You can join this zoom meeting if interested; it is part of an anthropology study group that focuses on tourism:
The Tourism Studies Working Group
is pleased to present
Our Heritage, Our Kin?
Communion and (Mis)communication
in Heritage Tourism Encounters
Dr. Naomi Leite
Assocaite Professor (Reader)
Anthropology, University of London
Friday, November 8, 4PM-6PM PST
Hybrid Presentation
In Person: Gifford Room, 221 Anthropology and Art Practice Bldg.
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract
Nelson Graburn has argued that the concept of heritage is fundamentally linked to the cultural domain of kinship, with its attendant concepts of descent and inheritance. In order to grasp how individuals think about and experience heritage, he suggests, we need first to understand their culturally inflected logics of relatedness, ownership, and alterity. In this paper, I extend Graburn’s insight to analysis of interactions between international tourists and local populations in heritage tourism encounters. If he is correct that kinship is the domain through which heritage is conceived, what communicative slippage transpires in transcultural, cross-linguistic interactions between tourist and toured when both espouse a sense of common heritage? Encounters between Portugal’s self-identified Marranos (urban, Catholic-born descendants of Inquisition-era Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism) and foreign Jewish tourists provide an instructive case. Although Marranos are not Jewish according to Jewish law, they are nonetheless widely considered to be part of “the Jewish family,” “lost brethren” whose ancestral experience is the heritage of all Jews. Marranos, for their part, describe a powerful sense of connection to the Jewish people, who represent the heritage that was “stolen” from their forebears. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in encounters between the two groups, this paper offers a fine-grained analysis of the interpenetration and disjuncture of imaginings of relatedness in the abstract and feelings and actions that arise in direct social interaction.
Speaker Bio
Naomi Leite is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. A UC Berkeley alum (BA, MA, PhD), she co-founded the Tourism Studies Working Group in 2003 and co-chaired it for several years before serving as founding co-convenor of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group, 2012-16. She is author of the multiple award-winning Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (2017) and co-editor of The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (2019). Her research focuses on identity, belonging, exclusion, logics of peoplehood, and experiences of community across domains and scales of sociality, both in tourism encounters and, in her newest project, in intentional communities in the US and UK.