Among academic specialties, tourism studies have been one of the most eager to cope with cultural identities.Most of tourist practices,especially in the South, rely on intercultural relations between people often willing to conceive themselves as being highly different. Therefore academic issues in terms of social and collective identities have been put at the very heart of the work of many sociologists, anthropologists and human geographerssince the rise of tourism studies as an academic field (i.e. Cohen 1988; Nash 1996; Cazes 1989).
However, for a long time, most of these works have been driven by a main question: how far do tourist images of the places and people they visit influence these people, their cultural habits and their self-definition? Somehow, this field of research has focused its attention on the causal effects (often seen as deleterious) of tourism stereotypes, folklorisation and commodification of cultural habits and know-how(see among many others, Krippendorf 1975, Rajotte and Crocombe 1980; Turner and Ash 1975), often reified as shown by many authors.
This analysis has already been made more than 20 years ago when an alternative way of seeing was emerging. As a matter of facts, a generation of scientists took another point of view in the 1990’s and 2000’s, less critical, less Manichean as well. This generation underlined the role of tourism in the revalorization of vernacular practices and local forms of knowledge, as well as in the emergence of new formsof cultural expression and reflexivity which shaped the modes of collective self-definition within local societies (see among others Norhonda 1979, Harkin 1995, Krystal 2000, Picard 1996, 2001). The concept of performance, among others, proved to give way to renewed understanding of the agency of local stakeholders, their identity and their staging.
This special issue will report the renewed approaches of dynamic identities in tourism studies. It addresses the following questions:

1. Is this dualistic approach of identities still relevant in tourism studies?
2. How could we assess the work done on identities by tourism studies within the last twenty years?
3. What do we know about the implication of tourism on the tourists’ identities?
4. Most of the works having dealt mostly with groups, what do we know about the changing identities of the individuals who, tourists or not, are confronted to touristic practices which may challenge their way of live?
5. Considering that identities are not changed only by touristic practices but also by other entangled factors, what is the exact role played in that matter by the social and economic transformations of the countries in the South, by geopolitical tensions, by the issues of ethnic minorities in the countries (such as China, Vietnam, Morocco, etc.) where they are the target of government pro-active policies, etc.?
6. How did or could the theories of identity which have emerged in and spread from political philosophy (Taylor, Ricoeur, etc.), sociology (Castells, Giddens, Calhoun, etc.), anthropology (Appadurai, Amselle, etc.) or gender studies (Butler) help tourism studies to renew their approach of identity?
7. How do tourists’ and local people’s race, gender and class identities articulate to each other?

Calendar

- Articles are to be sent before 31st July 2012, for online publication in 2012; articles on this theme can be sent up until 15th October, for online publication at the beginning of 2013
- Articles will be returned to contributors before 25 October 2012
- Articles which have been accepted will be published online from 1st Decembre 2012, after they have been translated
- Send articles to: redaction@viatourismreview.net

Any article accepted by the Editorial Board will be translated into two other languages besides the one the article was originally written in.

References

Amselle J.-L., 2010, Logiques métisses. Anthropologie de l'identité en Afrique et ailleurs, Paris, Payot.
Appadurai A., 1988, "Putting Hierarchy in its Place", Cultural Anthropology, 3, 36-49.
Appadurai A., 1996, Modernity at large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Castells M., 1997, The power of identity, London, Blackwell.
Cazes G., 1989, Le tourisme international: mirage ou stratégie d'avenir ?, Paris, Hatier.
Cohen E., 1988, "Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism", Annals of Tourism Research, 15, 371-386.
Erb M., 2001, "Le tourisme et la quête de la culture Manggarai", Anthropologie et Sociétés, 25, 93-108.
Giddens A., 1994, Les conséquences de la modernité, Paris, L'Harmattan. Traduction de The Consequences of Modernity, 1990, Stanford University Press.
Harkin M., 1995, "Modernist Anthropology and Tourism of the Authentic", Annals of Tourism Research, 22, 650-670.
Krippendorf J., 1977, Les dévoreurs de paysage, Lausanne.
Krystal M., 2000, "Cultural Revitalization and Tourism at the Moreria NimaKicke'", Ethnology, 39, 149-161.
Lanfant M., Allcock J., & al. (Eds.), 1995, International Tourism : identity and change, London, Sage.
Nash D., 1996, Anthropology of Tourism, Oxford and New York, Pergamon Press.
Norhonda R., 1979, Paradise reviewed : Tourism in Bali, in Kadt E. d., Tourism : Passport to Development?, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 177-204.
Picard M., 1996, Bali. Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, Singapore, Archipelago Press.
Picard M., 2001, "Bali, vingt ans de recherches", Anthropologie et Sociétés, 25, 109-128.
Rajotte F. & Crocombe R., 1980, Pacific Tourism: As the Islanders see it, Fiji, South Pacific Social Sciences Association.
Taylor C., 1998, The Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Turner L. & Ash J., 1975, The Golden Hordes, London, Constable.