868 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 101, No. • DECEMBER 1999

Sociocultural Anthropology

Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places.Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren, and Donald V. L Macleod,eds. New York: Berg, 1997. 246 pp.

KATHLEEN M. ADAMS

Loyola University Chicago

Over the past decade anthropological studies of tourism haveenjoyed newfound popularity. Once dismissed by many in ourfield as an applied domain, tourism is now being hailed as a fer-tile realm for new theoretical insights into the construction andnegotiation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. Recentanthropology conferences have featured small flurries of panelsaddressing tourism and new book displays offer growing num-bers of tourism-related titles. Simone Abram, JacquelineWaldren, and Donald Macleod's volume is a part of this newmovement. Most of the case studies collected in this volumewere originally presented in Britain at a 1994 Institute of Socialand Cultural Anthropology seminar entitled "Tourism: Con-struction and Deconstruction of Identity." The contributors areprimarily British anthropologists, sociologists, and music spe-cialists sharing an interest in exploring how tourism provides asetting for people to rethink how they identify themselves andrelate to the world.

In their introduction to the volume, Abram and Waldrensagely problematize the traditional typologies and definitions oftourism dominating the 1980s tourism literature (e.g., host andguest dichotomies, tourists as leisured nonlocals, etc.). How-ever, they, like most of the authors in the volume, neglect to ad-dress or engage with the burgeoning literature on tourism andidentity. Much of this literature is American and dates as farback as the late 1970s (cf. Nelson Graburn's 1976 volume ontourism and ethnic arts [University of California Press]; Pierrevan den Berghe' s classic 1980 article in Ethnic and Racial Stud-ies [3:375-392] on tourism and ethnicity in Cuzco, Peru; Char-les F. Keyes and Pierre van den Berghe's 1984 "Tourism andEthnicity" issue of the Annals of Tourism Research [ 11 (3)]; Ed-ward Bruner's 1991 article in Annals of Tourism Research[18(2):238-250] on the transformation of self in tourism;Marie-Francoise Lanfant et al.'s 1995 volume [Sage Publica-tions] on international tourism, identity, and change, etc.). As aresult of this failure to engage with the existing literature, muchof Abram, Waldren, and Macleod's volume is not as theoreti-cally sophisticated as tourism-oriented readers would have an-ticipated. Nevertheless, there are several strong pieces in thevolume, including chapters by Hazel Tucker; Tamara Kohn;and Michael Hitchcock, Nick Stanley, and Siu King Chung.Moreover, in two of the chapters in the volume, a relatively newand interesting arena for tourism and identity studies is ex-plored, that of music's role in generating particular identities fortourist destinations. In a chapter that would work well for an un-dergraduate anthropology of tourism course, ConnieZeanah Atkinson explores music's place in the packaging ofNew Orleans for tourism and examines the consequences ofcommodification of regional music on local identity. Sara Co-hen also focuses on music and how it informs urban imagery andidentity: in her contribution to the volume she explores the rela-

tionship between Beatles music, tourism, and urban regenera-tion in Liverpool.

Many of the studies in the book problematize the notion thatthe world is comprised of "endangered authenticities" and thattourism is a force that compromises authenticities. As the con-tributing authors illustrate, a complex array of identity negotia-tions and social relations are embodied in touristic encountersand representations. Jacqueline Waldren illustrates the multipleand shifting meanings of concepts such as "foreigners," "tour-ists," and "locals" on the island of Mallorca and chronicles howthe village she studied was able to identify itself as a communityas a result of the presence of outsiders. Her argument is evoca-tive of Fredrik Barth's classic work on ethnic groups andboundaries and could have been further enriched by drawing onthe ethnicity literature. Similarly, Donald Macleod presents acase study of tourism on aCanary island to illustrate the slipperi-ness of the concept of "alternative tourist." Other case studiesoffered in the volume address topics such as global and local dy-namics of Trinidad carnival tourism (Niels Sampath), the link-age of indigenous involvement in Alaskan tourism to the poli-tics of community empowerment (Mark Nuttall), touristicrepresentations of Nepal (Ken Teague), the ways in which ruraltouristic performances in the Auvergne region of France em-body multivalent expressions and negotiations of identity (Si-mone Abram), and a processual analysis of how some touriststransform into residents and contribute to the construction of lo-cal identity on a Hebridean island (Tamara Kohn). One of themost theoretically compelling chapters in the volume is by Ha-zel Tucker. Tucker examines tourism interactions in CentralAnatolia, qualifying previous semiotic analyses of tourism byarguing that the overemphasis on the visual (e.g., the sites andsights) in such studies has obscured the ways in which the "tour-ist site" becomes participatory in touristic interactions ratherthan simply being an object of the tourist gaze (p. 107). In anequally interesting chapter, Michael Hitchcock, Nick Stanley,and Siu King Chung examine ethnographic museum displays inChina, Indonesia, and Sweden, arguing that Asian ethnographicmuseum displays have become new arenas for the developmentand touristic promotion of complex nationalist sentiments.

