"Native" performances: Tourism in South Ethiopia

One of the most common issues tourist anthropologists first addressed in small-scale societies was how native host societies changes due to the aggressive emergence of tourism. According to Mckean (1989) normal assumptions included (1) changes brought about the intrusion of the usually superordinate sociocultural system into a weaker receiving culture; (2) that changes are generally destructive to the indigenous culture and (3) it will lead to a homogeneous culture as ethnic identity is subsumed under technologically advanced industrial system. The way indigenous people actually think of, and make sense of tourism is the base of these alternative mechanisms but the way it actually works was rarely explicated. In this seminar I make an attempt to give a broader socio-cultural context of touristic events among the Mursi, a South-Ethiopian pastoral community and the way how local people make sense of, and reflect to tourists.Le conférencierDr Tamás Régi is an Associate Professor in the Tourism Department at the Kodolányi János University of Applied Sciences in Hungary. Tamás graduated in 2003 from the Social and Visual Anthropology Department, University of Miskolc, Hungary, and earned his PhD in 2011 at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Dr. Régi's main research area is the anthropology of human mobility with a particular interest in the politics of tourism and migration in East Africa.