1Nelson Graburn is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Curator at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology (UC, Berkley) and Co-Chair of the Tourism Studies Working Group (www.tourismstudies.org).

2From his initial research on Inuit tourism in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, to his investigation of Japanese tourist practices, and more recently his research on minority tourism scholars especially in China, the purpose of this discussion was to explore some of his lifetime of questioning on indigeneity, alterities and hegemonies in tourism research. In particular, I wanted to ask Nelson Graburn to reflect upon the vast changes in the field of anthropology of tourism (the epistemologies, the methods, the geographies) he has witnessed (and driven) over the course of his career, interacting with scholars from different backgrounds and different parts of the world. I invited him to discuss some of the topics of this Via special issue on postcolonial and decolonial paradigms.

3I first met Nelson Graburn in 2011 during a conference on “Tourism Imaginaries” that he organized at UC Berkeley, and we have been following each other’s research projects for the past years.

The interview took place on July 3rd, 2019, at Kroeber Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. It has been edited for clarity as it was more than a 2-hour-long conversation.

Linda Boukhris (LB): I would like to start with a passage of Ann Laura Stoler’s book, Duress. Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016):
“How do colonial stories matter in the world today? … Some work in the field of (post)colonial studies has assumed that the connectivities joining colonial pasts to ‘postcolonial’ presents are self-evident and unproblematically identified and accessed. This book starts from the premise that more often they are not. … Leftovers are not what most interest me here. Connectivities to those colonial histories that bear on the present can escape scrutiny: some of those that are most pressing evade recognition. … Colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and whom they most palpably act” (Stoler, 2016, pp. 4-5).
This was also the intention of the Via special issue, tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms. How would you answer to the question: “how do colonial stories matter in the world today?”

Nelson Graburn (NG): This is the story of the world. The whole world is a debris of postcolonialisms.
To begin very simply, when I grew up in England, at the age of 7, I began to study Latin and then English history. We learn we were colonized by the Romans 2000 years ago and it went on for 300-400 years. Our history in England began with its colonization. We didn’t have any history before that period. This doesn’t mean that we unconsciously still look upon the Roman as the masters. That is the way I began to think that everybody’s history is a debris of postcolonialisms as colonized people or colonizers. So, in England, we learned that we were colonized first and then we became colonizers. In fact, for most English people, we would say that the Roman Empire was the model which gave the British permission to have a British Empire. This was probably made more obvious in my education because I went to a school where we learned Latin and Greek and we learned that this is part of the colonial history, but I think everybody in Britain looks upon the [Roman] colonial period as the beginning of British history, both the antagonism and the attempt to fight the Romans — which we lost — and then the attempt to learn from them, cooperate with them, and carry on the [Roman] heritage.
But more than that, in anthropology, I have looked upon most of the history of the world as the history of colonialisms. There are very few places where somebody comes in and they are the only inhabitants of the place. I’m lucky that I studied with the Inuit who were never colonized until the British or the Danish people got there. They were one of the few people who went to an empty area, but almost everywhere else is the history of a series of conquests of one people by another; each conquest leading to a hybrid society. That is the foundation of most cultures, most civilizations. I don’t think colonialism is something rare or something necessarily deadly. I think colonialism is actually the norm of the history of all societies. Nearly all societies have been through a period of being colonized and many of them have also been through a period of colonizing. They have been the colonizers, the conquerors.
Anywhere you go in Europe, your culture is actually the accumulation of hybridity of a series of layers of influences which maybe could be political conquests. It could be religious conquests, as I would say that missionization was another kind of colonialism. Look at the school I went to in Canterbury: it was a school founded by Saint Augustin when he found the illiterate Kenty (the people of Kent) and said if we want to make them Christian, we have to send them to school to have priests, and it has been going ever since. So, my school was a post-Roman colonialism, another kind of colonialism. That was the foundation of a lot of the way England grew.
I would agree that colonialism is maybe the central fact of history.

