Abstract

This book explores the links between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, festivals are examined as ways of responding to various forms of crisis - social, political, economic - and as a way of re-making and re-animating spaces and social life. Importantly, this book locates festivals in the constantly changing, socio-economic and political contexts that they always operate in and respond to - contexts that are both historical and modern at the same time. Tourism is bound closely together with such contexts; feeding and challenging festivals with audiences that are increasingly transient and transnational. Tourism interrogates notions of ritual and tradition, shapes new spaces and creates, and renews, relationships between participants and observers. No longer can we dismiss tourists simply as value neutral and crass consumers of spectacle, nor tourism as some inevitable commercial force. Tourism is increasingly complicit in the festival processes of re-invention, and in forming new patterns of social existence.

David Picard is an anthropologist (PhD, University of La Reunion, France) and is currently working as a research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research interests focus on the cultural economics of international tourism, especially spaces and forms of exchange between hosts and guests. David's previous research has focused on the transformation of transnational contact zones and strategies of accommodating strangers in the post-plantation context of the island of La Réunion, Indian Ocean.

Mike Robinson is Professor of Tourism and Culture and Director of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University Leeds, UK. Mike has research interests in the way that festivals are mobilised to animate spaces and re-invigorate societies and in the ways in which tourists encounter and experience festivity within cross-cultural contexts.