From the Back Cover
The anthropology of tourism is a relatively recent topic area within both academic and applied anthropology, having gotten its start in the 1960s and 1970s. Valene Smith's edited work
Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (1977) marks the beginning of the field as a serious academic concern. Since then it has grown rapidly. Anthropologists were (and some continue to be) ambivalent about studying tourists, but initially they were concerned with the impact of tourists and tourism on local communities, especially in rural regions. Much of the initial findings suggested that tourism generally had negative impacts on communities that had become tourist destinations. In this volume, the contributing authors were asked to reflect more on the positive and practical contributions of anthropology to the field of tourism studies and to the tourism industry itself. The authors in their various ways have successfully answered their charge. A brief synopsis of the 13 other papers in the volume is given.
About the Author
Tim Wallace is Associate Professor and Applied Anthropologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. His primary interests lie within the subfield of the anthropology of tourism. His most recent research has taken him to the communities around Lake Atitlan in the Guatemalan Highlands. He has carried out applied research work on tourism in Costa Rica, Hungary, and Madagascar. In addition, he has done applied work in Mozambique studying maize marketing; Ecuador for a potato marketing project; Togo, West Africa, to study economic development policy; Peru to research community development strategies in Peru; and, Hiroshima, Japan to study international education policy. He has also done research in North Carolina on farmers markets in Raleigh, North Carolina, and on socioeconomic responses to pest management practices among tomato and cabbage farmers in North Carolina. He has been President of the Southern Anthropological Association and the Association of North Carolina Anthropologists, was a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and is coeditor of the NAPA Bulletin. He recently edited NAPA Bulletin 23 on "Tourism and Applied Anthropologists." (tmwallace@mindspring.com)