LB: You published Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World in 1976 and discussed your position towards the problematic words “primitive arts” as well as “non-Western” arts. You preferred the concept of the “Fourth World,” defined as
“the collective name for all [A]boriginal or [N]ative people whose lands fall within the national boundaries and techno-bureaucratic administrations of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. As such, they are peoples without countries of their own, peoples who are usually in the minority and without the power to direct the course of their collective lives” (Graburn, 1976, p. 1).
What is particularly interesting is your fluid approach to minority identities and your conclusion which states that unlike the study of “’primitive art’, … characteristic of most earlier anthropological writings, … the study of Fourth World arts is the study of changing [emphasis in original] arts — of emerging ethnicities, modifying identities, and commercial and colonial stimuli and repressive actions” (Graburn, 1976, p. 2). In our contemporary context of intense debates on restitution of artefacts, particularly in France following the Felwin Sarr and Benedicte Savoy report on the restitution of African cultural heritage in 2018 (Sarr, Savoy, 2018), these contributions should be revisited. How did you come to question and challenge this category of “primitive art” based on your research on tourist arts?

NG: In the first summer I went to the Eastern Canadian Arctic, I discovered that the Inuit were producing these little models and so on and selling them, as they needed credit at the store. The next summer, I went to Baffin Island and the same thing happened there. It was a part time occupation, not a primary occupation like hunting or fishing. I realized that this was important to them, it was not just about making money. It was a means for them making statements about themselves so it would be exported to the world. So, they were representing themselves to the world in a way they had not been able to before. They were not able to broadcast in the south; they didn’t write letters or newspapers or anything. This was the first time they could get messages to go to the world out there. That’s why they asked me: what do people do with this stuff? Where does it go? Only later, 10 years, 20 years, they realized what art was; they had no idea it was art. They realized that some of it was collected in galleries, some of it was put in museums, some of the leading artists were asked to go south and appear at events and they gradually learned about the outside world which they joined.
When I got back to Berkeley, I realized that this was important and it had not been studied by anybody else before, because when I looked at what was happening in arts in other societies, all I found in the literature was studies on traditional arts in situ, functional arts, ritual arts etc.; nothing on art as a message, as a means to exchange, except for one book by a German ethnologist named Julius Lips, entitled The Savage Hits Back: Art and Alterity in the Colonial Encounter in the 1930s. It was a book about some of the arts of colonialism, for instance, West Africans doing little statues of white people. I thought I should learn more about the anthropology of art, and William Bascom who was hired as a director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology just before I came, was a major anthropologist of the art of West Africa. He had of course gone to West Africa during the colonial period and looked at the arts of people of West Africa. He had written more about happened to the art when it got to Europe than what happened in West Africa because the West African art when it got to Europe changed European art immensely. So that is a big subject that anthropologists took next after studying the art in situ, was the effect of this art on Europe, Western art and so on.
So, I thought that these formerly independent but now colonized peoples must be doing the same thing all over the world. I published an early article on “Art and Acculturative Processes” in the International Social Science Journal for UNESCO in 1969. And I wrote letters to anthropologists with interests in the arts and crafts, asking them if they knew of productions for trade or modified for sale and if they would like to meet to discuss this, or work on a volume together. I heard from about twenty scholars and I organized a panel on “The Study of Contemporary Ethnic Arts” at the American Anthropological Association meeting in San Diego in 1970. I called for contributions for an edited volume, both from those who attended the panel and those to whom I had just written. This collection, with 18 chapters and 400 illustrations, I called Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, but the manuscript met with a stream of rejections from publishers. “Tourist Art? Do you mean kitsch, or souvenirs? … Why are you studying tourism, instead of something serious? … Oh, this is too new and we are not sure it will sell” … and so on. It was eventually published by the University of California Press (1976) and sold well enough to come out in paperback in 1980.

