Member Activities

Erik Cohen

In Dec 2008, Erik has delivered a key-note address on 'Tourism, "Domestic" and "International" a Critique' to the ISA Research Committee RC50 (Tourism) International Conference in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. 

Erik's recent publications include:

Death of a Backpacker: Incidental but Not Random, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 6(3), 2008: 209-226. 

The Tsunami Waves and the Paradisiac Cycle: The Changing Image of the Andaman Coastal Region of Thailand, Tourism Analysis, 13, 2008: 221-232.

Southeast Asian Ethnic Tourism in a Changing World, Asian Anthropology, 7, 2008: 25-56.

Douglas Frechtling

Doug presented one of the central papers at the World Tourism Organization International Conference on Tourism, held in Malaga, Spain, on "Measurement and Analysis of Tourism Economic Contributions for Sub-national Regions through the Tourism Satellite Account" on October 30, 2008. The Conference was attended by nearly 400 international delegates, gathered to develop ways of improving destination management through research and networking.

He also addressed the Annual Meeting of the Professional Convention Management Association on January 12 in New Orleans, on “Economic Factors Affecting Global Meetings”. The presentation was based on research he is conducting of the economic and financial variables influencing attendance at international conferences by U.S. delegates and those from the host countries in the coming year.

Nelson Graburn

In July 2007 Nelson entered phased retirement by becoming a Professor of the Graduate School of the Department of Anthropology at U C Berkeley. He still directs graduate students, hosts visiting scholars (recently from China, Korea, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Philippines and Brazil), teaches his graduate seminar and retains his office, but does not have to teach and advise undergraduates. From July to November 200, he taught his graduate seminar on Tourism at the Universidade Federale, Porto Alegre, Brazil; he also visited and lectured in many other Brazilian cities and in Buenos Aires. In November 2008 he taught classes at Beijing International Studies University, the sponsor of the 2005 Academy Conference.

He also took up a post as Senior Professor in the International Institute of Culture Tourism and Development of London Metropolitan University (25% time) in October 2007, and spent a few weeks there in March-April 2008 and September-October 2008, and will be there again in March-April 2009. He has lectured at London Met., as well as at University College London, in Lyon and Paris, Lisbon, Melbourne, Beijing, at Harvard and Duke universities, and soon in Oxford and Norwich; he gave conference papers in Nuuk (Greenland), Gôteborg, Jaipur and Agra, Bangkok, Auckland and Christchurch, in Xishuangbanna (with Erik Cohen) and soon in Kunming, China.  

Last year his volume Multiculturalism in the New Japan (co-edited with J. Ertl and R K Tierney) was published by Berghahn. Graburn's chapter concerns ethnographic museums and foreign cultural theme parks (gaikokumura) as tourist attractions, spreading the ideology of multiculturalism and internationalism. He has also published chapters on Japanese and Chinese domestic tourism and about twenty previous works have been translated and published in Chinese.

At Berkeley, he has been working with the graduate student officers of the very active Tourism Studies Working Group, on hosting scholars from near and far, and arranging conferences on tourism in Cuba, Latin America, Southern Africa and, most recently on “Cultural Tourism Movements: Articulating and Problematizing Indigeneity” (see www.tourismstudies.org.) This conference was co-organized with graduate student Jenny Chio and Alaska Native postdoc Alexis Bunten; participants included Maori, Canadian First Nations, and Native Americans, as well as anthropologists who had worked with indigenous tourisms in Brazil, New Caledonia, Australia, Japan, China, Tibet, and Guatemala.