Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques II: Cultural Landscapes

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.2.2026.4328

Keywords:

tropical tourism, tristes tropiques, cultural landscapes, critical tourism studies, anthropology of tourism, colonialism, neocolonialism

Abstract

In this second special issue on “Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques” we explore “Cultural Landscapes” socio-culturally and ecologically to show how they are intertwined with historical, colonial, and neocolonial aspects of tourism. The anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies recognize tourism as both an industry and a cultural phenomenon, and this dual approach provides a lens for exploring how cultural landscapes are created, transformed, activated, and morphed by tourism. In this Introduction, we discuss how such studies have contributed to a nuanced and careful understanding of tourism's effects on cultural landscapes. The title of this special issue pays homage to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a memoir that, in many ways, anticipated the subfields explored here. Although Tristes Tropiques remains a controversial text, on its publication in 1955, it presented an intrepid indictment of racism and colonialism, and of travellers whose very act of mobility contributes to both. In this second issue, we venture across a range of tropical landscapes, from South America and Northern Australia to the Seychelles and the Andaman Islands, through India, Southeast Asia, and finally to tropical Africa. The contributors examine how tourism shapes and is shaped by cultures, ecologies, heritage, and history. Their analyses reveal cultural landscapes that are not merely scenic backdrops but rich spaces that local people engage with to counter the touristic forces of commodification and inequality. This second part of the double special issue on “Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques” complements the analysis established in the first issue on the subtheme of “Literary Travels,” and furthers that analytical journey.

Author Biographies

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. 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 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).

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 at 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.

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Published

2026-04-11

How to Cite

Guerrón Montero, C., & Lundberg, A. (2026). Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques II: Cultural Landscapes . ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 25(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.25.2.2026.4328

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 2 (2026): Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques: Cultural Landscapes

Section

Introduction

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