{The course under this code is intended for MA level students. BA students interested in this course need to enrol the BA level code that begins with "YB".}
The aim of the course is to introduce tourism as a multifaceted global phenomenon, which is mainly related to
travel in travel-for-leisure and as such offers a range of interesting research topics across different disciplines.
Tourism-oriented ethnographic research has come a long way from the almost total disinterest of anthropologists,
who have ignored tourism and tourists in their research, to its gradual inclusion in corpus of courses in many
social anthropology, sociology, etc. departments around the world. Tourism is nowadays usually seen as an
example of global currents that blur traditional territorial, social and cultural boundaries and creating their various
hybrid forms. Their objectives are clearly adapting very quickly to global trends and the global market, but at the
same time they seek to maintain or even increase their local differences. This conflict of the “global” with the
“local” then raises the question of how this “local” is created or reshaped through the practices of “touristified
representations”. On the one hand, they play a key role in these processes global marketing companies and
national and local authorities, which are jointly involved in creating and selling image of certain destinations. On
the other hand, however, it is tourism that, to a greater or lesser extent, generates the for transforming the local. In
this way, tourism can be seen as a dynamic process that helps to renew competing socio-culturally defined local
identities.
