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Nelson Graburn, a Franco-American story of tourism studies

Maria Gravari-Barbas

Several texts have been published in memory of Prof. Nelson Graburn following his recent death on February 27, 2025. One such text is from UC Berkeley and the Canadian Studies Program at UC Berkeley. His scientific and academic work is immense, and it is difficult to give more than a summary of a career that spanned over sixty years –Prof. Graburn was continuously active even after his retirement and throughout the world: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania...

  • 1 I would like to thank Allison Strickland, PhD Student at EIREST, for editing this text in English.

This text1 modestly emphasizes the role that Nelson Graburn played uninterruptedly in academic relations between the United States and France from the 1980s until his death. It is written from a personal perspective, as it is marked not only by a great admiration for what Nelson represents in tourism studies, but also by a sincere friendship.

I met Nelson Graburn in Paris in 2008. He was a guest of anthropologist Saskia Cousin and sociologist Bertrand Réau as part of the tourism seminar they were co-organizing at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). As well as discussing his research, I wanted to talk to him about his experience of the Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG), as we were currently considering setting up a tourism research team within IREST, at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Founded by UC Berkeley doctoral students in 2003, the TSWG defined itself as a “forum in which faculty and graduate students from a wide range of disciplines can exchange ideas, circulate and/or informally present works in progress, hear from visiting scholars, and receive feedback on their research”. Rather than a discipline in its own right, the group considers tourism studies “as a node at which numerous disciplines intersect and cross-fertilize”.

This was also how we imagined our future tourism studies research laboratory at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne at the time: as an open, critical and resolutely interdisciplinary team. The TSWG was thus a decisive inspiration for the creation of our lab, EIREST, founded in the same year, 2008.

From this first meeting with Nelson at Cosi, a Corsican restaurant very close to the Sorbonne that has since disappeared, a whole series of collaborative projects immediately emerged. They were driven by a shared desire to work on emerging, somewhat offbeat themes, aimed at bringing together young and not-so-young researchers in France, the United States and elsewhere. They were gradually supported by a sincere friendship that grew stronger over the years, through meetings, conferences and trips.

  • 2 Lanfant, Marie-Frangoise and Graburn, Nelson Η. “Chapter 5. International Tourism Reconsidered: The (...)

However, the history of Nelson Graburn’s scientific relations with France goes back much further. Nelson loved France and spoke French. It can be said without hesitation that Prof. Graburn paved the way for Franco-American intellectual cooperation in the field of tourism. In 1980, he worked at the Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CHET, University of Aix-en-Provence) and published two monographs (one in English and one in French) in the CHET publication series. In 1989, he collaborated with the tourism sociologist Marie-Françoise Lanfant (research director at URESTI, CNRS) in the creation of the Research Committee on International Tourism in Nice. He was the translator of Marie-Françoise Lanfant, with whom he published International Tourism Reconsidered: The Principle of the Alternative2 in 1994. He was also one of the instigators of the new RC50 (Research Committee) created within the International Sociological Association following the conference “International Tourism between Tradition and Modernity” (Nice, 1992), with other Americans including Dennison Nash and Dean MacCannell, in collaboration with Marie-Françoise Lanfant, who became its scientific director. The RC50 was behind a major scientific meeting on “Heritage, Tourism and Nostalgia” at the University of Bielefeld in 1994. Over the following decade, Nelson continued to work on subjects such as “Ethnic and Tourist Arts” in collaboration with French specialists including anthropologist and historian Jean-Loup Rousselot, anthropologist and ethnologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure and anthropologist Marie Mauzé. In 2003, Nelson Graburn was elected member of the Anthropology, Objects and Aesthetics Research Group (National Center for Scientific Research, in France - CNRS). During the period 1996 - 2007 he remained in contact with researchers in France. However, direct collaboration on tourism research only resumed following his meeting with the sociologist Bertrand Réau in 2007.

Nelson Graburn’s scientific collaboration with France was consolidated in the following years through the active and continuous exchanges between the TSWG and EIREST. Following my visit to Berkeley in early spring 2009, and discussions with Nelson Graburn as well as with the doctoral and post-doctoral students in the TSGW (Naomi Leite, Maki Tanaka, Charlie Carroll, Alexis Bunten), the collective decision was made to organize an international conference on “Tourist Imaginaries” in Berkeley in 2011.

Illustration 1.

Image 100000000000056C000003A195FB40FC16760297.jpg

Naomi Leite, Maki Tanaka, Alexis Bunten, in front of the French restaurant Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, March 2009

© M. Gravari-Barbas

Dr. Alexis Bunten was a visiting professor at IREST-EIREST from May-June 2009, where she gave a series of lectures on the theme of “Indigenous Tourism”. During her stay in Paris, in June 2009, we co-organized a seminar on “The Heritage Industry and the Tourist Imagination” (Les Industries patrimoniales et imaginaires touristiques). This bilingual seminar (French/English) brought together interdisciplinary researchers from all over Europe, the United States and New Zealand. It sought to understand how the heritage industry taps into the collective imagination to create tourist products, but also the role of the actors who interpret, shape and produce tourist discourse and products, and the positioning of local populations in relation to the tourist development of their living spaces, sacred places and traditions. It was to be the preliminary event, ahead of the proposed joint conference on the theme of “Tourist Imaginaries” which took place at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011. This brought together 130 participants from all disciplines and geographical backgrounds.

