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Contributors are Ebrahim Afsah, Gerd Althoff, Jenny Benham, John Comaroff, Hans Jacob Orning, Frederik Rosén, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Henrik Vigh, Helle Vogt, Stephen D. White, and Øyvind Østerud.
Contributors are Ebrahim Afsah, Gerd Althoff, Jenny Benham, John Comaroff, Hans Jacob Orning, Frederik Rosén, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Henrik Vigh, Helle Vogt, Stephen D. White, and Øyvind Østerud.
Abstract
Tourism is a nexus for movement across, and the blurring of, national, cultural, linguistic and imaginative boundaries. Diverse actors attempt to utilize tourism to reinforce, shape, and sometimes challenge popular concepts of these boundaries. This chapter examines three early Anglophone guidebooks about Kyoto to explore how guidebook authors of differing national backgrounds seek to mediate corporal and imaginative encounters between tourists and locals. Through analyzing and comparing guidebooks written by authors from the West and Japan, including pre-modern texts, this chapter challenges assumptions in previous research that tourist discourses of non-Western “others” are simple impositions of Western Orientalism. Further, it demonstrates that representations are not only a product of a writer’s national and cultural background, but are also influenced by the commissioning organization, anticipated audience, and local and international discourses. The study thus highlights the complexities of representation in texts that mediate the imaginative boundaries of international tourism.