Nearly forty years have passed since anthropologists began linking
tourism and pilgrimage, yet there still exist inter-and intra-disciplinary boundaries
impeding a robust exchange of data and theory between them. Likewise, the
literature by practitioners in these fields reveals an astonishing ambivalence
towards the oft-critical and theoretical contributions of anthropologists. Building on
the work of Bourdieu, the author asserts that such divides are contingent on
historical and cultural forces within and between various groups of stakeholders that
are brought together in a “field of touristic production.” Informed by divergent
ideologies and research interests, tourism and pilgrimage scholars have taken
different pathways towards developing their respective fields, leading to a pervasive
dualism that often privileges pilgrimage and neglects tourism. Drawing on a wide
breadth of scholarship from numerous disciplines to illuminate definitional,
conceptual, and methodological issues related to the anthropological study of
tourism and pilgrimage, the author interrogates the logic of such dualities and
focuses on their shared phenomenological attribute of perspectivalism, a particular
way of perceiving the value and use of a destination. Offering a new apologia for the
study of tourism as a “global cultural form” produced through a “field of production,”
the author advocates greater consideration of this phenomenological definition to
bridge disciplinary divides, and for extending anthropological tourism research into
academic and practitioner-related fields.