Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Travel like an Anthropologist

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Travel like an Anthropologist,” an exploration of the cultural complexities of tourism and a guide to ensuring your visits to other places benefit all involved, with Melissa A. Stevens, principal at CultureSnap Consulting and adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Delaware.

Mark Twain once famously remarked that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Indeed, it can open our minds to new ideas and possibilities, positively contribute to local communities, and help us establish lasting relationships with people across the world.

At the same time, however, our travels can be harmful to the people and places we visit and to our world as a whole. We can end up exploiting vulnerable populations, worsening global and local inequalities, accelerating climate change, and forever altering the places and cultures that we visit.

How are responsible tourists supposed to navigate these contradictions without ruining their vacation?

Explore the cultural complexities of what it means to travel, and find ways to ensure your conscience rests easy after full travel days, with the help of cultural anthropologist Melissa Stevens.

She’ll start by discussing how her own field has not always been a positive force in other parts of the world, and historically has committed some of the same sins as the tourism marketing industry when it comes to shaping Western perceptions of Non-Western cultures. Popular anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon contributed to the “exotification” and exploitation of indigenous peoples and local communities in ways that cast a shadow on their work.

In confronting the ethical implications of its early history, anthropology developed a perspective known as “cultural relativism,” which called upon anthropologists to build awareness of their own cultural assumptions as a means to engage more ethically and responsibly with the people and places they visited. Anyone, including tourists, can learn to have a culturally relativist mindset in their travels.

Dr. Stevens will discuss how anthropologists use cultural relativism to gain a deeper understanding of people and places. She’ll also talk about how anthropologists look at tourism through a cultural lens, diving into the politics of representation, of performance, and of authenticity, and also examining gendered experiences of tourism. We’ll take a tour through the history of travel, from early pilgrims to digital nomads, and we’ll explore different types of tourism, including cultural tourism, ecotourism, sex and romance tourism, dark tourism, backpacking, and “voluntourism.”

We’ll consider the environmental and cultural impacts of tourism on tourist destinations. Drawing from her experiences conducting ethnographic research on cultural and sustainable tourism in Tanzania and Vietnam, Dr. Stevens will share immersive stories about what she learned in researching how tourism was perceived and experienced by the people who live with it.

What you learn at her talk will help ensure that you keep learning every time you pack your bags. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image by Canva.