Tourism

Kayoiura, located at the most easterly point of Omijima Island, Nagato City, Japan, is a small fishing village where community-based coastal whaling took place from late 1600 to early 1900. Today, more than 100 years since the end of whaling, the community maintains a number of cultural properties, both tangible and intangible, dedicated to the spirits of whales, including prayers for the whales given daily by two elderly Buddhist nuns. This article suggests that these cultural properties convey the former whaling community's ethics and spirituality with a strong sense of reciprocity that acknowledges the undeniable human dependency on other lives. It is argued that such spirituality has an important implication for our understanding of sustainability. Whaling is no doubt one of the most contentious issues in today's environmental debates, where divisive arguments collide over a wide range of issues. Although any study on whaling would play a role in the debate, this article's intention is elsewhere: to acknowledge the importance of ethics and spirituality as intangible cultural heritage and their role in sustainability debate.

If, as according to Robin (2015: online), "islands are idealised ecological worlds, the Edens of a fallen planet'", the rationale underpinning tourism expansion should acknowledge MacLeod's (2013) notion of "cultural realignment" that calls for optimal and resilient encounters. This introductory article to the subsequent theme section of the journal on sustainable tourism acts as a bridge toward the development of emergent themes that describe how island peoples adapt and respond in localised cultural islandscapes as a consequence of tourism expansion. The links between cultural alignment and social-ecological resilience are clear and the principal and overarching question posed in this introductory article is: To what extent are islandscapes resilient to rapidly changing utilities, significances and ways of life wrought by tourism expansion? The vulnerabilityresilience duality remains firmly entrenched in the discourse on islands where tourism has become prominent, and although tourism provides some resiliency, overall, islandscapes remain subject to externally driven fast and slow change that exercises an overwhelming influence. Islander agency will likely remain subject to the fluctuations in the demands of the tourism supply chain. Therefore, tourism as a standalone focus of islands is a high-risk proposition, especially in contexts where externally driven change is likely to intensify.

In an era where the dissemination of seductive tourism imagery permeates a global social landscape a renewed interest into how, or even if, critical tourism studies can best overturn these persistent representations emerges as an interesting and timely subject to consider. It is at this juncture that Noel Salazar and Nelson Graburn's (2014) Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches takes up the difficult and creative task of imagining other possible tourism worlds. Drawing on a range of literature from psychoanalysis to continental philosophy, the edited volume brings together the concept of ‘imaginaries’ with detailed ethnographic accounts of tourism destinations from around the world....For me, however, the value of this contribution lies in the questions that it gives rise to: How do other possible tourism imaginaries emerge?How do other possible tourism imaginaries emerge? Does a dialectic approach do enough to challenge the way tourism scholarship continues to situate ‘other’ people and places as the site of critical analysis? Can other possible worlds be imagined without also fundamentally rethinking the concept of the Other? By raising these concerns this book will undoubtedly play a significant role in generating new visions and critical debates concerning tourism inquiry and praxis.

If you surf, the odds are high that you also know a Japanese surfer. Next to America, Australia, and Brazil, Japan has long been regarded as an established surf nation. Yet despite the fact that Japanese surf culture has been present on the international stage since at least the 70’s, very little has been written about its unique surf history and culture in the English academic literature. So let’s begin this introduction to Japanese surf culture with a seemingly simple question, how did Japan’s surf culture begin?

Lighting Vanuatu began in 2010 as a two-year project funded through The Australian Aid - Governance for Growth Programme. The primary objective of the project was to increase access of portable solar lanterns for rural Vanuatu communities in an effort to reduce their dependency on kerosene as the… Read more

How does belonging fit into a Western travel ideal so heavily invested in freedom? When one reflects on travel stories in the West the initial response seems clear: there is no belonging. From the colonial binaries of “home/away”, “self/other” and “free/unfree”, to New Age claims of belonging on the road, to the world,  or as a global soul – hinting at the end of belonging all together – Western travel “ideals” have been built upon a precarious fascination with the individual’s choice of how to be “free” and where to “belong”. But as contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asks, what would such a self-determining free decision mean if it was not also an attempt to remain untouched by every obstacle in life and to maintain a comfortable distance from entering into relations with others?...

...This chapter shifts the focus from the “subject’s freedom” to the experience of freedom itself. Working within and against the Enlightenment ideals that equate travel with free selfhood and a displaced mode of belonging, I begin with a proposition set out by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Experience of Freedom that freedom itself unfolds as a shared exposure with the world. That is to say, the experience of freedom transgresses and is indifferent to whether we are travelling the globe or commuting to work. As we will explore, this reconsideration of the travel ideal revolves around the possibility that freedom is never “my” freedom to attain, possess or act upon. To the contrary, I argue along- side Nancy that freedom is a relational experience of belonging-together rather than a distancing or displacement from it.