The ubiquity of tourism throughout Southeast Asia, and its growing importance as a valid subject of detailed academic study, is brought into sharp relief by geographers, anthropologists, ecologists and others in this collection of essays. The range of issues, the challenges and new directions highlighted in the subtitle, are informed by the scope of tourism in contemporary Southeast Asia. This book, a follow-up edition to Tourism in South-East Asia (ed. Michael Hitchcock, Victor T. King and Michael J. G. Parnwell [London, New York: Routledge, 1993]), generally traces the trends within academia that have evolved in the years since its publication. Such trends affecting an academic understanding of tourism include the rising importance of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ecotourism’ in an environmentally vulnerable region of the world, the arrival of global terrorism and its impact on international tourism, and the general nature of globalisation as it complicates the relationship between hosts and visitors, whether they are international or western, or intraregional in origin. Taken together, the analyses presented here situate tourism within the widely variant tableaux of Southeast Asia's disparate touristic vistas. What is clear from the case studies illustrated within this volume is that tourism continues to play a critical role in the region economically, and that the academic study of the subject, although relatively new, can offer fresh insights within the broader paradigms of Southeast Asian studies generally.

Victor King's impressive review of the literature from the fields of anthropology and sociology in chapter two provides the intellectual ballast of the important theoretical features and challenges of the study of tourism in Southeast Asia. As an overview of trends in the field from the 1970s to the present, the chapter highlights concepts that have added to the important debates that arise from discussions of the multiple ‘impacts’ of tourism on economic development and cultural transition. King points out that tourism's role in shaping ethnic identity, particularly the images that are fabricated or presented by the nation-state itself, has been of recent focus for anthropologists and sociologists. Implicit in the discussion of images of ethnic identity is the broader importance of globalisation as a commoditising and unifying factor which complicates the very process of tourism itself. Whether seen, then, as a ‘search for authenticity’ or as a vicarious spiritual pilgrimage, experiencing other cultural settings, whether fabricated, ‘staged’, or organic, particularly in Southeast Asia, is inflected not only by individual expectations of the ‘exotic’ ethnic images projected by the modern nation-state, but also as a process that is integrally related to the broader homogenising forces of global development.

Considering the breadth and scope of touristic experience in Southeast Asia is a daunting challenge well met by this volume. Not only is the geography and cultural landscape of the region diverse and seemingly resistant to general categorisation and overarching comparison, but the individuated goals and expectations of the tourists themselves serve many purposes and presuppose an obvious, unbalanced sense of ‘agency’ between tourists and hosts. This volume highlights the divergent aims of differentiated tourist groups, whether individual ‘backpackers’ who often function as a kind of ‘proto-tourist’ in the less-travelled, but environmentally sensitive parts of the region, to intraregional sex tourists of the kind highlighted in Yuk Wah Chan's chapter on ‘Cultural and gender politics in China–Vietnam border tourism’, or Heidi Dahles's ‘Romance and sex tourism’.

While some scholars in this volume quantify the impact in terms of ecological damage, for example, in the fragile islands of Indonesia (see Mark Hampton and Joanna Hampton's chapter), others focus on the importance of exogenous factors affecting the dynamism of the tourism industry itself. For example, international terrorism's effects on tourism are analysed in two chapters that describe the devastating bombings in Bali (by I Nyoman Darma Putra and Michael Hitchcock; and Michel Picard, respectively). That terrorism and other significant natural disasters figure prominently in the analysis of modern tourism in Southeast Asia speaks to the importance of geopolitical and natural forces for which the region serves as a kind of barometer, measuring not only the propensity of tourists to visit developing countries during unstable times of crisis, but also the host nation's ability to secure the environment in order to accommodate tourists in resourceful ways.

This volume satisfies several important needs of both scholars and a general readership. It presents essays that function as multiple entry points to an important academic subject, one which is occasionally subsumed by purely economic analyses, or one which occasionally engenders impassioned responses regarding the moral ambiguity of cultural change in the developing world as introduced by supposed foreign influences. Whatever the reader's critical responses to the subject individually, it is helpful to regard the essays presented here as ways of qualifying the explosive growth of the tourism industry and the attendant challenges in the nations of Southeast Asia over the past several decades.