tim wallace and quetzil castañeda, organizers

NOTE for 2008 Workshoppers:For Thought Provocation #1 on the "Tourist" click here

Thought Provocation #2 on Visuality, Analytical-Interpretive framings and Host-Guest Dynamics see photoessay one below from the Hagia Sophia.

Thought Provocation #3

When leaving the Hagia Sophia in June 2007, I paused in the shade with my nephew. Suddenly this transcultural encounter began. A group of young, chicque western dressed women began taking photographs of their friends posed with a few other tourists who just happened to be traditionally dressed women, also with impeccable fashion in black and veil.	This triggered a group of young men to also start photographing themselves posed with the woman. The requests and acknowledgement of "yes, its ok," were mostly communicated by body gestures and intercultural languages. In turn, my gazing and documenting as a dedicated tourist-ethnographer went without essentially unnoticed, especially since I did not ask permission.	What can be said about this encounter, this performance of identity, belonging, difference, even non-in/difference, that has not been said already through heavy handed feminist, post-colonial, foucaultian theory or with the battering rams of tourist-travel theories that reduce everything to a semiotics of gaze, consumption, neocolonial globalization, and the like?

My question is serious and pointed. Where have we gotten to from across the decades of analyzing the tourism dynamics of performance and encounters? What new analytical, theoretical and methodological tools and frameworks can be brought into play? While I have my own thoughts on this, I leave this as an open provocation and trigger for those who wish to respond, dialogue, comment and create alternative hermeneutics and problems in tourism. -- Quetzil.

Thought Provocation #3. Visuality, Visual Ethnography, Heritage, Tours/Tour Guide Service