Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros23BrèveTourism and Musical Imaginaries: ...

Brève

Tourism and Musical Imaginaries: A Personal Research Journey

Nelson Graburn

Texte intégral

1This text presents my research journey on the topic of Music and Tourism Imaginaries and gives the context which led to the publication of this special issue of Via Tourism Review. The issue is about musical imaginaries and tourism, not music tourism itself (Kruger and Bridge, 2019) which is more narrowly focused on tourism to a particular destination motivated by the music available there, such as reggae in the Caribbean or classical music in Salzburg. While a closely related topic, the subject of tourism imaginaries is almost the opposite, as one of its foci is how music, whether performed, imagined or mediated, creates the character of a destination and hence may cause music tourism.

2This special issue stems for the conference of the same title, held in Berkeley in Berkeley 24-26 March 2022, after being postponed by COVID restriction from its original date of 26-28 March 2020. It is the 4th in a series of conferences focusing in tourism imaginaries (Salazar, 2010; Gravari-Barbas and Graburn, 2011; Salazar and Graburn 2014), the first of which the “Tourist Imaginaries/Imaginaires Touristiques” Berkeley-Sorbonne Conference, co-organized with Dr. Maria Gravari-Barbas, EIREST, Pantheon-Sorbonne, and held in Berkeley in February 2011. Joining with Jean-Francois Staszak of the University of Geneva, our next conference, on “Worlds of Desire: Eroticizing Tourist Places” was held in Geneva, June 2015, resulting in the volume Lérotisation des lieux touristiques (Gravari-Barbas, Staszak and Graburn, 2017). Our next conference, on “Architecture and Tourism. Fictions,moved to Paris in July 2017, resulting in Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities (Gravari-Barbas, Graburn and Staszak, 2019) and Tourism and Architectural Simulacra (Graburn, Gravari-Barbas and Staszak, 2021).

My first encounters with the topic

3Although I have been researching tourism and the visual arts since the 1960s (Graburn, 1967; 1976) and I have been teaching the Anthropology of Tourism since the 1970s (Graburn, 1980), I knew little about research on tourism and music, and only realized later that pioneer tourist-ethnomusicologist Adrienne Kaeppler had been inspired by my paper “The Eskimos and Airport Art” (1967) to entitled her publication “Polynesian Dance as “Airplane Art” (1973)! But my students’ research brought me close to the topic. The first was undergraduate Alison Powell which write a term paper Alison Powell’s “Like a Rolling Stone: Notions of Youth Travel and Tourism in Pop Music of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties” in my upper division (Anthropology 151) course at Berkeley. This was first published among the many student papers I gathered together for the local journal Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers (Graburn, 1988).

4Powell was an avid collector of pop music records from the 1960s-80s and her paper examined the intimate relationship between the lyrics and themes of pop songs and the youth subculture’s idea of travel. Her paper explores, the relationship between, for example, the Beatles and the advent of the jet age, enlarging the fans’ world of possibilities, providing enticing description of destinations and “gave permission” for young women to travel alone to such places. The destination imaginary part of her analysis prefigured the kind of work exhibited in Lazzarotti’s contribution to this volume and his major published works (Lazzarotti, 2021).

Expansions and Comparisons

5The more general possibilities of an anthropology of music and tourism came about when I was invited to spend the year 1989-90 at the National Museum of Ethnology [commonly named Minpaku], Suita, Osaka Japan. My host was Prof. Shuzo Ishimori, with whom I had previously worked since 1978 on the anthropology of tourism, museums and the arts (Graburn and Ishimori, 1979) and who later became the pioneer anthropologist of tourism in Japan (Graburn and Shioji, 2020). When I arrived at Minpaku, a research institution with more anthropologists than the Smithsonian, Ishimori told me that Prof. Tomoaki Fujii, Director of what was at the time, a unique Music section of the Museum, had asked him to put together a volume on the anthropology of music and tourism.

6I encouraged them, but they did not have enough papers for the volume their envisaged, so I offered them three papers written by my Berkeley students, the undergraduate paper by Powell mentioned above, and the work of two of my graduate student advisees, Sandra Smith [McCosker] and Yvonne Payne Daniel.

