ABSTRACT
Tourism, the multifaceted global phenomenon of travel-for-leisure, offers many fascinating research topics across disciplines. Tourism-related ethnographic research has come a long way, from anthropologists ignoring tourists during their fieldwork and disregarding the seriousness of tourism research (Lévi-Strauss 1978 [1955]) to academics taking active roles in tourism planning and development (Wallace 2005). Tourism is now commonly seen as one of the exemplary manifestations of global flows that blur traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries, and create hybrid forms (Clifford 1997). Destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to rapidly changing global trends and markets while trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. This competitive struggle to obtain a piece of the tourism pie becomes a question of how ‘the local’ is (re)produced through the practices of touristified representations. On the one hand, global marketing companies and national as well as local authorities play a crucial role in manufacturing and selling images and imaginaries of destinations. On the other hand, tourism stimulates localization, a dynamic process characterized by the resurgence of competing localized, socio-culturally defined identities (Cawley et al. 2002).
