Tourist : moving places, becoming tourist, becoming ethnographer.

Abstract

This essay looks at three interwoven mobilisations around travel and tourism. Perhaps the most obvious is the mobilisation of the destination, where it suggests that while tourism is often defined as travelling to somewhere – that sense of "where" is visited is actually rather less firmly placed on the earth’s surface than is often assumed. Second, it tracks the mobilisation entailed in becoming a tourist, looking at the construction of tourism as a specific practice of mobility. And to tell those stories it uses the third register of academic mobility – to speak of being a researcher chasing the two previous mobilised topics. The story is told in the context of the Greek Ionian Island of Kefalonia, or to locate the destination in not entirely the same space, Captain Corelli’s Island. The use of the ethnographic confessional is used to avoid treating tourists as dupes, through the scandalous suggestion that ethnographer and tourist are, if not the same creature then the same species – that homo academicus might be uncomfortably closely related to that embarrassing relative turistas vulgaris.