Ethnography in Tourism Studies My PhD training made me an ethnographer, so the way a people's culture has been formed in relation to its terroir, climate and habitat is always uppermost in my encounters when travelling. Ethnography describes how social groups make meaning from their knowledge of the environment and the cultural artefacts they create. Like anthropologists, we examine what people make and do; in French this is just one verb, faire . And French has given us a whole host of anthropologists and ethnographers, including Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). But two contemporary academics have developed approaches that are exciting for the tourism researcher today, especially in my field of tourist autoethnography, these two are Americans: Kathy Charmaz, in grounded theory, and Catherine Kohler Riessman for her work on narrative analysis. Narrative analysis Narrative analysis is such a powerful tool that once you h...
ISSN 2753-7803