Sally's Ethnographic Study

When asked about the role of tourism in promoting cultural awareness, Professor Sally referred to how there were many cases that she saw in the Philippines where tourism development showcased cultural practices “that were considered to be distinctive and representative of certain ethnic groups in the Philippines and so for all the people who didn’t belong to those groups, it certainly increased their awareness of those groups and enhanced their appreciation and their recognition of those groups.” Being able to enjoy a cultural practice other than your own allows you to open your mind to learn more about other cultures. She underscores that those kinds of performances can enhance cultural awareness. However, Sally expresses the paradox she faced …show more content…
Additionally, the wide array of people whom she has studied in Yosemite has given her a chance to understand a global population. One of the conclusions that came out about Sally’s ethnographic study of Yosemite was that the climbing community continues to search for new obstacles to overcome and that “it does so not only by means of conventional symbolic constructs that it intentionally employs to represent itself, but also by dint of the experiential and ecological fields of symbolism that it generates, improvises, and choreographs” (Ness 2007: 11). People have their own ways of handling what they give and take from their surroundings. In the interview with Sally, when asked about how she chooses to explain the overall environment created by tourism, she reveals how she was “really struck in my field research by how deep the experience of connecting with the landscape could be in Yosemite for every visitor potentially and how diverse it could be.” According to Professor Sally, most of the theoretical perspectives that anthropologists have used to explain how people establish connections with tourism destinations are not really sufficient in accounting for each visitor’s individual experience because most of those explanations focus on a definition of symbolism as it’s regularly defined. Those scholars would have people believe that the various types of conversations that are used to describe stories in the park are rigid scripts that are developed by the managers, or the government, or by the people who want to attract visitors to the park. Additionally, those theories place a great deal of emphasis on the way that those standardizations control what happens in the park and deny that