Tourism Recreation Research

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Studying tourism means going to have a look

for yourself: co-research, vulnerabilities and
opportunities after the pandemic

John Hutnyk

To cite this article: John Hutnyk (2023) Studying tourism means going to have a look for
yourself: co-research, vulnerabilities and opportunities after the pandemic, Tourism Recreation
Research, 48:4, 582-592, DOI: 10.1080/02508281.2023.2201755

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Published online: 24 Apr 2023.

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TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH
2023, VOL. 48, NO. 4, 582–592
https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2023.2201755

Studying tourism means going to have a look for yourself: co-research,

vulnerabilities and opportunities after the pandemic
John Hutnyk
Global Inquiries and Social Theory Research Group, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanites, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Tourism Studies cannot rely upon studies of tourism alone to cover its range. While the anthropology Received 6 May 2022
of tourism had once sustained a revival, disciplinary inertia suggests a renewal is again overdue and Accepted 31 March 2023
anthropology might justify a reconstruction. The possibilities of tourism as ‘study’ perhaps remain
KEYWORDS
unfulfilled, despite significant antecedents in Malcolm Crick’s work, where anthropology exactly Anthropology; tourism as
glosses as travel plus study. This builds upon the desire to know worlds, to contribute to human research; fieldwork;
togetherness across differences, economic disparity, languages, faiths, and political inclinations. ethnography; co-research;
Thus, calling for engagement with the political, postcolonial, and ontological concepts of reparations
anthropology, including multi-site ‘fieldwork’ methodologies, reanimates tourism studies via the
critical idealism of study as priority for anthropologists, workers and tourists. Alongside questions
of privilege, re-booting tourism studies through anthropology in the service of knowledge posits
tourism as much more than study tours, finding out about heritage sites, or guides with stories to
tell. Crick’s credo of ‘going to have a look for yourself’ could be a rallying cry for participatory
ethnography in tourism. In a more vulnerable world, anticipating future ethnographic work in
Vietnam, the paper seeks insights and opportunities for a new engagement in the study of
anthropology as tourism studies and tourism more widely.

Introduction offer only interpretations, and all places are not

There is an urgent political, economic and societal con-
sequence – and interpretive gap – at the heart of tra-
velling. Clinical reports on tourism’s decline in the time
of the pandemic may mean the travel industry and
travel studies more generally could miss the benefits
of a period of reflection. The opportunity currently on
offer in the study of tourism involves potential reas-
sessment and renewal. What has been written so far
should guide research, but it is the argument of this
paper that adopting an attitude of study is imperative.
Everywhere already seems to have been visited and
written up, and no traveller could now hope to see
any place without the influence of pre-existing
interpretations by others. Even on an desert island,
Robinson will have already been there to suggest, at
least to Emile, what is to be done. TripAdvisor will
tell you so, over and over, and, as the British-Australian
semantic anthropologist Malcolm Crick once advised,
you should always look at many views, read as many
versions, and talk to as many visitors as possible, but
then try to make your own way and have a look for
yourself. The point is that all references, prior experi-
ence, and guidebooks are advisory, all prior visitors
always and forever the same.
Welcoming a crisis of methods
A surprising opportunity was offered by the global col-
lapse of tourism under the pandemic, seemingly
designed to challenge especially those working in, as
well as on, the tourism sector. Two years or more of
effective suspension of international travel to Vietnam
(early 2019 to mid-2022), with only a partial displace-
ment of focus onto domestic tourism, and an overall
slow recovery, was a chance to assess the socio-econ-
omic viability of the sector in a new way. Even as it is
too early to tell if tourism studies can renew its disciplin-
ary practices, a social laboratory outlook might think of
this as a souvenir-like gift of COVID-19. The justice
tourism thinker, Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, suggests
tourism studies researchers are best placed to find the
means of ethical and environmental recovery: ‘A critical
question to consider is what opportunities … the
COVID-19 interruption of business-as-usual offer[s] …
us to rethink tourism?’ (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006,
p. 612). Yet, she has also pointed out that the

