ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the worlds of suicide tourism in the UK and drug use during nightlife tourism on the party island of Ibiza. It discusses the epistemological issues that are at the difficult centre of tourism research. The book suggests both that anthropology’s inherent reflexivity provides room for oral history, and that it is a methodology that is relatively unexplored in tourism research. It also points out that many tourism ethnographies suffer from a lack of engagement with actual tourists, as they are often focused on the place and purpose of touristic practices. Oral history, then, could help fill in portraits of those often missing tourists. That is, a return to the methodology of conducting life-histories in the field with a range of tourists might prove useful for both tourism understandings and theory making.
