ABSTRACT
While the number of books and articles on tourism in the social sciences has increased sharply in the past decade, there are at least two domains of research which have remained relatively understudied. First, and as the Introduction to this volume has indicated, the anthropology of tourism has for long overlooked the practices and representations of non-Western tourists. This ‘Northern bias’ (Ghimire 2001a) can be considered both a blindness and a denial; non-Western tourists are not as often studied because many cannot help but consider non-Westerners as being only benevolent and dependent hosts. This neo-colonial attitude is certainly reflected in the current state of the anthropology of tourism (Alneng 2002). Even when non-Western tourists are mentioned, they are usually considered as late avatars of their Western counterparts, and thus denied their own originality.