In sum, Abram, Waldren, and Macleod's volume offers an in-teresting array of new case studies to the growing literature ontourism. While most of the chapters in the volume are theoreti-cally informed by British tourism literature's focus on issuesconcerning authenticity, tourist gaze, and the problems of tour-ist typologies, American readers may find the book's observa-tions concerning tourism and identity negotiation relativelysimplistic. Nevertheless, a number of the chapters would makefine case-study reading assignments for undergraduates. • •

Culture of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning LatinAmerican Social Movements. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina

BOOK REVIEWS / Sociocultural Anthropology 869

Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 1998.459 pp.

ERIC HERSHBERGSocial Science Research Council

The abundant literature on Latin American social movementsis replete with case studies celebrating the democratic possibili-ties embodied in the emergence of a variety of collective actorsas well as with pessimistic accounts of the eclipse of once-prom-ising movements in the aftermath of transitions to formal politi-cal democracy during the 1980s and 1990s. An edited volumeby Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar (1992) was among thefirst significant attempts to go beyond this dichotomy by analyz-ing the roots and dynamics of Latin American social movementsacross a number of countries and issue areas. Now, together withEvelina Dagnino, Alvarez and Escobar have teamed up again toedit a voluminous tome in which they strive to illuminate the im-pact of social movements on political and cultural change inLatin America in the mid-1990s and beyond.

The nearly 500-page volume consists of 19 chapters that, fol-lowing an ambitious conceptual overview by the three editors,are divided into four sections. The first section, devoted to thecultural politics of citizenship, democracy, and the state, beginswith a fine essay by Dagnino. Emphasizing the concept of citi-zenship, Dagnino builds on the introduction's argument, tracingthe political significance of Latin American social movementsto the articulation of demands by a growing array of collectiveactors who mobilize on the basis of shared identities—identitiesthatare framed as often in cultural as in economic or convention-ally political terms. These shared identities typically emergealong lines of ethnicity, race, and gender. Each of these catego-ries is analyzed in the second section of the book, which is high-lighted by Jeffrey Rubin's richly nuanced chapter on commu-nity organization in the Southern Mexican town of Juchitan. Asthe editors argue, the proliferation of such diverse movementsreflects the fragmentation of popular subjects that traditionallywere portrayed as united, whether in struggling against dictator-ship or in seeking incorporation by the strong and intervention-ist central states of the populist era (p. 10). A central contentionof the volume is that in shifting the terrain of political struggleaway from an exclusive focus on formal state institutions, and inemploying a variety of discourses to assert their "right to haverights" as citizens, these movements open the way to a radicallyde-centered vision of the boundaries of the political, and thus ofthe arenas in which the quest for deepening democracy takesplace. In this sense, the book takes aim explicitly at the writingsof political scientists and sociologists—whose considerationsof the impact of social movements on democracy are said to fo-cus disproportionately on the characteristics of political institu-tions—in order to "transgress the narrow, reductionistic con-ceptions of politics, political culture, citizenship and democracy. . . in . . . mainstream approaches" (p. 11). Thus, the book en-deavors to "shed new light on how (social movement) dis-courses and practices . . . might destabilize and thereby—atleast partially—transform the dominant discourses and exclu-sionary practices of'actually existing'. . . democracy" (p. 11).

