African hosts and their guests

Cultural tourism is arguably the oldest of the ‘new’ tourism phenomena. Much recent research has focused on how cultural tourism is deployed as a developmental strategy and the dangers of this approach. These two new contributions to the literature are important for three reasons. First, there are not many academic book-length contributions on tourism in Africa. Second, contributions to this scholarship are seldom focused purely on cultural tourism per se. Finally, these investigations are undertaken through the analytic lens of anthropology, whereas most writers have engaged with tourism in Africa from developmentalist, economic, or geographic perspectives. These new volumes therefore require serious attention. Although they share a broad disciplinary home, they make two very different types of contribution to the scholarship on tourism in Africa. The central heuristic device deployed in African hosts and their guests is the ‘tourist bubble’. This ‘bubble’ consists of the means created to host visitors, and the arrangements made for their travel, stay, well-being and return home. This volume aims to interrogate the modalities of interchange between ‘opposing’ role players, the ‘local groups and the tourists’, who may be termed ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. But the ‘bubble concept’ directs attention to the brokering agents and infrastructural arrangements that permit the professional reception of guests, such as hotels, lodges, personnel, and general logistics. It is argued that this ‘bubble’ is central to the dynamics of the tourist's encounter with the host society.

Aesthetics · Cultural tourism · Discipline · Identity (music) · Mobilities · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Tourism · Tourism geography · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

• Pragmatic arguments for decolonising tourism praxis in Africa

  Open Access•Maureen Ayikoru•Tourism Geographies•2024

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