CONTACT John Hutnyk johnhutnyk@tdtu.edu.vn

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

‘contemporary lens’ of tourism ‘does not seem to be a
conducive enterprise to think philosophically about
what comprises a good life and a just society because
tourism today is categorised as an individualistic, consu-
merist, hedonistic and commercial pursuit’ (Higgins-Des-
biolles, 2018).
Tourism is obviously not tourism studies, nor do the
usual designations of tourism studies cover all the
work that tourism can entail. When tourism researchers
expand the scope of their reference, they can take on
much more than market research surveys of commercial
and demographic consumption numbers, employment
recovery numbers, and the like. The stop and restart of
tourism means taking a wider reflexive view of the
methods deployed in tourism studies, including a
reconfigured ethnography. Co-research and participa-
tory enquiries might then also introduce a healthy,
much-needed, intellectual vaccination process to advo-
cate radical questioning of everything. Alongside the cri-
ticism of existing observation-from-afar implied in
advocating ‘participatory methods’, it is also necessary
to carefully distinguish between studies of participation
in tourism, for example, ‘collection of public opinions’
through questionnaires (Ta, 2021, p. 204, 206) and parti-
cipatory research as a method that relies upon local par-
ticipation throughout the research process (Nguyen &
Dang, 2020).
The tendency to reproduce somewhat formulaic
survey papers not much different to marketing, cannot
adequately address the issues canvassed here. There
have been welcome calls for research ‘based on longer
periods of immersion into destinations as culture, ethni-
city and heritage demand more than a shallow experi-
ence of place by the researcher’ (Ryan, 2018, p. 197).
As ‘studies of tourism and its impacts increasingly
demand periods of immersion in the context that is
being studied’, there are consequences. (Ryan, 2018)
suggests ‘more ethnographic studies’ are ‘required if
researchers are going to meet the requirements of
reviewers’ (p. 198), and this can only encourage anthro-
pological perspectives. What remains is the question of
who gets to do these studies and how research
methods could still be further diversified by making –
and funding – ethnographic methods that are more gen-
erally accessible, and genuinely participatory.
This paper, on the basis of calls for a renewal of eth-
nographic and participatory research, recommends
exploring a shift in scholarship towards a co-research
model, derived from the Marxist inquiries tradition,
and somewhat different from the surveys, ethnography
or version of participatory methods in conventional soci-
ology and anthropology. Co-research is inspired by work
in a tradition that goes back to Marx sending a survey
TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH 583
out to factory workers in 1880 (Haider & Mohandesi,
2013). Other examples include the involvement of
workers in the Bolshevik ‘Factory Exposures’ published
in Pravda, and the Frankfurt School’s ‘Group Experiment’
(Adorno, 2010). More recently, wider awareness of co-
research has taken inspiration from Italian workerism
(Wright, 2002) and the call centre organising of Kolinko
(2002), among others (see Overtz, 2021). In all these
cases key to the model of co-research is that the research
entails research by those involved in the practice being
studied at the time. In this case, that would mean
research by tourists, tourism workers and tourism
studies personnel. In seeking support for this approach,
at least one recent example of survey work (ironic cheer)
provides justification for exploring co-research
methodologies:
one of the most crucial issues to achieve sustainable
tourism development, especially in the process of
tourism planning is the need to have collaboration/
cooperation among stakeholders, but 70.42% of resi-
dents have responded they have not been asked for rec-
ommendations/suggestions/opinions/comments on
local tourism development plans or projects. (Vu et al.,
2021, p. 724)
The main idea of co-research is that the researchers
involved in any project of study should include those
best placed to have insights into what is going on in
any situation – by dint of the being directly involved
in that situation. Here an ontological orientation
meets the writing culture research politics of who has
the authority to write ethnography to suggest that col-
laboration or co-research should be considered
(Clifford & Marcus, 1986). This promotion of a militant
co-research methodology starts by assuming no neu-
trality in questioning what the restart to tourism
should look like. Co-research also implies an agenda
of not predicting the forms that any re-boot of
tourism could take, and, given what happened in the
period of suspension, seeks to work with people to
find out what might be the important questions to
ask about prospects, and meanings, over what time
frame, and with an emphasis on what may be the
best renewal plans when facing the urgency of crises.
Such an approach can significantly reconfigure the
focus of tourism research in tourism studies.
In Vietnam, as elsewhere, the suspension of the
tourism sector left a large number of trained workers
facing questions about what to do. Nevertheless, given
widespread impacts and a stalled recovery, the
answers they found, and in some cases continue to
pursue, need to be studied in ways that take account
