over more than two years of fieldwork, the paper presents an ethnographic analysis of the variety of responses by Pietrelcina’s locals and site managers to tourism’s revitalizing potential, ultimately urging practitioners and researchers alike to consider revitalization theory as a model for sustainable tourism development

UNESCO’s World Heritage Program: Challenges and Ethics of Community Participation

In the nearly fifty years since the 1972 World Heritage Convention was ratified, UNESCO’s flagship preservation program has transformed itself from an initiative valorizing primarily national parks and Western-style monuments to the keystone of a robust World Heritage Program that seeks to engage different communities with a common ethical narrative of “unity in diversity.” Yet UNESCO has been critiqued for its politicized and elitist nature; its inability to protect its World Heritage properties from militias such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ansar Dini in Mali, or from adverse governmental policies in Germany, Syria and Oman; for a rather late engagement with the tourism industry; and for the 1972 Convention’s historical marginalization of descendent and indigenous communities (cf. Prott 2011). Yet this chapter posits that we should view UNESCO’s 1972 Convention as part of a broader World Heritage Program, a coordinated set of initiatives born out of the World Heritage Convention, which seeks to fulfill the organization’s ultimate, utopian goal of producing “peace in the minds of men” (UNESCO 1945) by cultivating in individuals an ethical orientation towards human cultural diversity, through the idiom of heritage. The World Heritage Program should be seen not merely as a preservation initiative – despite language suggesting this – but as a fundamentally ethical framework aimed at slowly cultivating a new, and ostensibly more peaceful, world system by appealing to communities at a grassroots level to responsibly embrace and act on a particular conception of heritage. This chapter interrogates UNESCO’s true objectives, and the ways in which its initiatives progressively work towards meeting or refining them. It also examines the primary target “audiences” of the World Heritage Program, and they ways in which UNESCO has changed in its mode of appealing to them. Last, the chapter also questions the ethics surrounding such participation at the local, grassroots level

Padre Pio, Pandemic Saint: The Effects of the Spanish Flu and COVID-19 on Pilgrimage and Devotion to the World’s Most Popular Saint

In the Catholic world, pilgrimages and other devotional rituals are often undertaken to foster healing and well-being. Thus, shrines dedicated to saints are particularly relevant in times of pandemic. Pilgrimage to the shrines associated with 20th century Italian stigmatic, St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, known as one of the Catholic world’s most popular saints, is particularly informed by this notion, as Pio is understood as a healing saint thanks to the spiritual and corporal works of mercy that marked his ministry during his lifetime, as well as belief in the miraculous nature of his relics. Pio’s hometown of Pietrelcina and his shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo boast millions of religious tourists each year, especially from Italy, Ireland and the Philippines—many of whom come with the expressed purpose of healing their ailments, praying for others who are suffering, or rendering thanks for healing received through the saint’s intercession. The current COVID-19 crisis has also seen the faithful turn to Pio for the alleviation of this new form of suffering. This paper thus argues that Padre Pio can be considered a ‘pandemic saint’—one to whom the faithful pray specifically to alleviate their suffering and that of the community, and who serves as a model for moral behaviour, during a pandemic. First, employing ethnohistorical analysis and a close reading of Pio’s writings, I trace the development of Pio’s ‘ministry of mercy,’ which is predicated on the Christological ideal of suffering as a proxy for others. In particular, I show that Pio’s stigmata experience in 1918, and the meteoric rise of devotion and pilgrimage to him, was a partial result of the world’s last great pandemic, the Spanish Flu. Second, drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research at Pio’s shrines, interviews and analysis of news media during the current COVID-19 pandemic, and an examination of Pope Francis’ public discourses on both Pio and the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, I argue that Pio can also be considered a ‘pandemic saint’ for COVID-19. Third, the paper ends with an update on the impacts of COVID-19 on the main Italian shrines to Pio, which despite their importance and relevance for alleviating pandemic suffering, were closed to mass religious tourism and pilgrimage during Italy’s harsh quarantine in spring 2020, and are now beginning to contemplate new ways to serve the faithful and promote Pio as a pandemic saint in a post-COVID world

In Memoriam: Ed Bruner

Edward M. BrunerSeptember 28, 1924 – August 7, 2020 Last month, our community—and indeed the world—lost a shining light in contemporary anthropology. On August 7, 2020, the humanistic anthropologist Edward Bruner passed away peacefully at his home. He would have been 96 today. This is a significant loss for the ATIG community, as Bruner made important contributions to the study of tourism and heritage—problematizing authenticity and host-guest interactions in the touristic “borderzone;” introducing post-modern constructivism to tourism analysis, and emphasizing narrative, experience, and interpretation in ethnographic research. The compilation of his tourism-focused essays, Culture on Tour, is a classic in our field