1 in 10 jobs on the planet, 1.5 billion international travelers, 100+ peer-reviewed journals, and 60 years of longitudinal research: Dr. Valene Smith’s prescient and pervasive influence on the anthropology of tourism”

Thursday, January 23, 2025 – 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time

Zoom Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQS7E888vO8&ab_channel=TimWallace

Dr. Carter A. Hunt (Penn State) and Dr. Tim Wallace (North Carolina State)

Talk Summary:

Carter Hunt and Tim Wallace discuss the importance of tourism  and heritage as a topic of research by anthropologists in the context of the history of Valene Smith’s role in bringing this vital field to the attention of socio-cultural anthropologists. Dr. Smith passed in 2024 at the age of 98. Arising from a symposium honoring Smith’s contributions to the anthropology of tourism in Tampa at the AAA’s, Hunt and Wallace discuss why tourism is a key topic of research for anthropologists and Smith’s role in making that happen.

Carter Hunt’s focus is on the role of Dr. Smith’s contributions in laying the foundation for the explosive growth in ecotourism and sustainable tourism scholarship seen from the late 1980s onward. In her writing, Smith identified the need to distinguish the impacts of tourism from other ongoing processes of colonization, globalization, extraction, and market integration that affect communities and their environments. Amid efforts to promote understanding of these distinctions, Smith called for “full cost accounting” of social and environmental consequences of tourism that brought attention to questions of “who benefits and who pays?” In calling for governmental discourse to catch up with grassroots activism, and the development of tourism policies that can be monitored, Smith anticipated strengthening of resource management institutions as a key benefit of ecotourism.

Tim Wallace’s part of the Chat discusses Smith’s contribution to the anthropology of tourism as seen from the perspective of applied anthropology. Valene Smith was one of the first to recognize anthropologists’ lens for studies was out of focus when it came to tourists and tourism, hence her call for papers at the 1974 Mexico AAA conference. Valene had long been an active observer of how tourism affects and could affect local communities. She is one of the few anthropologists who actually owned a travel agency. She even owned and flew her own airplane. As early as the mid 1950’s she led large group study tours to far flung places around the globe which deepened her understanding of the role of tourism relating to both hosts and guests, as she called them. Dr. Wallace traces Smith’s connection not only to advocacy of the study of tourism by applied anthropologists but also to her emphasis on encouraging both
colleagues and students to use tourism for good.

Bios:

Carter Hunt is an Associate Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management, and Anthropology at Penn State University. He is the Director of the PSU Dual-title Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Research on Environment and Society (TREES) and the Intercollegiate Minor in Sustainability Leadership. He is also the director of an NSF-supported project entitled Cultura en Camino in the Galapagos Islands. His primary research interests lie at the intersections of environmental anthropology, political ecology, and the anthropology of tourism in biodiverse regions of Latin America. He and his students tend to utilize ethnographic methods to conduct field research on the impact of tourism on conservation, sustainable community development, and rural livelihoods around parks and protected areas. He also leverages an interest in conservation psychology to research the ways that different forms of nature-based travel influence one’s subsequent pro-environmental behavior, including
conservation-oriented travel philanthropy. His research has taken him to Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Tanzania. He has published in outlets that include the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Journal of Ecotourism, Human Organization, World Development Sustainability, and Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources. https://sites.psu.edu/carterahunt/

Tim Wallace is an associate professor emeritus and an applied, cultural anthropologist at North  Carolina State Univ ersity. He is a Past President of the Association of Senior Anthropologists and he also served as President of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (2011-2013), and a former editor of the NAPA Bulletin. He also was a board member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and is a founding member of the SfAA Tourism and Heritage TIG. His research areas are tourism and heritage and community development with fieldwork in Central and South America, East Africa, Central Europe, Japan and North Carolina. He organized and led 25 seasons of an ethnographic field school in Hungary, Costa Rica and Guatemala. He retired from NC State in 2019 after 45 years of service. He continues to teach an online course at NCSU entitled Language and Culture.