Abstract
The Tourism Development Master Plan for Siem Reap, Cambodia, described in the article in this issue by Celia Tuchman-Rosta (2024), embodies a common-sense hopefulness that tourism-as-hope has been weighted with for a very long time. Not only to grow national and local economies, reduce poverty, and pay back international debt—the hope behind the Master Plan for Siem Reap—the hopefulness of tourism, more broadly, has been directed at the realization of a great number of goals and aspirations, and from micro to macro scales (e.g., Crouch, 2021; Tucker et al., 2017). In Siem Reap, the livelihoods and futures of Cambodian cultural performers and vendors were tethered in new ways to the spatial borders of tourist sites created by the Master Plan (Tuchman-Rosta, 2024). So, too, this trajectory of precarity and uncertainty is unfortunately all too common for workers, residents, business owners, and others living in countless tourist destinations all over the world, albeit trajectories of precarity that play out in particular socio-historical formations, as this special issue so clearly demonstrates with different ethnographically-enlivened scenarios. This tension between hopefulness and precariousness, and all of the emotional, structural, financial, relational, and imaginative elements that are enmeshed in the friction that materializes between the hope/s of tourism and its precarities, is the central topic of the special theme in this December issue (Kaul and Tuchman-Rosta, 2024). This tension, this friction, this unease and discordance names the power dynamics implicit to tourism—tourism as “life itself” (Huijbens and Jóhannesson, 2019: 289).
We are delighted to introduce “Precarity and Hope in the Tourism Landscape,” a set of four papers, and introduction, and an afterward. The special issue is guest edited by Adam Kaul and Celia Tuchman-Rosta, U.S. cultural anthropologists at Augustana College, Illinois, and Denison University, Ohio, respectively. The theme emerged out of lively discussions and a conference panel of the same name at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, in 2022. I am delighted to have convinced Drs. Kaul and Tuchman-Rosta to bring to Tourist Studies the anthropological scholarship they have marshalled from the panel, including the work of early career scholars. Precarity and hope as dual analytics share a similar puzzling and troubling of tourism that we see in past articles. Chris Gibson’s (2021: 84) call for a recognition of the “multiple temporalities of vulnerability and resistance” within tourism that opposes the notion of singular moments of disruption, such as the global pandemic, is one such article. Another provocative example is the urging by Edward Huijbens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson to face head on the fallacy of “the prevailing linear ‘economic growth paradigm animating tourism development discourse and practice” and, in turn, to recognize the realm of possible future trajectories, not a single track (Huijbens and Jóhannesson, 2019: 279). For them, tourism precarity is not separate from the precarity of multiple vibrant worlds marked by change and uncertainty. This special theme thus contributes to and extends this dialogue, bringing, in particular, “grassroot scenarios” and the complexities and contradictions of tourist settings as places of relations seen by local points of view, thanks to both the closeness of ethnographic fieldwork and the evocation of ethnographic writing (Kaul and Tuchman-Rosta, 2024).
This issue wraps up 2024 and Volume 34, all together seventeen articles that spark our collective attention and critical tourism studies’ imaginations, addressing an immense range of subjects, issues, places, people, and theoretical and methodological approaches. From a rethinking of volunteer tourism during the pandemic on Lesvos, Greece in the March issue (Di Matteo and Daminelli, 2024) to questioning how and why people eat humans in tourism settings (de Jong et al., 2024) in the June issue, to a consideration of haptic tourism in the Palestinian West Bank prior to the crisis underway (Buda, 2024) in the September issue, as merely three examples, we can attest to 2024 being a richly generative volume. We take this opportunity to thank all of the reviewers and authors whose much-valued intellectual labour and scholarly vitality has made Volume 34 the gem that it is. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge Nassim Zand, who is not only a skilled editorial assistant and a joy to work with, but whose contributions often remain invisible to the journal’s readership. As the year comes to a close, our very best wishes to all.