Tourists and tourism are no longer the annoying, but for the most part avoidable, subjects they once were in cultural anthropology. They are topics that have come of age. No longer limited to “chasing anthropology’s discarded discourse” (p. 4), tourism has emerged as a legitimate subject of ethnographic inquiry, as the nine essays collected into Edward M. Bruner’s latest volume attest. To study tourism, as Bruner interprets it, is to study human mobility and identity, globalization and locality, and the relationship between postcoloniality, postmodernity, and the ethnographic project itself. What lies within the pages of Culture on Tour is as much a discussion of what is at stake generally for cultural anthropology, as it adapts itself to 21st-century social life, as it is a discussion of tourism per se by one of its most knowledgeable senior scholars.

As an assemblage of texts generated for a variety of different purposes over the course of more than two decades, Bruner’s collection is remarkably cohesive. This is due to a theoretical orientation consistently maintained throughout the essays. Bruner defines this as a “processual, constructivist, and performative perspective” (p. 8), developed during the 1980s, that seeks to understand tourism as it is “lived, experienced, and told” (p. 19). These descriptors indicate the influence of symbolic interactionism (Victor Turner), the sociolinguistics of verbal art (Richard Bauman), and performance studies (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett). In addition, Bruner engages the work of figures as diverse as Karl Marx and Margaret Mead, Coco Fusco and Clifford Geertz, and Homi Bhabha and James Boon. The constructivist perspective proves integrative of a wide range of cultural theory.

The volume is divided into three sections. Part 1, “Storytelling Rights,” contains the landmark essay “Maasai on the Lawn,” coauthored in 1994 with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, along with a 2001 essay documenting touristic variations in constructing Maasai culture and a third essay from 1996 on multiple interpretations of the Ghanaian destination Elmina Castle. Part 2, “Competing Stories,” contains another classic essay, “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction” (1994). Here, Bruner articulates his stance on the question of authenticity in relation to touristic practice. A second essay, on New Salem, from 1993, and a piece coauthored in 1983 with Phyllis Gorfain on the Israeli destination of Masada complete the section. In these essays, Bruner juxtaposes authoritative and popular interpretations that vie for dominance over each destination. Part 3, “Tales from the Field,” begins with another well-known 1996 essay, “The Balinese Borderzone,” in which Bruner lays out his theory of the geographical and performative characters of tourist sites in developing nations. Bruner builds on this discussion in the (original) essay that follows, comparing domestic tourists in Indonesia, Kenya, and China as they impose meanings on state-sponsored ethnic theme parks. Bruner ends the section with a 1999 account of his 1997 return to the Toba Batak community on Sumatra, Indonesia, where he worked in 1957. Here, Bruner argues that “post-local” (p. 252) communities can be identified in a wider range of locations than generally has been assumed to be the case in recent anthropological discourse—in particular, in the very villages that were once the objects of imperialist nostalgic ethnographic gazing.

Looking beyond the volume’s substantial contribution to the anthropology of tourism, I recommend Culture on Tour to anyone engaged in questions concerning the future of ethnographic practice generally. Especially for those who would call into question the continued viability of the ethnographic method in relation to contemporary topics of inquiry, Bruner’s work provides an incisive counternarrative. Tourism, without question, counts as a contemporary cultural object. Bruner, however, employs a relatively classic version of participant-observation to deal with it. He adopts multisited, transit-based, collaborative modifications only when necessary. If Bruner’s approach is nonstandard, it is in its emphasis on participation over observation in his efforts to dialogue with as many of tourism’s participants as possible. The result is strategically humanistic, complicating the contemporary picture of tourism by resisting the reductive tendencies that have plagued both industrial and anthropological conceptions of it. Even in this performative mode, however, Bruner’s method depends largely on techniques that Franz Boas would have recognized and found familiar. In this regard, Bruner’s ethnographies of travel write against internal critics of ethnography, suggesting that its usefulness is far from outmoded. As far as the understanding of global forms of consumption is concerned, the discipline, in fact, may never have needed it more.