of realignments in the character of travel, who travels,
and who works in travel. Thus, it can recognised that
584 J. HUTNYK
tourism studies should study tourism alongside other
contextual factors, such as national economy, inter-
national diplomacy, soft power disguised as ‘develop-
ment’, heritage as historical revisionism,
decolonisation, global recalibrations, environmental
crisis, and, frankly, the threatened end of the planet,
and tourism, altogether. In this sense, the suspension,
pause and restart of tourism, after the pandemic (if
there is an ‘after’) might require the deepest rethink of
all. How and in what ways might tourism become a
mode of study going forward? If anything is indeed
new in the accretion of crises of environment, health,
security, commodity system, and marketisation, the
usual recourse of Government to market research,
online surveys and sampling-promotions will not
suffice. This may mean asking what can address the
various problems of employment, exploitation, opportu-
nism, over-tourism, exoticism, charity, ego-investment,
development, heritage, social media, fashion trends,
resource limits, and strains on collaboration, demands
intensive and multi-faceted consideration. The crisis is
long and the tasks are large for anyone interested in
the politics of knowledge and interpretation we know
as tourism studies.
Who could have imagined how quickly tourism would
come to such a grinding halt? COVID-19 measures
including travel bans, border-crossing restrictions, lock-
downs and physical distancing have created an
inflexion, or a pivot point for social, economic and politi-
cal life – and for the ecological wellbeing of the planet.
(Cave & Dredge, 2020, pp. 503–504)
Since the pandemic has changed so much, it is
necessary to question who and what tourism studies
scholars will target as they investigate these issues.
What could potentially become the renewed focus of
study in tourism research?
Why re-boot in vulnerable times
Both anthropology and tourism studies have constantly
reinvented themselves, but always under an institutional
domination, strictly speaking, in an ideological mode
that has been difficult to shift. For anthropology, the
dominant mode has been ethnographic fieldwork, with
training within the PhD usually requiring a year-long
‘fieldwork’ apprenticeship. A methodological constraint
with a proper name, either ‘Malinowskian’ or ‘participant
observation’, the codification of the method has been a
staple of all training programmes in anthropology. There
is a sense in which the rite of passage of a-year-in-a-tent
was held out as the controlling criteria of a discipline
organised around a famous Pole. One hundred years
of effort to move beyond Bronisław Malinowski can be
seen to have intensified in the last decades, under the
auspices of more frequent travel – leading to multi-site
fieldwork (Marcus, 2006) – and the pandemic and
environmental blocks on travel – leading to ‘digital eth-
nography’ (Ghosh, 2020). Yet these moves beyond Mal-
inowski are still measured against an ideal that not
even he came close to reaching, as we know from his
own travel diaries – an indication of the stickiness of dis-
ciplinary mythos. Malinowski was not ‘set down’ alone
on the beach, did not spend all his time in his tent or
with the natives, when he was with them some of his
practices were questionable, he thought often and
obsessively of home, and his interests were in Mali-
nowski as a writer – ‘it is I who will describe them’ (Mal-
inowski, 1967, p. 40) – rather than ‘the natives’ point of
view’ (Malinowski, 1922; see Hutnyk, 1998). The chal-
lenge to such formulaic ways of (saying how we
should be) doing things is always testy. Tourism
studies too has its somewhat arcane and set-in-stone
pathways beyond which few can stray.
In 1985, Crick set out his humorous characterisation
of the familiar identity between tourists and anthropol-
ogists, and it is always good to go back to that provoca-
tion to humbly remind ourselves, as advised by the very
serious Dr Crick, not to take things too seriously (Crick,
1985, p. 71). Crick’s humour was too subtle, upsetting
many with work that appeared vexatious, but was an
anthropology of investigation and interpretation.
Perhaps not his most important point, the conjoining
of anthropologists and tourists at a time of the disci-
pline’s difficult critical reconstruction came after
decades of anthropology’s close alignment with colonial
power.1
It is now an old debate, but let history show that an
earlier renewal of the anthropology of tourism was inau-
gurated with Crick’s provocative suggestion that just as
tourists get ‘taken’ [deceived] by guides and touts,
perhaps rather more up-scale or long-game touts ‘take’
anthropologists (Crick, 1988). This was what most aggra-
vated the sensitivities of establishment anthropologists,
shrugging off the idea that nothing much substantially
separates intellectual and touristic desires. Some push
back to the provocation might have been expected
and welcomed. A minor farrago of scandal among
anthropologists was good publicity, while tourists pre-
sumably didn’t much care. Irrespective of even more gar-
rulous presentations of the tourism-anthropology nexus,
for example in the essay ‘Fucking Tourists’ by Glenn
Bowman (1989), the notoriety of Crick’s missive struck
discordantly home when the Annual Review of Anthro-
pology republished his 1988 paper to a wider audience
(Crick, 1989). Today, after a long assimilation, which in

