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Tourism and its discontents. Suri-tourist encounters in southern Ethiopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2000

JON ABBINK
JON ABBINK
Affiliation:
African Studies Centre, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Encounters between foreign tourists and people of different cultural background become very common in a globalised world. The nature of this exchange in cultural terms relates questions of identity construction and the emergence or creation of difference. This article addresses tourist-‘native’ encounters in a semiotic perspective, which helps to reveal its essentially contested aspects. The empirical study relates to the Suri people of southern Ethiopia, a small ethnic group of agro-pastoralists only recently ‘discovered’ by the tourists and displaying notable aggression towards them. Suri reject their role in the ‘tourist game’ of creating realist experience of the Other, and staunchly assert their own identity and would-be equality towards these affluent visitors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Anthropology , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , February 2000 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

For support of research work in southern Ethiopia on which this article is based I am grateful to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Tropics (WOTRO, WR 52-601), and the African Studies Centre (Leiden). I also am much indebted to the former directors of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), Dr Taddesse Beyene and Professor Bahru Zewde, for their support. My sincere thanks to Professor Wim van Binsbergen for his critical comments on an earlier version of this article, presented in March 1997 at the EIDOS conference on Globalisation, Development and the Making of Consumer. That version appeared in the proceedings, published as Modernity on a shoestring (eds. R. Fardon et al.), Goudon-Leiden: CAS-EIDOS-ASC, 1999. Also many thanks to Azeb Amha for her pertinent criticisms and suggestions for improvement.