WebinarOnline
The soul of tourism: Anthropological perspectives on cultivating true destination stewardship
Friday, 20 November 2026
An anthropological exploration of place, belonging and responsibility in tourism, showing how lived experience, cultural meaning and diverse forms of knowledge can inform destination stewardship beyond visitor numbers and economic returns.
About this event
Tourism is more than an economic activity. It brings visitors, residents, workers and places into relationships shaped by meaning, memory and power. This webinar uses anthropological perspectives to examine what destinations are, who belongs within them and how stewardship might protect the qualities that cannot be captured through visitor numbers or financial returns alone.
The session will explore how rituals, everyday practices, stories and attachments give places social significance. It will consider the tourist gaze alongside the ways residents interpret tourism and negotiate change. Participants will be encouraged to question simplified distinctions between host and guest, authentic and staged, or local and global when contemporary destinations are connected through migration, media and commerce.
Stewardship requires more than promotion or impact management. The webinar will ask how decisions can reflect diverse forms of knowledge and recognise obligations to future generations. Governance, participation and care will be examined as practical processes, including who sets priorities, whose evidence is valued and how disagreement is handled. Attention will also be given to the danger of romanticising communities or treating culture as static.
Researchers, students, planners and tourism practitioners will gain a richer vocabulary for understanding destination relationships. The discussion will connect close observation with questions of policy and responsibility. Its aim is to show how anthropological insight can support decisions that respect lived experience, sustain cultural and ecological meaning, and treat stewardship as an ongoing collective practice rather than a slogan applied to place. Such stewardship remains attentive to both continuity and legitimate change.