7The book appeared in 1991 (Ishimori, 1991) and was perhaps the first purposely focused book on the anthropology of tourism and music. Ishimori’s Introduction provided a comprehensive analysis based partly on the principles I have introduced in my Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976), such as traditonal heritage, economic forces of tourist demand acculturating and assimilating the ethnic traditions snd, conversely, the ethnic peoples’ incorporation of outside musical traditions such as scales, rhythms and lyrics for their own pleasure. I thought the book was of such importance, yet unreadable for most of the world, that I persuaded the editors of Annals of Tourism Research to commission an unusually long and thorough review in English (Lie and Abelmann, 1992).

Tourism and Music at Berkeley and the Growth of the Idea for the Conference

8I was lucky to teach in a large Department of Anthropology with students of many backgrounds and interests, raising the possibility of encountering a wide range of topics. For instance, graduate student Anya Peterson Royce was a Russian ballet dancer in San Francisco who later focused her dissertation on the anthropology of dance among the Zapotec in Mexico. Her major early work in the topic mentions tourism and music (Royce, 1977, p. 141). Overlapping in the early 1970s, was the student Sandra Smith [McCosker] a musician and musicologist of the Cuna of Panama (1974). And her Berkeley career coincided with and was encouraged by my advisee Mari Lyn Salvador who had worked with the Cuna on their arts and crafts in the 1960s, returned for her dissertation and later research, and who became the leading expert on the topic (1997); she also worked extensively with me on the production of Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976). Sandra Smith’s (1984) dissertation contextualized the Cuna’s lively musical development in a situation which had for 400 years been subject to outside (Euro-American) pressures, just like their arts and crafts. And she extracted part of it for her chapter “Traveling in the Realms of Gold” (1991) in the Ishimori volume, showing that though it was promoted as traditional for cultural tourism, Kuna music has eclectically adopted other traditions and provides a paradigmatic instance of a tradition shaped profoundly by tourism and trade contacts. Thus “tradition” is often a complex crystallization of disparate influences.

9Perhaps most important has been the research and influence of Yvonne Daniel, the first keynote speaker at our 2022 conference, who entered the Berkeley anthropology doctoral program in 1997, overlapping with Sandra Smith. And like the scholars mentioned so far, she was already an accomplished professional: she taught dance at Mills College in Oakland (near Berkeley) and was a trained Black dancer and choreographer, like her role model Katherine Dunham (Clark and Johnson, 2005; Dunham, 2005). Her dissertation research focused on the institutionalization and commercialization of Rumba in Castro’s Cuba. Rumba was a popular dance amongst lower class Black laborers, mainly immigrants from Haiti. Castro’s socialist government “killed two birds with one stone” by elevating a common street dance into a professional dance illuminating Cuban identity, at the same time promoting its performance throughout the hotels ansd arenas of the tourism industry, which was vital to the economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Culture, for example, institutionalized sabado de la rumba (Rumba Saturday) and organized international conferences. Daniels got to dance with the national troupe, so was able to see the meanings and emotions from the dancer’s point of view as well as the appreciation of both the communities on the street and the foreign tourists in the hotels as analysed in her dissertation. The Ethnography of rumba: dance and social change in contemporary Cuba (1989), later published as a major book (1995). Like Smith, she adapted a section as a chapter for the Ishimori book, “Economic Vitamins from the Cuban Aesthetic System or Commoditization and Cultural Conservation in Cuban Tourism” (1991), emphasizing the political and economic success of the promotion of Rumba. Soon Daniel made another key contribution to the understanding of authenticity in tourism dances in her “Tourism Dance Performances: Authenticity and Creativity” (1996). She showed that though the professional Black male Rumba dancers disdained and resented the requirement to invite audience members (mainly middle-aged white North Americans) to dance with them on stage, after their performance was over, as soon as they music started, they usually fell into a trance-dance, visited by their Orishas, just as in their community and professional dances. This is one case where possibly commercialization of dance arts differs from other tourist arts. Daniel went on to become a faculty member at Smith College and carried out dance research in Haiti, Surinam, Brazil and West Africa, before returning as famed Emerita to Mills College. Our continued association was one path which led eventually to the conference on Music and Tourism Imaginaries. I kept an interest in tourism and music (Graburn, 1999; Yu and Graburn, in press) and continued to include the topic in my teaching.

