Introduction : Performing cross-cultural understanding in Pacific tourism

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the special issue entitled Indigenous Tourism, Performance, and Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Pacific. Based on various examples from the Pacific, we argue for the analysis of the tourist encounter as a single performative act of production and reception that produces its own ever shifting and contested meanings. We look at the dynamics of the tourist meeting and the possibility of really encountering and understanding the Other, by moving beyond cultural performance as text and by including the pre-objective, experiential dimension of the performative interface between indigenous ‘hosts’ and tourist ‘guests’. The inclusion of the sensory, bodily dimensions of tourism practices challenges common approaches to guest-host roles, the gaze, intentions, expectations and authenticity, and opens up to a more complex exchange through which the sensuality of the sensory body of the self is tentatively experienced via the sensuality of the sensory body of the Other.