LB: In “Ethnic and Tourist Arts Revisited,” published in 1999, you wrote that this research was “central to the understanding of the colonial predicament and the ethnic self-image of many minorities” (Graburn, 1999, p. 340). I invite our readers to explore your seminal anthology published in 1976 as well as the following important contribution published twenty years later and edited by Phillips and Steiner, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. In the introduction of their anthology, Phillips and Steiner assert that “the inscription of Western modes of commodity production has been one of the most important aspects of the global extension of Western colonial power”. They want to explore how “the makers of objects have frequently manipulated commodity production in order to serve economic needs as well as new demands for self-representation and self-identification made urgent by the establishment of colonial hegemonies.” (Phillips, Steiner, 1999, p. 4). Several of the essays of this anthology focus on tourist arts, going beyond the classical analysis of the inauthentic objects produced for the tourist markets and demonstrating how tourism studies can contribute to challenging theories of Western practices of representation and evaluation of arts in the postcolonial world.
Let’s talk now about a recent publication co-edited with the anthropologist Alexis Bunten and published in 2018, Indigenous Tourism Movements. This is also a major contribution challenging the classical frame of indigenous tourism as “the consumption and / or appropriation of peoples often forced by necessity to participate in an industry that capitalizes on difference” which you describe as “obfuscating an Indigenous perspective or decolonizing framework” (Bunten, Graburn, 2018, p. 2). You analyze what you present as the “identity movements”, the “political movements”, the “knowledge movements,” as well as the “indigenous futures” at play in the tourism industry. You demonstrate the “double consciousness” at stake among tourism workers whose performances are “in dialogue with tourist imaginaries” but also “reflect their own imaginaries about heritage, colonization, work, and the tourist themselves” (Bunten, Graburn, 2018: 11). Can you tell us more about the purpose of this book?

NG: Most of the papers in the book are the situations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, and Chile where the colonial white people have domestic tourism which we call ethnic tourism. They go to see the conquered ethnic groups, the indigenous people. Alexis Bunten is half Indigenous and half European white and identifies herself from an Alaskan [Native] point of view. Alaskan Native people are the recipients of this tourism that she studied and has written books about. We are looking at it from the point of view of how can Indigenous people in the internal colonial situations learn to control two things: one is the economics of it, so they are not exploited and they can actually profit from it; and the other is how can they control the imaginaries of it, how can they make their views of themselves the views which the tourists see and not some stereotypical advertising external views.

LB: You also point out that “Indigenous identity is neither static nor unproblematic” (Bunten, Graburn, 2018, p. 3). Can you elaborate on your approach of the concept of indigeneity?

NG: From my point of view, Indigenous People, I really was only concerned with the Fourth World, with people who are internally colonized, with people who had no chance of running their own country, of becoming independent, relatively speaking. Even the Navajos [Diné] claim they wanted independence, they wanted their separate country, but basically the rules are set by somebody else. By Indigenous, I mean the people who were there first before the colonizer arrived. There are some places it’s difficult to say Indigenous; especially, it has been difficult to say what Indigenous in England [as discussed above] is … maybe the Celts but maybe there were other people before them. Somebody wrote to me after the publication of the ethnic art book [Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World] and asked about Europe: are you going to include the Basques? People say the Basques are the Indigenous people and they have been colonized by the French and the Spanish. But if you look at the conquest of North America (and I wrote about that in the book at the end because I have an essay about this), one of the leaders of the conquest was a bishop who was Basque so maybe he was Indigenous and colonized, but he also became part of the imperial past of Europe. This is a very different kind of Indigenous people from what we are talking about, but it’s true that the Basques never ran their own country. However, they assimilated to the point that they became part of the power structure.
The Indigenous people from my point of view are people who are part of a non-state society that was overrun by a modern colonizing state society. I have not satisfactorily solved the problem of some areas of the world. The problem I’m dealing with now is China, because the Chinese Han people who are the majority (91 % of the population) overran hundreds of minorities, some of whom already had their own civilization, their own writing system and so on; and so, to what extent they are Indigenous? Yes, they were overrun, they’ve never become independent again. There were other people who were hunters and gatherers and had no state structure, were illiterate and so on: are they equally Indigenous? This is the problem. What do you do when you’ve got an area like China, and probably you would say the same in India, where the non-ruling people may have actually themselves been rulers in the past in the same way? How do you put them in the same category as some forest hunters and gatherers or illiterate agriculturists? Indigenous is a very difficult category. And the problem with this book is that it didn’t include China; I had to write about the problems of the book in the last chapter. The Press challenged me when we sent the manuscript in. They challenged us quite a bit: why didn’t we have any Indigenous authors if you are writing about Indigenous tourism?

LB: Yes, we will come back to this point later when we will discuss your work on minority scholars in China. Let’s talk now about your research based in Japan: how did you engage with Japan as an imperial power?