TSWG and EIREST

10More directly it was the foundation of the Berkeley student organization Tourism Studies Working Group (2003; see www.tourismstudies.org) and the series of conferences which started in 2005. Our collaboration with Maria Gravari-Barbas, following our meeting in Paris in 2009, more directly spurred our focus on Tourism Imaginaries and the series of conferences and publications mentioned above.

11But my ability to concretely envision the conference on Music and Tourism Imaginaries only came about when I got to know ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault. Although she arrived at Berkeley in 1999, I did not get to know her until February 2011 when, ironically, I declined her invitation to an event because it coincided with our first conference, on Tourism Imaginaries! Over the years I became aware of her extensive work on the musics of the tourist-saturated Caribbean (1993a and b, 2014, 2019) but our professional interaction was solidified when one of her students took my graduate tourism seminar and writing his research paper on Jewish music as a major component of the destination imaginary of Jewish birthright tourists (Nance, 2018). With enhanced self-confidence, we plunged into the creation of the Tourism and Musical Imaginaries conference, planned for March 2020.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Ciucci, A. (2022), The Voice of the Rural: Music, Poetry, and Masculinity among Migrant Moroccan Men in Umbria, University of Chicago Press.

Clark, V. A. and S. E. Johnson (eds.) (2005), Kaiso: Writings for by and about Katherine Dunham, University of Wisconsin Press.

Daniel, Y. P. (1989), Ethnography of rumba: dance and social change in contemporary Cuba. Doctoral Dissertation in Anthropology, U C Berkeley.

Daniel, Y. P. (1991), “Economic Vitamins from the Cuban Aesthetic System or Commoditization and Cultural Conservation in Cuban Tourism”, in Ishimori, Shuzo (ed.) Kanko to Ongaku [Japanese: Tourism and Music], Shoseki, Tokyo.

Daniel, Y. P. (1995), Rumba : dance and social change in contemporary Cuba, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Daniel, Y. P. (1996), "Tourism dance performances authenticity and creativity", Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 23 N. 4, pp. 780-797.

Dunham, K. (2005), ‘The Anthropological Approach to the Dance (and the Practical Application to Dance Theatre)’, in V. Clark and S. Johnson (eds), Kaiso!: Writings by and about Katherine Dunham, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 508-513.

Graburn, N. (1967), "The Eskimos and 'Airport Art'" Transaction Vol. 4, pp. 28-33.

Graburn, N. (1976), Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. (Ed.) University of California Press, Berkeley.

Graburn, N. (1988), "Anthropological Research on Contemporary Tourism: Student Papers from Berkeley" (ed.), Special issue of Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, pp. 67-68.

Graburn, N. (1999), "Music." in Jafar Jafari (ed.) Encyclopedia of Tourism, Routledge, London, p. 4.02

Graburn, N. (2020), In Memoriam: Mari Lyn Salvador, University of California, Academic Senate, Berkeley.

Graburn, N. and Ishimori S. (1979), "The National Museums of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan: Research and Oceanic Collections", Pacific Arts Newsletter, Vol. 9, pp. 14-18, June.

Graburn, N., Gravari-Barbas M. and Staszak, J.-F. (eds) (2021), Tourism and Architectural Simulacra, Routledge, London.

Graburn, N. and Shioji, Y. (2020), “A Portrait of Shuzo Ishimori: A Pioneer of Tourism Studies in Japan”, Anatolia (series - portraits of pioneers in tourism research and education), Vol. 31 n.1, pp. 159-166.

Gravari-Barbas, M. and Graburn N. (eds.) (2012), “Tourism Imaginaries,” Via Tourism Review, Vol. 1.

Gravari-Barbas, M., Staszak, J.-F. and Graburn, N., (eds) (2017), “L'érotisation des lieux touristiques,” Via Tourism Review, Vol. 11-12.

Gravari-Barbas, M., Graburn, N., Staszak, J-F., (eds) (2019), Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities, Routledge.

Guilbault, J. (ed.) (1993a), Zouk: World Music in the West Indies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Guilbault, J. (1993b), “On Redefining the Local Through World Music”, The World of Music, Vol. 35 n. 2, pp. 33-47.