retrospect tames its notoriety, any presentation of eth-
nographic fieldsites as places of culture without
mention of tourists is no longer plausible. Yet, taking
Crick seriously – and here is the key point – if anthropol-
ogists were only sort of like tourists, as the consensus
became, the more interesting effort was to try to turn
this around to make a case for tourists to be more like
anthropologists.
Crick was keen to point out that the subject positions
of host, guest and interpreter, or in his terms, tout,
tourist and hippy-ethnographer, were interchangeable.
His critique of the intimate connections between anthro-
pology and power focussed upon major figures of
anthropological fieldwork, stressing contextual bias.
For example, Malinowski’s work in the Trobriand
Islands was at the invitation of then-Secretary of the
Department of External Affairs in the Australian Govern-
ment, Atlee Arthur Hunt, who thought ‘he could help
with native administration’ and Malinowski had arrived
at his first fieldsite in the company of the colonial
police magistrate (Crick, 1984; see also Pandian, 2019,
p. 21). Another foundation of twentieth century anthro-
pology, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders
(1922), published the same year as Malinowski’s Tro-
briands book, was based upon interviews undertaken
on a prison island where the British confined Indian
revolutionaries (Crick, personal communication, 1983).
He argued that the relationship of anthropology with
colonial and settler governments was ambiguous in
the same way that today we might ambiguously link
the climate crisis to global corporate polluters and
note that ‘to access the beach in the sun’ requires
‘carbon emissions associated with air and automobile
travel’ (Grimwood et al., 2018, p. 1).
Perhaps, like anthropology, despite hoped-for
benefits through employment, development of infra-
structure, and foreign exchange, if not cultural under-
standing, mass tourism suffers a bad reputation.
Tourists coming for sex, sights, savings, and servility
along with their dose of sun and sand (paraphrasing
Crick, 1988) have not endeared themselves and also
need reinvention. The proposal here is not only should
tourists and those who work in tourism read anthropol-
ogy, but they should also take up ethnographic studies
themselves, as researchers.
Tourism as anthropology
Tourism Studies’ interests range from, but are not
limited to, explicit market research and deep contingent
policy evaluations to questions of value, interpretation,
material, social and societal impact, heritage, exoticism,
literature, and political contexts. Without doubt, there
TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH 585
is an element where anthropology too partakes in heri-
tage and cultural product promotion, but to reduce
tourism studies to brand promotion would be a betrayal.
Instead, the radical extension of anthropology beyond
its institutional containment might reconsider all travel
and all tourism as ethnography and anthropology. An
appraisal of how the anthropology of tourism transforms
anthropology in general is perhaps more significant than
any interdisciplinary translation. At the same time, the
inverse is also probably true, that anthropology, at
least in Vietnam, is not currently as prominent as it
could be in tourism studies. The proposal to have every-
one in the industry, tourists, hosts, anthropologists and
market researchers, rethink what is missing from the
anthropology of tourism thus far might activate that
re-boot. Second stage reflexivity must focus on the
‘reception of anthropological “products” by the subjects
of research themselves’ (Rao & Hutnyk, 2006, p. 3).
Extending the scope of who reads and writes texts in
the anthropology of tourism, for which audiences and
for which purposes, is to open up the hermetic, and her-
meneutic, circle.2 To reconfigure tourism as study is
undoubtedly a stretch, but the closed past and an
open future is not only a postcolonial dream (see
Hutnyk, forthcoming 2023). While tourists already do
their ‘homework’ in choosing a holiday destination,
deciding among different options, styles, locations and
budgets, checking these and planning, their efforts are
also constrained by various factors. Limited information,
focus on beaches, resorts, quality of service, reliance
upon already organised heritage museums etc., leaves
initiative somewhat lacking. The tourist is not an
agent; the tourist becomes an agent.
Without a radical rethink, anthropology remains a
nineteenth-century discipline, albeit swapping armchairs
and canoes for the back of a motorbike, and the compara-
tive table for reflexive angst notes (like this one). The brief
period of capitalism’s unfettered ascendency and the
coinciding possibility of unimpeded fieldwork anthropol-
ogy were interrupted by the first wave of anti-colonial
and independence movements. The rise of inter-discipli-
narity coincided with the metrics-wielding reinvention of
the institutions by neoliberal accountants and a newly
narrow empirical focus dissuaded expectations of
system-wide critique, unless in the most general of
terms – globalisation, infrastructure, comparative – and
only to use this as a call for empirical specifics. Yet:
there are calls for tourism to move beyond ‘business as
usual’ and to find a pathway to regenerative tourism.
The question of how to move beyond simply advocating
a shift to articulating what that shift might look like in
tourism has received little attention. (Cave & Dredge,
2020, p. 504)
586 J. HUTNYK