NG: I think I ignored it for the most part. Obviously, I have a very big experience of Japan as a colonial and imperial power. My parents had many friends killed by the Japanese or imprisoned by them in Southeast Asia [during WWII]. I’ve been very involved with Japanese Americans before Kathy [his wife], the terrible situation they were in during the war in the United States. I’ve been aware of that. But in my work in Japan, I probably purposely ignored some of it. I ignored Japanese colonialism because I was studying domestic tourism. Domestic tourism depends upon many Japanese histories. I think more of it is historical tourism. Some of it is nature tourism (hot springs resorts). The only obvious minority tourism would be with the Ainu and I have done a lot with that when I wrote the ethnic art book [Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World]. The Japanese treatment of the Ainu was among the most racist, the most genocidal in the whole world, as bad as in Northern California and Tasmania which are the two other worse cases you can think of. They treated them so badly that they wanted to eliminate them. I didn’t deal with that in my work on domestic tourism in Japan.
The main work I wrote was a monograph which was on the structure of Japanese domestic tourism and how it built upon the traditions of pilgrimages (Graburn, 1983; 2008).

LB: Looking back on it, do you think this research could be revisited from a different lens?

NG: (pause) … No, because the tradition of Japanese domestic tourism which I wrote about was possibly the strongest and the biggest in the whole world, much bigger than any tourism in Europe, bigger than tourism in China, and so on. It was incredibly powerful. It’s what shaped Japan’s internal view of itself when Japan wasn’t at war. Also, structurally it copied and strengthened the kinds of sociality that Japanese have in terms of men and women, generations and so on. It was reinforcing bases of Japanese socialities. Now it has broken down to some extent in two ways: one is that it’s broken down by the ubiquity of the personal car (they have started traveling as families which they had never done before); and the other, they now travel more abroad as individuals or families instead of groups.

LB: Do you think these domestic tourism practices could have played a role in (re)producing the dominant group and a sense of being Japanese in a dialectical relation to the colonial territories and the minorities?

NG: Let’s look at tourism in the Western world for the moment, the idea that the tourist has some kind of an imperial power is one view which Dennison Nash (1977) and few others have analyzed, and it’s partly true in certain kinds of tourism. But it’s not all of it, because if you look at tourist sites in Western Europe, the powers of the local people, they are the companies, they are the hotels, they are the restaurants. So, there are two kinds of tourism. Tourism is not only an imperial force imposing on somebody else’s way of life except in colonial types of situations. I would say yes, if you get a bunch of Londoners who go down and stay in a village in Cornwall, maybe they will be egalitarian, maybe the Londoners will force the local people to adapt to their offerings, their kind of hospitality etc., to the fact that the Londoners are the big people who have the power, can decide to come or not come etc.
Japan is very interesting as it manages to cover up these hierarchical power relationships very well with intense control. Of course, there are original prejudices, they are wealth hierarchies, educational hierarchies, but people tend to cover them up as if they didn’t exist.

LB: In your intervention during the conference on “Anthropology and Tourism” organized in the Quai Branly Museum in 2018, and entitled “Anthropology, Alterity and Indigenous Peoples in Tourism”, you mentioned the case of an Inuit art historian, Heather Igloliorte (2017). You said that “this is an excellent example of the bridging or even the abrogation of the Us-Them alterity: from the point of view of we who study Inuit ethnic and tourist arts. Them has become Us, and we are all drawn closer together as humans”. You also asserted about Indigenous Scholars and Alterity: “I have also been looking at the emergence of Indigenous scholars in these nations, into anthropology of related professionals where they may be seen, not just as clever representatives of their own peoples, but a fully competent wide-ranging professionals who can take research or policy-making positions in their own countries. We could call this the decolonization of our topic or the emergence of a postcolonial era. Sadly, even with someone like Prof. Igloliorte, this is quite rare in Canada and in the United States.” (Graburn, 2018). Do you think being from the community is enough of a guarantee to decolonize the field? What about the decolonization of the epistemology?

NG: That’s very difficult. The theme of my talk in Paris was that anthropology should stop criticizing everybody else from being colonial until it decolonizes itself. And the only way it can decolonize itself is if the people we normally study also become the studiers. There are very few of them and she is one of them.
I was involved in this in Japan, that was the key thing. Shuzo Ishimori had a seminar to introduce the anthropology of tourism to Japanese anthropologists in the 1980’s because the Japanese were being studied by white people all over the world (Graburn, Shioji, 2020). He thought - why should we always be the people being studied? We want to learn about the anthropology of tourism. So they invited me to help them run a three-year program to get it going. At the end of my talk in the Quai Branly, I said the perfect example is Prof. Yuko Shioji [Hannan University, Osaka] who was one of the students of that program who came to study England and she is a better anthropologist of the nature of tradition and Englishness than any English anthropologist (Shioji, 2014). That’s the way it should be. We are learning more from her about England than if we study ourselves. This would be the decolonization of anthropology.

