The idea of „doing‟ tourism anthropology is one that prompts reflection on
a number of issues, not least those that invite us to consider the merits of its
negation: of „undoing‟ some of the shibboleths that have attached themselves to the
subject area. Accordingly, in this paper we argue that there is a need to delineate
more clearly a sense of intellectual lineage and methodological specificity, and to
bring into sharper relief what it is that distinguishes/aligns the anthropology of
tourism from/with perspectives developed in fields of cultural geography, for
example, or business and marketing studies, disciplines that have all sought to
claim purchase on ethnographic approaches to the study of tourism. (Un)doing
tourism anthropology also entails a process of „undoing‟ the tourist: of paying
greater recognition to the ways in which tourism mobilities converge, overlap, or rub
up against the landscapes, spaces and everyday practices that anthropology more
broadly has long set out to explore. Drawing on a lineage which, theoretically and
ethnographically, encompasses developments in experiential and
phenomenological anthropology, we argue that doing or undoing tourism
anthropology is in part the practice of reinforcing the anthropos while at the same
time looking critically askance at the category of „the tourist‟