Honoring Valene Smith, our prescient foremother

Abstract

Written by the Convenor of the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG) at the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Board and membership, this memorial article celebrates the life and multifaceted work of Dr. Valene Smith, the pioneering founder of the subdiscipline of the anthropology of tourism. It examines her prescience throughout her life that made her the pathbreaking scholar, teacher, traveler, and tourism practitioner that she was. Such foresight led to her convening the first anthropology of tourism panel at the AAAs in Mexico City in 1974, the product of which became the classic volume, Hosts and Guests. his and her subsequent publications are put into broader context of other classic tourism-focused social scientific works at the time, revealing her role in the development of tourism studies more broadly. As anthropologists are particularly keen on tracing kinship and lineage, the article argues that she rightly is considered anthropologists’ and tourism scholars’ “foremother”, or ancestral mother, who paved the way for generations of anthropologists to begin taking tourism seriously, recognizing its nature as a “total social fact” that can shed light on the holistic human experience.

Keywords:

• Anthropology
• American anthropological association
• Valene Smith
• kinship
• tourism
• host
• guest

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael A. Di Giovine

Michael A. Di Giovine is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at West Chester University; Director of its Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and Museum Studies Program; and Director of the Ethnographic Field School on Sustainable Food and Cultural Heritage in Perugia, Italy. An Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michael is also a former tour operator whose research in Europe (Italy, Spain) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam and Cambodia) focuses primarily on the intersection of tourism/pilgrimage, heritage, and sustainability. A founder and Convenor of the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group at the American Anthropological Association, and a member of its Task Force on Cultural Heritage, he is also an expert-member of ICOMOS and its International Cultural Tourism Committee (ICTC). The author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism (Lexington Books, 2009), Michael has edited over ten special issues and volumes, and numerous articles and encyclopedia entries. Among them are Tourism and the Power of Otherness (Channel View 2013), The Seductions of Pilgrimage (Routledge 2014), Pilgrimage Beyond the Officially Sacred (Routledge, 2020), Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience (Lexington 2021), and the forthcoming Tourism: Anthropological Insights (Toronto) and the Routledge Handbook on Heritage and Tourism. An internationally renowned expert on tourism and heritage, he has been featured on National Public Radio, ABC News Australia, The Economist, and National Geographic, and has keynoted conferences for Government of France/The University of Paris- Sorbonne (2014); ICOMOS – ICTC (2017), World Heritage UK (2017), The European Union in Sofia, Bulgaria (2018); and the United Nations World Tourism Organization in Hamedan, Iran (2018). He is the Book Reviews Editor of The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, and is the editor of the book series The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility and Society with Lexington Books. www.michaeldigiovine.com