Guilbault, J. (2014), Afterword, in Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean, Timothy Rommen and Daniel Neely (eds.) Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 306-315.

Guilbault, J., Rommen, T. (2019), Sounds of vacation. Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism, Duke U. Press

Ishimori, S. (ed.) (1991), Kanko to Ongaku [Japanese: Tourism and Music], Shoseki, Tokyo.

Kaeppler, A. (1973), “Polynesian Dance as “Airplane Art”, Dance Research Journal, Vol. 8, pp. 71-85.

Krüger Bridge, S. (2019), “Tourism and Music”, in Sturman J. L. (ed.), SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Lashua, B., Spracklen K., and Long P. (eds,) (2014), “Music and Tourism,” Special issue, Tourism Studies, Vol. 14 n. 1.

Lazzarotti, O. (2021), « Vivent les vacances. Tourisme et chansons », Presses universitaire Septentrion, Villesneuves d’Ascq.

Lie, J. and Abelmann N. (1992), Review of Ishimori, Shuzo (ed.), 1989, Kanko to Ongaku [Tourism and Music] Shoseki, Tokyo. Annals of Tourism Research Vol. 19, pp. 609-612.

McCosker, S. S. (1974), “The Lullabies of the San Blas Cuna Indians of Panama”, Etnologiska Studier Vol. 33, Göteborg, Sweden.

Nance, M. (2018), "Jewish Heritage Tourism to Israel: Israeli Transnationalism Through Sex Appeal and Music." Presentation at TSWG Mini-Conference on Tourism, Pilgrimage and Identity in Israel/Palestine, Berkeley, 26 April.

Powell, A. (1988), “Like a Rolling Stone: Notions of Youth Travel and Tourism in Pop Music of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties”, Papers - Kroeber Anthropological Society, Vol.67, pp 28-34.

Powell, A. (1991), “Like a Rolling Stone: Notions of Youth Travel and Tourism in Pop Music of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties,” in Ishimori S. (ed.) Kanko to Ongaku [Japanese: Tourism and Music], Shoseki, Tokyo.

Rommen, T. and Neely, D. T. (2014), Sun, sea, and sound : music and tourism in the circum-Caribbean, Oxford University Press

Royce, A.P. (1977), The Anthropology of Dance, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Sadigova, G., Marchiori E., Cantoni L. (2018), Music And Tourism: An Exploratory Study: How Do National Tourism Organisations Websites Cover Soundscapes, UNESCO, Brussels.

Salazar, N. and Graburn N. (eds.) (2014), Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches, Berghahn, London.

Salvador, M. (1997), The Art of Being Kuna: Layers of Meaning Among the Kuna of Panama, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Shioji, Y. and Graburn N. (2020), “A Portrait of Shuzo Ishimori: A Pioneer of Tourism Studies in Japan.” Anatolia series - portraits of pioneers in tourism research and education, Vol. 31 n. 1, pp. 159-166.

Smith, S. (1984), Panpipes for power, panpipes for play : the social management of cultural expression in Kuna society, Doctoral Dissertation in Anthropology, U C Berkeley.

Smith, S. (1991), “Traveling in the Realms of Gold”, in Ishimori, S. (ed.) Kanko to Ongaku [Japanese: Tourism and Music] Shoseki, Tokyo.

Staszak, Jean-François, Nelson Graburn, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Philippe Forêt (eds.) (2018), “The Building and Practice of Erotic Destinations”, Via Tourism Review, Vol. 11-12.

Yu, Y. and Graburn, N (in press), “Rituals, Symbols and Stages: A Study of Sri Lankan Kandyan Dance from the Perspective of Tourism Anthropology” in C. Tuchman-Rosta and A. Kaul (eds.) “Precarity and Hope in the Tourism Landscape”, Special issue of Tourism Studies Journal.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Nelson Graburn, « Tourism and Musical Imaginaries: A Personal Research Journey  », Via [En ligne], 23 | 2023, mis en ligne le 24 juillet 2023, consulté le 15 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/9968 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.9968

Haut de page

Auteur

Nelson Graburn

University of California, Berkeley

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
  • Logo DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Logo DIALNET
  • Logo L'Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca
  • OpenEdition Journals
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search