Anthropology was originally conceived of as the study of different cultures. Cultures were thought to be unique bounded entities with limits and specific characteristics. Cultures were static, in that they could be captured by anthropological analyses. Their customs, habits, mores, relationships, uniquenesses could all be detailed, and in doing so, the ways in which each culture was separate from all others could be seen. But recently, a strain within anthropology has criticized this notion of culture as a bounded, unchanging entity. Cultures are in constant contact with one another, and they have been for centuries. Through these meetings of cultures, ideas and information are exchanged along with material goods. It seems that the last isolated cultures have been brought out into the modern world, and there is no longer a part of the earth that has not come into contact with western civilization. Even if there were such a group found, the idea of a static culture might still not apply. Facing constantly changing situations in the world, cultures must adapt, and even when conditions are stable, cultures grow and evolve. Thus the idea of a static, unchanging culture with certain rules etched in stone no longer seems to apply. Anthropologists are recognizing this limitation to their work. As Lourdes Arizpe (1999) writes, "today... anthropologists are discussing whether to throw out culture as a concept" (2).Arjun Appadurai has a vision of culture that could be considered post-structural. It works on different planes of meanings than the structural theories of culture, and it thus constructs a completely different view of the relationships between globalization, modernity, and culture. In his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), Appadurai argues that the new global age of modernity has been heralded by the joint forces of media and migration. These forces have united the world in ways never before possible because of their effects on the "work of the imagination," which he sees as "a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity" (3). Appadurai argues that people and images are "in simultaneous circulation" throughout the globe in ways and to an extent not possible before modern technology, both information technology and transportation technology. These people and images meet and react to each other.
This vision of modernity argues against the idea of cultures as strictly delineated, definable entities. Like Arizpe, Appadurai would like to get rid of the term "culture," at least in its use as a noun. He prefers to use it as an adjective to describe the dimension of phenomena that attends to situated and embodied differences, "differences that either express or set the groundwork for the mobilization of group identities" (13). He defines culture for his purposes as "the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity" (15). Appadurai examines how culture, globalization and modernity play out through certain issues in India. He argues, though, that India should not be seen as a "case, example, or instance of something larger than itself. It is, rather, a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world,... of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and of how global facts take local form" (18). I see cultural tourism as multiple sites of contestation.
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