‘An interplay at specific points’: Traveling between California and Cape Town

Ethnographic research on the everyday lives of those who are privileged to travel as vacationers or on study abroad programs offers important insights into assumptions about global connections in the 21st century. This article tells the stories of two journeys between Cape Town and California. Through these narratives I explore the challenges and rewards of ethnographic work with travelers especially when this work takes seriously their lives when they are not tourists. Ethnographers of tourists face many challenges, some practical — tourists deliberately seek experiences that are independent of their everyday lives and ethnography is at its best focusing on the everyday. Others are due to the anthropologist's own uncertainty about her position as a tourist, making the anthropology of tourism a kind of native anthropology. © 2008, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Catherine Mathers International Comparative Studies