Against charitable tours development, action research, participatory and pro-

people expert deployment. Research grants now invari-
The other side of the romantic idyll and political oppor-
ably come with the requirement, in advance, that the
tunism of institutionalised knowledge is panic. After rec-
scholars requesting funding will report back with
ognition and realisation of the debt owed to the
‘impact narratives’ and ‘outcomes’, predetermined and
environment, anthropology and tourism studies, like
by now utterly formulaic. Impact reports are written in
other disciplines, must address the looming catastrophe.
the language of foreign office diplomacy often before
In the same way that physics and engineering seem not
any accountability feedback or survey of the views of
to have done, the anthropology of tourism cannot avoid
the impacted subjects (the terminology here already
addressing its contribution to an unequal and overbur-
invokes a crash-test scenario geared more to sell cars
dened planet. Contributing to global knowledge
than provide a universally safe mode of transport).
outside the cloistered academy might make anthropol-
Think of the provocation of Crick here also – impact aca-
ogy relevant through campaigns and actions of
demics feeding the supplicants in the vestibule of
redress, seen as the only way to justify the circumnaviga-
heaven as a more upmarket version of alms-giving
tion of the global by those privileged enough to be able
travel.
to stay home if they wished. This does not mean the
The traveller-researcher’s means of locomotion is
meagre worthiness of environmental study tours that
motivated by ego-investment, oftentimes disguised,
bring back only the equivalent of evangelical philan-
and effectively endorsed by institutional imprimatur –
thropy. The self cannot be saved from compromise on
the stamp of ethics committee approval given even
a package tour and the purchase of woven baskets
before the project begins, the outcomes in the funding
and souvenir t-shirts does not emancipate the world.
bid, the narrative pre-scripted by the assessment units
What can only organise at a generalisable level is mass
to whom it never occurs that a report from the subjects
mobilisation and the inculcation of habits of redress.
themselves might be warranted. Subjects remain mute
The well-meaning enthusiasm of study tours and vol-
in this system, at best the recipients of unasked for
unteer tourism often follows a superior, self-serving
development, targets and goals constructed by policy
model. How is it that those with the economic privilege
in faraway summits.
of being able to shift locations with relative ease, trading
their middle-income jobs for purchasing power in the
low-wage peripheries of capitalism, then think that res- Study as viable repair
olution of their residual, largely unexamined, guilt at
Maybe it is naïve to think that tourists will want to study
this disparity means they can offer good works out of
or that hosts will want to have them interfering, but just
charitable magnanimity? Without thinking they might
as it is not possible to think that all tourists will want to
serve local causes all the better by learning something
follow the same beaten track, not all study need be the
from those who know, and learning from them where
same. Not all are suited to self-sacrificing honest work in
their effort might be warranted – even appreciated –
disregard of ego-appreciation, or tanning – and some
the charitable do-gooder type misses a potential voca-
may say why should they be so suited? These are not
tion at the very moment they think they’ve found abso-
unprecedented suggestions or unanticipated problems,
lution. Research on charity workers, followed up by
and there are similar projects that try to establish conti-
attention to activist, culture warriors, and other benevo-
nuity and credibility: for example, with the term ‘creative
lent allies, has in most cases found that local tolerance of
tourism’ offering a broad definition:
good intentions is greater than any effects, and toler-
ance sometimes brings a return purchase (Hutnyk, creative tourism: a sustainable, small-scale tourism that
1996). Customer satisfaction and good marketing add provides a genuine visitor experience by combining an
a meaningful emotive charge to the contributions of immersion in local culture with a learning and creative
process. (Duxbury, 2021, p. 29)
the charity worker, whose ascension is secured even
more surely than Max Weber’s protestant self-chosen An optimist will admit that Anthropology tries, as yet
penitent (Weber, 1905/1930). Charity work is redeployed and evermore unsuccessfully, to unravel the Eurocentric
as cultural credit accumulated from places where it was framing of institutional forms of knowledge creation and
quietly endured. dissemination. Malinowski style fieldwork as learning still
There are, no doubt, models in more elaborated code prevails as a somewhat idiosyncratic methodological
for doing work that is meaningful in impoverished parts absolution setting it apart because at least anthropolo-
of the Global South. In the Global South, sophisticated gists go and have a look for themselves. This credo
theorisations of charity present themselves as makes them more akin with tourists, though there

