ABSTRACT
The notion that tourism is the largest industry in the world seems to have acquired a wide currency over the past few years. Whether such claims are empirically correct or simply part of the industry’s own propaganda, there are very good reasons for tourism to constitute a serious focus of attention for anthropologists. Yet anthropology, along with other social science disciplines, has been remarkably tardy in according tourism the importance it deserves. Indeed, during the late 1970s a number of social scientists with interests in tourism were relaying stories about how their research had been actively discouraged by others or even derided (Finney and Watson-Gegeo 1979:470; Leiper 1979:392; Mitchell 1979:236; Smith 1978:274). The reasons behind the neglect or discouragement may have differed from discipline to discipline, but in the case of anthropology the failure to come to terms with tourism is particularly curious given the self-evident fact that tourism, particularly international tourism, bears directly on a number of time-honoured themes in the discipline such as acculturation, socio-cultural change, inter-cultural relations, and so on (Nash and Smith 1991:13; Lett 1989:276).
