Introduction

This issue of Tourist Studies was born out of a meeting, & out a question raised by that meeting. In October 2006, Anne Doquet & Olivier Evrard organized two study days at the Institut de Recherche pour Ie Developpement (Institute of Research for Development -- IRD) in Paris, entitled 'Tourism, mobility & the commodification of identities'. The idea was to bring together researchers from different social science disciplines (mainly anthropologists, but also sociologists, geographers & historians) to explore the role of tourism in modern issues of identity. The organizers were lucky to be able to welcome two Anglo-Saxon sociologists, Adrian Franklin & John Hutnyk, but they had more difficulty in identifying & gathering a sufficient number of French researchers with long experience of working on this theme. Admittedly, these difficulties were partly due to problems of availability, notably for two recognized French specialists on tourism, Jean-Didier Urbain & Michel Picard (see their contributions in this issue). A growing number of young French-speaking sociologists & anthropologists are now working on tourism, as testified by the articles presented here & several doctoral theses in progress. But the question remains: why has this theme been ignored for so long in French anthropology & sociology, while during the same period it has given rise to numerous works in English? How can we explain the French disinterest in a subject which, ironically, has often been approached in the UK & the USA on the basis of a conceptual frame provided by what is called the 'French theory'? This issue of Tourist Studies was born out of a meeting, & out a question raised by that meeting. In October 2006, Anne Doquet & Olivier Evrard organized two study days at the Institut de Recherche pour Ie Developpement (Institute of Research for Development -- IRD) in Paris, entitled 'Tourism, mobility & the commodification of identities'. The idea was to bring together researchers from different social science disciplines (mainly anthropologists, but also sociologists, geographers & historians) to explore the role of tourism in modern issues of identity. The organizers were lucky to be able to welcome two Anglo-Saxon sociologists, Adrian Franklin & John Hutnyk, but they had more difficulty in identifying & gathering a sufficient number of French researchers with long experience of working on this theme. Admittedly, these difficulties were partly due to problems of availability, notably fo