Social anthropology is the study of human social life. Its subject matter is culture, and anthropologists examine the similarities and differences between societies. Tourism, and in particular cultural tourism to less economically developed countries, involves people from very different societies meeting in different circumstances. Social anthropologists, using their distinct methodology, ethnographic fieldwork, are in a particularly strong position to examine this phenomenon. It may be surprising then, that so few ethnographies of tourism exist. Many authors have commented that the anthropology of tourism has been slow to emerge considering the synergies between anthropology and tourism, and given that ‘tourism bears directly on a number of time-honoured themes in anthropology’ (Crick, 1994: 1). Although anthropological interest in tourism can be traced back to the 1960s, it did not gather momentum until the publication of the first edited collection of papers on the anthropology of tourism: Hosts and Guests (Smith, 1978), and it was nearly two decades later before full ethnographic monographs began to appear. Crick’s work on Sri Lanka was published in 1994, followed by Waldren’s (1996) work on Mallorca; Kottak’s examination of social change in a Brazilian village appeared in 1999; followed by Ness’ (2002) ethnography of tourism in the Philippines, Causey’s (2003) examination of the interactions between travellers and woodcarvers in North Sumatra, and McLeod’s (2004) study of tourism and globalisation in the Canaries. This book adds to these contributions by giving the ‘native-voice’ or hosts’ perspective of international tourism but from a different cultural region.

Despite the slow start, the anthropology of tourism is now firmly established as a sub discipline with a number of interconnected themes. In this chapter I will briefly examine each of these themes in turn to provide the theoretical background for the ethnography of Ngadha tourism.