Most of the case studies in the first two sections support theeditors' core argument that in struggling to assert rights to dif-

ference in a variety of societal spheres and employing dis-courses of identity to advance material and representational de-mands, contemporary social movements have politicized LatinAmerican culture and infused democratic politics with culturalconcerns. In this and other ways, the volume makes a compel-ling case for the importance of anthropology and cultural studiesto any comprehensive account of the origins, dynamics, andconsequences of social movements. Readers will be persuadedas well that in societies long characterized by deeply rooted pat-terns of exclusion and intolerance of difference, a crucial (po-tentially) democratizing effect of social movements is to "con-struct or configure new interpersonal, interorganizational, andpolitico-cultural linkages with other movements as well as witha multiplicity of cultural and institutional actors and spaces" (p.15).

Of course, some social movements seek primarily to securebasic material needs, such as safe housing or clean water, or toexert pressure on governing elites to observe the rules of the po-litical game, as occurs when citizens demand the impeachmentof corrupt presidents. These experiences also represent criticalmoments of democratization in Latin America, and though is-sues of identity and culture are certainly not absent—as much ofthe sociological and political science literature would im-ply—they may not be paramount either. The case studies in-cluded in the volume lend support to the claim that cultural iden-tities and discursive transgressions are as essential for socialmovements as material or political demands. However, the per-sistence of more conventional bases for collective action re-ceives relatively little attention, and the fact that discourses ofidentity are at times deployed strategically is recognized but notpursued in depth.

In the third section of the book, the authors consider how glo-balization and transnationalism reconfigure civil society and,thus, engage another way in which contemporary social move-ments are destabilizing traditional boundaries of the political.The contributions to this section are uneven. Alvarez's discus-sion of the relationship between Latin American feminism andglobal feminism, and particularly of trends over time, stands outfor its clarity of focus as well as for its thoughtful treatment ofnongovernmental organizations, a topic that also receives muchneeded attention in Veronica Schild's analysis of Chilean femi-nism. Essays by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and David Slater, on cy-bercultural politics and on the "spatialities" of social move-ments, respectively, are less satisfying: the first confirms theubiquity of electronic networks and hints at their potential toforge new linkages among previously isolated actors, but af-fords little guidance on how to think concretely about their im-pact; the second seeks to grapple with the complex analyticalchallenge of conceptualizing interactions between global ortransnational processes and dynamics of social and cultural lifeat the local or national levels. The task is a crucial one, butSlater's use of such concepts as "geopolitical" and "zones of re-sistance" seems much too imprecise to help the reader makesense of a set of highly complex phenomena.

The final section of the book consists of four brief chapters re-flecting on future challenges for studies of political cultureand/or social movements in Latin America and beyond. Each ofthese brief papers presents interesting ideas, but they are onlyloosely connected to the remainder of the volume, and one won-

870 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 101, No. 4 • DECEMBER 1999

ders why the editors chose to include this section given the inor-dinate length of the collection.

Nonetheless, the ambitious theoretical arguments put forth inthe opening chapters and the high quality of several of the casestudies make this book quite valuable. Indeed, it is likely to be-come a widely cited contribution to the literature on LatinAmerican culture and politics. The book certainly will be usefulfor courses on Latin American anthropology and cultural stud-ies, as well as on social movements, though in the latter case itwill not replace studies that incorporate analyses of the institu-tional aspects of social movements and political democracy. In-deed, the collection underscores the continuing need for inter-disciplinary scholarship that can bridge the divide between theperspectives of cultural studies and the social sciences. •»

Culture and Conflict Resolution. Kevin Avruch. Washing-ton, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1998. 154 pp.

Culture Variation and Conflict Resolution: Alternatives toViolence. Douglas P. Fry and Kaj Bjorkqvist, eds. Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. 274 pp.

SAMUEL R. COOKVirginia Tech

How does one define conflict? How does one distinguish con-flict from violence? Can a "conflict" be said to have been "re-solved" if said resolution merely brings about a cessation ofovert aggressive behavior on the part of disputing parties? Howdoes culture influence or aggravate international and localizedconflicts, as well as their resolution? The works reviewed in thisessay attempt to answer these questions, and in so doing call intoquestion the scope and meaning of terms such as culture, con-flict, and resolution.

