The modern does not cater for natives: Travel ethnography and the conventions of form

As a response to editors Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang’s outline of ‘the trouble with tourism and travel theory’, this article sketches some further troubles. It is argued that researchers have adopted modernist spatio-temporal distinctions that reproduce a singularity of the Tourist-as-Westerner. Meanwhile non-Westerners are mostly seen as immobile pre-modern participants of Western tourism. As non-Western tourism involves considerably more people than Western tourism, tourism theories on the whole do not necessarily fit most tourists of the world today, and they may even serve to re-enforce the global geopolitical hierarchy. Illustrated with ethnographic examples from Vietnam, it is suggested that a radical questioning of autocentric spatio-temporal distinctions is needed to arrive at a more heterogeneous and complex view of both modernity and tourism. While this will open up the field of inquiry, a sensitivity to socio-cultural diversities and, more importantly, global inequalities and the situated knowledge production is needed.