The two of us organised a panel for the annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (the ASA), held in March 2007 at London Metropolitan University. The theme of the meeting was ‘Thinking through tourism’. Both of us were frustrated by the limited scope of much of the work that was being done on tourism in anthropology and elsewhere. We thought that the work was often formulaic and mechanical and too little concerned with power and what was going on more widely in the tourist destinations’ countries. We hoped that we could recruit people concerned with a set of questions that deserved more attention. Those questions revolved around the interplay between tourism and political-economic relations within host countries, influenced by the cultural context. We selected the best-suited of the papers from that panel, and the result is Tourism, Power and Culture: Anthropological Insights.

These papers are intriguing and revealing. In them, tourists as individuals visiting a tourist destination are not our main concern. Instead, they are more important in the aggregate, as the people who, collectively, make up consumer demand and are catered to by the tourism sector. Also in the papers in this volume, the encounter between hosts and guests is important only in so far as it influences and is influenced by national and international interests and processes that extend well beyond the immediate places of the tourist destination and the immediate nature of the tourist encounter.

The papers illustrate a growing body of anthropological work on tourism, and they are part of an increasing interest in the discipline in power in its more straightforward forms. Importantly, they show the ways that a broader perspective on tourism helps illuminate processes and relations that are of serious relevance for tourist destinations and host societies, but that are difficult to discern if we restrict our attention to tourists and the encounter between hosts and guests.