The Tourist-cum-Anthropologist

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, my interest in tourism and the role of culture brokers, in part, derives from my own experiences as a frequent visitor to India under various guises: initially as a traveller, then as a tour guide and eventually as an anthropologist. Clearly, these ‘shifting identities’, to use Crick's term (1989), are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, my personal experiences as a traveller and tour guide provided me with a more emic perspective regarding tourist sensibilities and the way in which the tourist industry operates in India and in Banaras in particular. Equally important, however, is to reflect on how such experiences influenced my work as an anthropologist and the often unconscious methodological implications this had for both the fieldwork and the writing of my research.

As an anthropologist I often felt the need to shed what I considered to be the ‘superficial skin’ of my tourist identity. While in the field, I found that the anthropological rite of passage, namely fieldwork (involving participant observation and learning the language), was indeed (or so I thought) an attempt to establish clear boundaries between myself and other tourists.