remains a structuring Western privilege of universal
access, despite so many anthropologists trained in
India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Africa and South
America.
A transformation of tourism into study would not just
be study tours, but broader. How might it look? Perhaps
something like the walking tours described by Stephen
Muecke and Jennifer Eadie in ‘Ways of Life: Knowledge
transfer and Aboriginal Heritage Trails’ (2020), where
Aboriginal elders in Australia, assisted by their younger
charges, have much to teach us all while walking the trails.
Yet something more systematic and generalisable,
within contingency, is implied where indigenous-led
initiatives could be considered a necessary return or
reparation for decades and even centuries of colonial
exploitation, along with recognition of tourism’s acceler-
ating ‘detrimental impacts on communities and the
environment’ (Matteucci, Nawijn and Zombrich, 2022,
p. 169). Really hearing and beginning with what local par-
ticipants say are important issues. Having them decide
what counts as knowledge, and having them lead the
search for it, seem the only appropriate ways of addres-
sing the multiple crises that make it unwise to return to
tourism as we knew it. Again, Higgins-Desbiolles notes
the urgent need ‘to imagine ways tourism can be devel-
oped to enable human thriving and ecological recovery’
(Higgins-Desbiolles, 2022, p. 620), and later:
The outcome of this decolonising approach is we focus
too early on the seemingly positive processes of decolo-
nising before we have adequately accounted for the his-
torical and ongoing structural injustices of imperialism,
conducted adequate truth-telling and estimated and
enacted the reparations that are needed. (Higgins-Des-
biolles, 2022, p. 2)
Reconfiguration of tourism as learning and fore-
grounding collaboration between locals and tourists,
as a form of reparation, of course requires caution.
Theodor Adorno writes:
Rarely is the duty of compensation simply denied; rather
it is completely acknowledged formally, but is made illu-
sory through qualifications and caveats … unambiguous
statements in favour of compensation are rare. (Adorno,
2010, pp. 136–137)
Reparations may be the only word that captures the
complications and obligations of a material change
addressing the need for redress. Not only an economic
redress, as proposed but ignored for example by Henry
Kissinger and Richard Nixon after the Paris Vietnam
Accords.3 Redress of plundered knowledge requires a
financial transfer of perhaps unprecedented magnitude
alongside redefinitions and pluralisations of perspec-
tives, interpretations, and the very structure of
TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH 587
knowledge. How do we evaluate the contrast of indivua-
lised ego-invested knowledge production versus collec-
tive projects usually dismissed as propaganda by
Western scholars unable to articulate the extent to
which the possibility of selfless group engagements
affronts them?
There will be difficulties and variations, false starts,
failures, and impossibilities, in attempts to do co-
research and rearrange the investments and desires of
an entire sector. Riff Raff journal called the Kolinko co-
research ‘touristing’ and ‘learning to swim without
getting in the water’ (Riff Raff, 2004), because the
Kolinko activists had imposed a formulaic version of
class composition theory and ignored the theorising of
the workers.4 The criteria of success may need to be
reviewed, though once the subjectivist ideological
attachments of institutionalised research are challenged,
the only impediments seem training, motivation and
time. Training for research is not only the preserve of
PhD candidates, and both tourists and workers in the
industry seeking to learn research methods could
benefit from exposure to and discussion of a range of
methods and ways they might interact with other
researchers – those anthropologists with degrees still
exist, and are not excluded. Yet adopt methods of co-
research and writing are not simply willed into existence
– funding is required for training, or ways for tourists to
fund their own education as prelude to and as part of
travel, might run alongside programmes to pay
workers in the industries associated with tourism for
their involvement. All industries and all sectors suppor-
tive of the tourism industry will require review and over-
sight, so there should be funds for this and the people
best placed to do such review work – often called
audits by Government agencies – are those involved
within the sector. Funds for such training and review
are a major consideration (see Hutnyk, 2020; 2022)
Time of course requires finances – allocation of
funding would need to break with the credentialism of
grant administration. While motivation is a less
obvious question – but what you want to do, what
needs to be done, and what do we need to know to
get there, seem like good starting questions.
Go and have a look for yourself might be the ideal
injunction, but as we know, the structure is not
undone in any simple mirroring reflection. Could
tourism be reconfigured as reparations? Not of the
kind where untrained volunteers offer their labour in
clinics or digging wells as a kind of charitable develop-
ment work, since charity usually rewards the one who
gives (Derrida, 1991/1992; Mauss, 1925/1966). Instead,
intellectual repair as an obligation to get to know, talk
with, understand and study with and among the local
588 J. HUTNYK
historians, artists, writers, journalists, performers,
workers, agents, architects and scientists of the local
community.
Co-research as tourists walking the walk
The engagement envisioned here is not entirely alien to
the scholarship of Europe. There are several extant
models. For example, following on from the Gauche pro-
létarienne (GP) the Groupe d’information sur les prisons
(GIP) adapted a methodology whereby a collective
group around Daniel Defort, Michel Foucault and
others, almost 50 years ago (see Fuggle, 2020), initiated
powerful studies of the prison system of France:
[the GIP] method of gathering information on French
prison conditions was based on the favored Maoist
tactic of the enquête (investigation): immersing oneself
among the masses – ‘going to the people’ – in order
to allow the oppressed to describe their predicament
in their own language, a practice that was in keeping
with the Maoist maxim, ‘One must descend from the
horse in order to smell the flowers’. (Wolin, 2018, p. 18)
Utilising co-research, team ethnography, and partici-
patory methods challenges the way institutions and
their disciplines are set up to exclude those who have
not fulfilled the hierarchical class and birth-based privi-
leges of access. It is not simply a matter of speaking
the correct language and doing work of quality and
merit – any assumption that the wider exclusions of
society are not operative in the networks of citation,
reference and preferment in academia would be naïve.
Nevertheless, the challenge is a part of the path out of
subalteneity for class mobility and racial justice. Struc-
tural change can also be reparation, though polite
debates and critiques of method are not going to
bring about the institutional reconfigurations so necess-
ary, and still so remote.
It is not like mass tourism could suddenly be replaced
by some sort of evangelical pedestrian global walking
cure, but there are ways that tourism as study could
be made more mainstream. Most big cities by now
have several options for thematic historical walks,
there are causes and programmes geared as much to
domestic tourists as to expats and foreigners, and of
course there are museums and galleries marketed not
only to tourism, but with national agendas, more or
less explicit, of their own. In terms of walks, Muecke
and Eadie’s report on Aboriginal walking trails is a kind
of activity somewhat different from the usual tourism
fare. The ‘trails are far more than “tourism products”’
and both ‘enact inter-generational knowledge transfer’
for Aboriginal families and ‘have the potential to
change every discipline willing to “re-boot” on a
territorial, rather than global, scale’ (Muecke & Eadie,
2020, p. 1201). They ask, ‘Could this experiential model
of knowledge transfer represent a path away from the
nineteenth-century model of knowledge collection,
storage and display that we find in universities and
museums?’ (Muecke & Eadie, 2020, p. 1201). In Kolkata,
several groups do regular in-person and online heritage
walks. The most prominent of these is ‘Immersive Trails’,
which covers themes from East India Company history to
the lost halls of Bengali cinema heritage, food, and
crime. Perhaps most significantly, they also offer work-
shops on doing such history, whether family history in
graveyards, oral histories and evidence, or using the
archives in the National Library in Belvedere Estate (see
https://www.immersivetrails.com/). In London, the Jack
the Ripper tour of the East End has a long, if sometimes
contentious, record (should anyone want to read the 740
pages of discussion generated in the first half of 2008 in
an edit war on the Jack the Ripper Wikipedia site, there
are insights to be had). There are also occasional themed
walks, such as tracking the lascars and opium dens of the
docklands, or the more occasional Marx Trot, which
entails a day-long comradely stroll to most of the
public bars Marx and Engels are known to have visited.
People might choose a health or faith retreat, diving,
cooking classes, Vietnamese cuisine or architectural curi-
osities – a then-and-now-Saigon walk is popular, Tim
Doling has produced a handsome book of walking
tours for the city (Doling, 2014), alongside similar
volumes on Quảng Nam (Doling, 2020), and Huế
(Doling, 2018). The museums and galleries of Ho Chi
Minh City are staples of several levels of tourism and
wider knowledge exchange. Increasingly museums put
considerable effort into promotion and attraction –
interactive displays a must – and some have been
known to seek researcher guests by offering visitor
passes and opportunities for the self-styled visiting
researcher prepared to get to know the agenda of
local curators. Mothers may even organise their grand
international retirement trip in terms of places they
want to visit with family tree research in mind. Others
visit the graves of dead rock stars or poets, Jim Morrison
has done much to popularise the Pére-Lachaise ceme-
tery in Paris, while Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
and Marguerite Duras keep up the visitor numbers at
Montparnasse (along with Charles Baudelaire, Serge
Gainsbourg and many others).
Pandemic impacts in Vietnam
The extent to which the unprecedented pandemic
slump impacts the economy beyond tourism is
impacted by the move of tourism workers into ‘adjacent’

