Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.1.2026.4321

Keywords:

tropical tourism, tristes tropiques, travel literature, tropical travelogue, critical tourism, anthropology of tourism, tropical travel writing

Abstract

Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques draws attention to this tropical zone where the full scale and scope of tourism and its associated challenges and consequences are rapidly becoming materially manifest. Tristes Tropiques refers to the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous work. That he wrote about the “sad tropics” in a memoir-travelogue is significant. Through a literary and reflexive engagement, he draws our attention to the important place literature, in its many forms, has in the anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies. Travel literature, rather than being merely fictional, often presents the crude reality of tourism in the tropics and is essential to tourism studies. This first collection of papers (in a two-part special issue) entitled Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels, addresses the importance of travel literatures of and from the tropics. It presents works from the Pacific, Indonesia, Sarawak on Borneo, Cambodia, Asia, Hawai’i, Africa, and the Caribbean. Genres include poetry, dystopian futures, travelogues, travel novels, and a history of tourism.

Author Biographies

Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia

Anita Lundberg is an adjunct Associate Professor and cultural anthropologist. Her interdisciplinary ethnographies across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore the intertwinings of tropical nature~culture. Anita’s awards and fellowships include: LIA TransOceanik (CNRS, JCU, Collége de France); The Cairns Institute; Evans Fellow, Cambridge University, UK; Guest Researcher, Maison Asie-Pacifique, Université de Provence, France; Visiting Fellow, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, National University Malaysia; and Anthropologist-in-Residence, Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. She has published extensively in academic journals and edited numerous Special Issues. Anita has curated exhibitions in NY, LA, Paris, and Sydney, and her own research has been exhibited at the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, and Alliance de Française. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cambridge University, UK, has a PhD in Anthropology, an MA in Science & Technology Studies, and a liberal arts BA. After academic stints in Australia and Singapore, she now lives in Bali.

Carla Guerrón Montero, University of Delaware, USA

Carla Guerrón Montero is an applied cultural anthropologist. She is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) at the University of Delaware (Newark, Delaware, USA). She holds joint appointments with Africana Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the same institution. Guerrón Montero studies how the contested nature of heritage manifests through tourism, travel, food, and music in the African diaspora. She has also contributed to the literature on world and anthropologies. Guerrón Montero is the author of several books, including From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama (University of Alabama Press, 2020), its Spanish translation (Editorial FLACSO, 2023), and the coauthored The Origins of Prejudice (Berghahn, 2026). She is also co-editor of the award-winning Why the World Needs Anthropologists (Routledge 2021, 2026) and the forthcoming Why Anthropology Needs the Global South (Routledge, 2026). Guerrón Montero has been a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO (Quito, Ecuador), and a Visiting Researcher at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). In 2025, she was the Distinguished Harman Scholar in Applied Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB).

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Published

2026-03-04

How to Cite

Lundberg, A., & Guerrón Montero, C. (2026). Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels . ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 25(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.1.2026.4321

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 1 (2026): Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques: Literary Travels

Section

Introduction

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