In Culture and Conflict Resolution, Kevin Avruch offers aconcise but critical consideration of the aforementioned terms.He is especially concerned with the manner in which culture hasbeen defined, perceived, or deemed relevant or irrelevant by stu-dents and practitioners of conflict resolution and internationalrelations. Avruch chooses the broadest possible definition ofculture as "an evolved constituent of human cognition and so-cial action" (p. 4). Accordingly, chapter 1 is devoted to a histori-cal analysis of the manner in which anthropologists and otherscholars have defined and/or described culture. In this criticalessay, which warrants inclusion in an upper-level anthropologi-cal theory syllabus, Avruch highlights six interrelated but inade-quate ideas about culture that still pervade fields such as conflictresolution: (1) culture is homogeneous, (2) culture is a static"thing," (3) culture is uniformly distributed among members ofa group, (4) an individual possesses but one culture, (5) culture iscustom (i.e., uniform behavior), and (6) culture is timeless. Thislist provides a foundation for the critical analyses in ensuingchapters.

In chapter 2, Avruch looks critically at the concept of "con-flict" and its resolution, arguing that the ideas and approachesthereof that have historically dominated international relationsand conflict management practices espouse all of the aforemen-tioned inadequate views of culture. Conflict, notes Avruch, is

often viewed as either (a) competition over scarce resources andpower or status or (b) a difference in principles or beliefs. WhileAvruch advocates a hybrid definition, he suggests that the so-called "realist" school of international relations, which contin-ues to exert a pervading influence in the field, has typically em-braced the former definition. Realists tend to ignore therelevance of culture because they believe that conflict is moti-vated by a universal human logic (i.e., competition forscarcere-sources). Other approaches to international relations emerged inthe 1940s and 1950s that purported to pay closer attention to therelevance of culture in conflict situations. However, these stud-ies in "national character" and "political culture" (akin to RuthBenedict's work on Japanese culture during World War II) stillespoused a notion of culture as something timeless and neatlycontained.

The approach to international relations that most impressesAvruch is that advanced by cognitivist scholars such as RobertJervis. Such approaches demand close attention to such devicesas metaphor and context in conflict situations, recognizing thatindividuals are active agents who may interact in several differ-ent cultural settings, but not necessarily equally so. Such an ap-proach recognizes that metaphor is a device for transcending the"fuzzy logic" (as opposed to the alleged "universal" logic ofWestern thought) that is apparent in cross-cultural encounters.Likewise, cognitivist approaches recognize that culture is not ir-relevant in negotiation contexts, while realist approaches as-sume that it is because power (read coercion) issues render it so.Indeed, Avruch ingeniously inverts the realist argument to notethat power often becomes irrelevant when deep-seated issues ofethnicity and identity are at stake. Similarly, he challenges thenotion that the fact that there is an alleged universal "culture ofdiplomacy" lessens the importance of cultural differences in ne-gotiations. Instead, cognitivist approaches reveal that any "cul-ture of diplomacy" is constituted by individuals embracing amultitude of competing and fluid worldviews.

In chapter 3 Avruch begins to set the stage for an appliedmodel of conflict resolution by revisiting the two primary dia-lectical concepts of anthropology—the emic and etic points ofview. In dealing with conflict situations, writes Avruch, eric ap-proaches permit comparisons across cultures and offer the pos-sibility of building theory. However, emic approaches are cru-cial because they root the analyst more deeply in the relevantcultural context (hereafter, context becomes the operative termin this book).

In the final chapter, Avruch brings the concepts of culture,conflict, and conflict resolution together to consider the variousways that culture has been used in conflict resolution tech-niques. The first segment of the chapter deals with Eurocentricnotions of rationality (i.e., realist) that have historically in-formed conflict mitigation techniques in the internationalsphere. Avruch urges the reader to consider the possibility ofdifferent "logics" corresponding with different cultures andtheir impact on the success or failure of negotiations. Specifi-cally , Avruch spends a great deal of space scrutinizing the variedprinciples of third-party intervention in conflict situations, dis-tinguishing between mediators (facilitators with no real author-ity) and arbitrators/adjudicators, whose role is to force a com-promise. A successful third-party mediator must bereflexive—that is, s/he must realize that sometimes it is impossi-ble to be impartial in international conflict situations (Avruch