industries. In Vietnam, many workers were released from
formal and, in the tourism sector especially, often infor-
mal and precarious positions. Some took temporary
employment as low-paid motorcycle shippers, leaving
only a few waiting on the grand reopening and a
return to their old jobs. Muted, frustrated, anticipation
was palpable as the reopening was delayed on an
almost quarterly rolling basis (Huynh, 2021). Uncertainty
meant a reserve army of tourism workers were increas-
ingly less likely to rush back into posts once the date
arrived – as it finally did on March 15, 2022.
Deflated international tourism numbers meant a
pressing consideration involved renewed study of the
fortunes of domestic tourism. The domestic interim
involved the policy effort in Vietnam promoting ‘stayca-
tions’ (Hung & Nguyen, forthcoming 2024) and the bril-
liant, and apparently effective, campaign slogan Người
Việt Nam đi du lịch Việt Nam [Vietnamese people go
visit Vietnam] alongside government mechanisms to
support workers placed in difficulties because of the
pandemic (Pham & Pham, 2021). Domestic tourism
numbers increased, international tourists stayed away.
Yet, the reorientation of the tourism economy towards
domestic tourism could not match the foreign income
generated by international tourism. Of course all
aspects of tourism should be subject to study, both
economic realities and missed opportunities – and it is
only proper to question how best to launch the work.
As a scramble to escape the worst effects of the pan-
demic developed, the employment situation was put in
stark relief locally. For example, in the Mekong Delta, the
2022 restart of international tourism cannot engage the
number of visitors, or facilities, there were in 2019
because visits to the Mekong Delta in in the southern
part of Vietnam are dependent upon overall inter-
national arrivals. Visitors to the delta were always a
small percentage of total tourism numbers, and it was
clear, despite Government encouragement, that
tourism amenities at any capacity could not easily be
turned on and off. The logistics involved in being able
to stop, pause, and restart tourism was not without con-
sequences. While some tourism facility providers could
make renovations during lock-down closures, not
every initiative guaranteed survival. The additional dec-
orative lighting in some city tourism precincts, for
example along a riverside walking bridge in the
Mekong Delta city of Cần Thơ, installed especially to illu-
minate the grand March 15 reopening, were impressive.
However, opportunities for innovative new modes of
tourism were less promising in a stagnating sector
where anxious speculative investment and remodelling
could not easily accommodate the stress of delay. With
Chinese and Russian tourists, for different reasons, not
TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH 589
yet a part of the ‘reboot’ early in 2023, the return to
mass tourism could not happen as fast as providers
might hope. Even the low-level backpacker western
tourists – who still bring greater revenue than domestic
tourism, were not returning to the bamboo huts of the
eco-lodges in Cần Thơ. The lodges had been left
untended for two years, and could not stand up
without maintenance staff. Indeed, in several locations
alongside waterways near Cần Thơ, it was possible to
observe abandoned eco-tourism facilities where the
jungle was reclaiming huts at astonishing speed.
During a site visit, a half a kilometre from a similar hut
where these lines were written, the caretakers had
been laid off early in the pandemic and it was possible
to observe how bamboo architecture suffers without
maintenance. The jungle recovers quickly.
Bamboo constructions – having a look for
yourself
Even the most well-run eco-lodge near Cần Thơ can be,
fairly unsurprisingly, not geared to domestic tourism, so
with the apparent winding up of the pandemic, the
bamboo huts were still empty. The water hyacinth clog-
ging the waterways seemed unkempt where they would
usually be cut back to provide the correct degree of
jungle exotic. The huts were no longer maintained by
caretaker Quân. The tariff for a night stay is heavily dis-
counted, even more so for a month yet there are few
bookings. The owner has the advantage of not paying
rent, and the four staff retained are on half-pay. Some
40 other staff had been released to seek work elsewhere
and had not yet returned to work. Some 18 huts spread
across two acres of former fruit orchard, the fruit
hanging abundantly and extravagantly overripe on the
vine – the venture locked in the double-step of the Gov-
ernment’s mixed economy – forest to orchard to eco-
tourism. For now, there are only three guests. The only
thing not very much different in this new normal are
the mosquitoes, still in abundance. Internet and fresh
water are retained, but a one-choice fixed menu in
place of the usual a la carte, this somewhat mid-range
luxury resort has survived while the aforementioned
adjacent, even larger, facilities were abandoned – the
huts and bamboo walkways between them already over-
grown and sacrificed to a forest eager to reclaim all
spaces. The birds chirp away. In the distance a rooster
crows enthusiastically but inappropriately in the late
afternoon.
Discussing ‘the possibilities for socialising tourism’,
Higgins-Desbiolles, Doering and Bigby ask what
‘demands [could] be placed on tourism?’ and ‘could
we shape tourism in such a way that it no longer
590 J. HUTNYK
causes widespread injustices and instead strives to serve
as a universal social good?’ (Higgins-Desbiolles et al.,
2022, p. 15). The work needed to achieve such change
in the tourism industry seems considerable, but this
has to be seen as a possibility for co-research. Easy
answers that could fit into a glossy brochure would
hardly be satisfactory, indeed, part of the task must
also be a critique of representations of travel and of
communities – the business of anthropology too must
be rethought over and over, with the communities.
Higgins-Deboilles,
insisted that it is both tourists and tourism businesses
that must be socialised into respecting the lifeways of
the local community (often called ‘hosts’) and serving
the needs and interests of the local societies in which
the tourists tour or the tourism industry offers tourism
services. Tourism can be a means for socialisation of
tourists into the worlds of others and foster understand-
ing and empathy for those struggling with social
inequalities. (Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2022, p. 5)
For Sarah Wijesinghe, ‘decolonisation does not simply
occur with the inclusion of the “other” academics into
mainstream academia’ (Wijesinghe, 2020, p. 8). Over-
coming invisibility is step one in a long task of reconfi-
guring the hierarchies. In expanding the field of
researchers exponentially, can a guest – rather than
the tourist as consumer – get involved in co-research
in a community-centred mode of tourism? What would
make it normal, habitual, or if not normal at least plaus-
ible, for tourists to show solidarity and engagement
enough to be non-dominant partners in the work of
exploring, investigating, analysing and promoting com-
munity knowledge, be it about agriculture, history,
transport or animals etc. What criteria would be norms
of participation in locally led co-research? What pro-
cesses and procedures would be required to ensure
no-one gets ‘carried away’ with the saviour complex,
or indeed profits?
The co-research element here suggests the research
is collectively ‘approved’. However, in co-research, all
participants should be researchers from the get go,
but there are not the personnel or bookings in place
to enact any research plan. Although a university qualifi-
cation is not as important as the wherewithal to conduct
research in a way that meets the needs of the partici-
pants without imposition, grandstanding, egoism etc.,
there are as yet not enough participants. This is the
dilemma, even a radical research reconfiguration
requires willing subjects. John Urry inspired Fabian
Frenzel in his evaluation of participant action research
as part of avoiding the ‘parasitical’ tendency of research
of social movements (Urry, 1995, p. 34). Frenzel did not
want to be an ‘informer’ and identifies, following
Foucault’s critiques of governmentality, issues with
research that can entail ‘its systematic abuse for aims
of controlling, policing, and steering populations’
(Frenzel, 2010, p. 25). The project of co-research
described here remains potential.
Conclusion – vulnerabilities and viabilities
This paper has made a prospective case for longer term
co-research studies that are collaborative, interpretive,
open ended, non-survey, discursive, politically engaged
and indeed partisan. As all studies have biases, more
or often less known, but the ones affirmed here
address vulnerabilities of context for tourism in ways
that only seem viable in the context of longer-term
studies. The potential to recruit those who have been
impacted and affected by the ongoing crisis offers a
renewal of anthropology and of travel as study, as
inquiry, as a kind of global audit of the field, of which,
this paper offers a possible version. Go ‘have a look for
yourself’, as Malcolm Crick says. If we do not do this,
tourism studies will tend more towards market research
and anthropology towards elite online voyeurism. The
bamboo hut eco-tourism lodge is now also closed,
though the caretaker was kept on, selling the fruits
that remain, and we will research ways to reopen.
There must be a rapid reboot at both ends, tourists
and workers, an alliance of hosts and guests, and co-
research to save the world. There is no question of
giving up the struggle to never return to normal –
there has always been a crisis, just with different levels
of interpretive attention and current imperative.
Hoping tourism studies can be both unravel somewhat,
and be more focused together now, fostering a mode of
collective writing that is reflexive dialectical and colla-
borative, those seeking inspiration for an renewed
tourism studies beyond the distanced observed partici-
pation of the pandemic period in Vietnam might
promote a utopian virtue: of everyone everywhere
studying everything all the time. Both vulnerable and a
viability that does not seem all bad.
Notes
1. Similes that made anthropology the ‘handmaiden’ or
‘midwife’ of colonialism were poignant as some of the
greatest ethnographers were also contributing to the
‘war effort’, well after WW2. Yale professor, James Scott
admitted his work for the CIA in an unabashed anarchist
pose: ‘during my period working for the National
Student Association, all my reports were sent by the pre-
sident, who had been recruited by the CIA, to them; I
wasn’t paid, but I was in effect a CIA agent’ (Scott inter-
view with Macfarlane, 2009). The American