Illustration 2.

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Opening panel of the Tourism Imaginaries Conference, UC Berkeley. Nelson Graburn, Dean MacCannel, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Bernard Debarbieux, February 2011

© M. Gravari-Barbas

The results of this conference were manifold, both scientifically and institutionally. It was only the beginning of a long collaboration. Five other conferences on the theme of tourism imaginaries were organized afterwards. From the second conference onwards, the University of Geneva joined the team of co-organizers, under the scientific co-responsibility of Prof. Jean-François Staszak.

The conferences explored the theme of imaginaries by taking up various subjects: “Worlds of Desire: the Eroticization of Tourist Sites”, in Geneva in 2015; “Architecture and Tourism. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra”, at the Sorbonne in 2017; “Tourism and Musical Imaginaries” in Berkeley in 2022; “Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, Fictions, Fictions” in 2022. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra, at the Sorbonne, in 2017; ’Tourism and Musical Imaginaries, at Berkeley, in 2022; “Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, practices and representations”, at INHA, Paris, in 2024.

Illustration 3.

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Dean MacCannel and Nelson Graburn, Architecture and Tourism Symposium. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra, July 2017

© M. Gravari-Barbas

At the time these lines are written, the 6th conference on “World Tours and Globetrotters. Actors, practices and imaginaries, in Geneva, from June 11 to 13, 2025, has not yet taken place. Nelson Graburn was very actively involved in its organization until his illness prevented him from doing so. He had hoped to be able to attend until the last minute.

Illustration 4.

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The co-organizers of the colloquium Tourism and Musical Imaginaries, Nelson Graburn, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Jocelyne Guilbault, Jean-François Staszak, March 2022, UC Berkeley

© M. Gravari-Barbas

These five conferences have produced a large number of publications - more than 20 texts bear witness to this very intense collaboration between the Sorbonne and Berkeley and, from 2015, with the University of Geneva. The conferences and communications have enabled several doctoral students and young researchers, from all backgrounds and disciplines, to meet and collaborate. They have been incubators for several other projects, and for doctoral and post-doctoral mobility to France and the United States, but also beyond. In particular, several EIREST doctoral students and researchers have participated in TSWG seminars: Linda Boukhris, then a doctoral student, in 2009, and Saskia Cousin, Sébastien Jacquot and Gaël Chareyron in 2014.

Nelson Graburn was also particularly concerned with the participation of young researchers. Thus, the entire modest budget allocated to him by the Department of Anthropology after his retirement was devoted to supporting the mobility of young researchers from all over the world to conference venues. Generosity, a concern for transmission, and the ability to bring colleagues and students together were also among the qualities that characterized him and marked his way of being as a scientist.

Illustration 5.

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Nelson Graburn, during the introduction to the symposium Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, practices and representations, June 2024

© M. Gravari-Barbas

The overview of Nelson Graburn’s collaborations with French scientists would be incomplete if we did not mention his important editorial activities here. He was thus associated from the beginning with the two French tourism journals, Les Mondes du Tourisme and Via Tourism Review. Graburn played a key role in Via Tourism Review: completely committed to the concept of the journal (interdisciplinary, open, free and multilingual), he not only co-edited special issues but also translated several articles and editorials. I have very often heard him promote the journal at various scientific meetings and conferences, such as those of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism.

Illustration 6.

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Kathy and Nelson in Paris, during the conference “Architecture and Tourism. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra / Architecture et Tourisme. Fictions, Imaginaires, Simulacres”, June 2017

© M. Gravari-Barbas

  • 3 Thanks to Eva Graburn for sharing some of Nelson Graburn's correspondence with CTSAP.

Nelson Graburn has lived a long and wonderful life. His life - his wife Kathy’s family is from Kyushu, Japan - and his research have brought him very close to Asia. When he was told at the Critical Tourism Studies Asia Pacific Atlas Conference in 2025 that he had won the award for his lifetime contribution to Critical Tourism Studies in Asia-Pacific, his response was: ”Oh, it’s a surprise, of which I am humbly proud! Like almost everything else in my life, much of it is unplanned or unexpected (...) Thank you all, and I hope the era of ’happy accidents’ continues! 3

His career, built on ’happy accidents’ or on a wonderful ’scientific serendipity’, is remarkable. But it is his human qualities that have made it possible. This text therefore pays tribute to both the scientist and the person, the colleague and the friend.

Bon voyage dear Nelson.

Illustration 7.

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Marie-Françoise Lanfant, Nelson Graburn, Kathy Graburn, on the occasion of the conference “Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, practices and representations”, June 2024

© M. Gravari-Barbas

Notes

1 I would like to thank Allison Strickland, PhD Student at EIREST, for editing this text in English.

2 Lanfant, Marie-Frangoise and Graburn, Nelson Η. “Chapter 5. International Tourism Reconsidered: The Principle of the Alternative”. Tourism Alternatives: Potentials and Problems in the Development of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith and William R. Eadington, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, pp. 88-112. https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512807462-009

3 Thanks to Eva Graburn for sharing some of Nelson Graburn's correspondence with CTSAP.

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