Abstract 2 - Performative rendering of tourist ethnographyPerform

Epistemologies
and their practices: A performance approach to ethnography in tourism

Abstract
(2) for the 3^rd Critical Tourism Studies Conference in
Croatia

Chaim
Noy

I
wish to take this space to rethink a research I recently conducted,
reported in the previous lecture (titled Performance and Discourse in
Tourism: The Narratives Visitor Books Tell). I employ reflexivity in
order to critically examine the production of academic knowledge with
particular reference to ethnographic practices in tourism research.
The deconstruction builds on an appreciation of the fact that there
are different epistemological discourses that compete over the frames
of interpretation in various tourist attractions (in this case, the
National Commemoration Site in Jerusalem, Israel). In this vein,
tourists' ethnography will be (re)viewed and theorized in a fashion
that resembles the ways I viewed and theorized visitors' actions in
situ, putting visitors' visits and researcher's ethnography on
the same footing. A performative rendering of ethnographic
practices is promoted—a problematization of ethnography which
is pursued by viewing researching practices in situ not in
terms of 'academic research' but in terms of 'tourist visits'. By
doing so, the power and authority of the modern institutions of
tourism and museums are acknowledged.

Alternative
and competing "frames" (Goffman) are emergent, especially
in cases where research is pursued—performed—in highly
symbolic and ideological settings. Over and above research practices,
the lecture will move to discuss various modes of representation and
the convergence and divergence between the discourses of academic
knowledge in the social sciences and in national commemoration.

Altogether,
the inquiry leads to insights into the construction of academic
knowledge with regards to tourists and tourism (i.e. epistemology),
and to enriching tourists' ethnographies (i.e. methodology). The
inquiry is located in the junction of critical explorations of
ethnography, on the one hand, and museum studies, on the other, with
the performance paradigm in tourism as the connecting thread. The
research develops earlier conceptualizations regarding the
construction of meaning and power relations between researchers,
tourists and tourism institutions (Noy, 2007).

Noy,
C. (2007). Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling
in Qualitative Research. International Journal of Social Research
Methodology, 11(4): 327-344.