Anthropological Association (AAA) made colonial collab-
oration an issue in the late 1960s when the CIA adver-
tised for anthropologists to work in Vietnam in the
AAA newsletter. The organisation’s then president was
Core Du Bois, who had led the research office of the
CIA’s predecessor and had encouraged Gregory
Bateson to do his ‘bit’. Du Bois, though, had fallen out
with her spymaster handlers and was hounded for a
decade by the FBI for, it seems, not being Cold War
warrior enough (Seymour, 2015). The ‘Writing/Culture’
debate’s very own culture hero – almost an entire cul-
tural system in himself – Clifford Geertz was silent until
well after the fact about vicious pogroms against com-
munists in Indonesia while here was diffidently studying
malarial chickens (Geertz, 1996; see White, n.d.).
2. The hermeneutic of course might itself be taken as a
mode of (hermetic) closure if its origins in biblical
interpretation are allowed to contain possibilities.
Obviously, that is not the intent here, where the circle
is more of a dance move.
3. ‘In 1972, pressing the North to sign a peace agreement,
Henry Kissinger agreed in Paris to reparations for the
war damage to Vietnam. The chief Communist negotia-
tor, Le Duc Tho, first suggested $8 billion … By the time
an agreement was initialled in January 1973, the figure
was … $3.25 billion over a five-year period … South Viet-
nam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, launched military
actions against Communists in the South, and Hanoi’s
forces made major gains in the Mekong Delta. Washing-
ton had its excuse to back off from its commitment to
reparations.’ (New York Times, 2000, November 18).
4. Kolinko gathered critical support and is one of the best
known, even if flawed, examples of recent workplace
inquiry. See also the review in Aufheben (2004) con-
cerned that Kolinko repeat a form of inverse Leninist
vanguardism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
John Hutnyk (PhD Melbourne) is Associate Professor in the
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang Uni-
versity, Vietnam. He is the author of the books The Rumour of
Calcutta (1996), Critique of Exotica (2000); Bad Marxism (2004);
Pantomime Terror (2014); Global South Asia on Screen (2018);
and co-authored with Virinder Kalra and Raminder Kaur: Dia-
spora and Hybridity (2005), He lives In Ho Chi Minh City.
ORCID
John Hutnyk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4826-8949
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