Last update: PhDr. Marek Halbich, Ph.D. (18.01.2022)
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.