LB: Indeed, the conclusion of your talk was: “So, down with hierarchical alterity, let the ‘colonized’ scrutinize the colonizer; don’t be afraid of being studied, and make sure that the anthropologist doing the study has had the opportunity to come from elsewhere in your society or even from elsewhere in the world. You might even enjoy it !” (Graburn, 2018).
Concerning your current research on minority Chinese scholars, you mention that hundreds of them were able to “domesticate” foreign concepts, and direct the anthropology of tourism towards Chinese needs (Zhu, Jin, Graburn, 2017). What do you mean?

NG: Chinese have always tried to domesticate foreign concepts for all their sciences to turn them into something which fit with their Chinese background. [They say that] we don’t have to accept exactly the hegemonic view of what anthropology is as it’s been turned out based on Western philosophy. That doesn’t mean that concepts are completely replaced by local ones, but it means that it has to fit with local logics, local epistemologies etc.; it is a very difficult topic to study.
There is a volume that came out of the 2018 IUAES Meeting in Florianopolis, Brazil (Salazar, Graburn, Zhu, 2019), there were two sessions. One was a major session run by Noel Salazar and Yujie Zhu, and what we did was (I was the discussant), we asked anthropologists from different countries in the world: what is happening to the relationship between hegemonic Western anthropologies and non-hegemonic anthropologies? We had persons from China, Brazil etc.
The conclusion of nearly everybody was that Western anthropology has not become just another provincial anthropology; it is still a hegemonic anthropology even though there are efforts to decolonize local anthropologies in different ways according to the circumstances.
I think the successful non-hegemonic anthropologies are in countries where they do it in their own languages; they have their own educational system, rather than going abroad and bringing people back home, and they have a critical mass of enough people so that they can run their own journals, their own books in their own language. Brazil is one of them even though Brazilian anthropology is very disadvantaged by the current regime that is taking away money from research. Brazil has a healthy anthropology that speaks to and for itself. It’s strong enough. Japan has that too, even though they are trying to cut down social sciences.

LB: Your intervention as a discussant in the 18th International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences World Congress was entitled: “Inside and Outside the Anglophone Snake. Tourism Research, Alterities and Hegemonies.” What is the Anglophone Snake?

NG: The Anglophone Snake is Scotland, England, Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand; it is a snake and there are powerful connections around the world. For the most part, they are the people who in general don’t read anybody else’s work but everybody else reads their work.

LB: What are the next steps for a critical anthropology of tourism?

NG: One thing is exactly what you are doing, to get people to be conscious about the things that are may be unconscious in their habitus. What is interesting is that we are being reflexive, self-critical. When we teach the Chinese or the Japanese this, this is the Western hegemonic system, but it may raise their consciousness so they realize how their mind has been colonized (laughs). In the volume from the IUAES, the major conclusion was that nobody said that the Western system has ceased to be hegemonic, but there are local systems which have some degrees of self-direction, pride, identity.

LB: I reproduce here part of your conclusion during IUAES Conference:
“Latin-Americans are leaders who proposed independent non-hegemonic regional anthropologies. In the anthropology of tourism, the Spanish and Portuguese world now has the self-confidence and numbers to form a critical but not antagonistic world of research and scholarship. In Cyprus, the miniscule anthropological tourism team encourages new paths to critical thinking. China is in part dependent on Western (Anglophone) training and ideas for tourism research, though now they are sending a few people to France. But again, the critical mass is capable to adapting to China’s particular needs in a huge country with its own problems of unequal development, heritage loss and fears of disunity. Japan, though once dependent on US hegemony, remains strong and is providing regional and world leadership in areas of heritage and tourism research where it already excels. Does this make Europe provincial or the West in decline? They do not think so, but they no longer feel dependent either.” (Graburn, 2019, pp. 32-33).