How Tour Guides Turn Global Culture into “Local” Experiences

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Looking back at this article more than twenty years after its publication, what strikes me is how strongly its central concern continues to resonate with my later work. I was already interested here in something that would become increasingly important in my research: the ways people imagine places, cultures and ways of life, and how those imaginaries subsequently shape actual practices. The tour guides I worked with in Yogyakarta provided a particularly vivid example. They were deeply embedded in contemporary global culture. They listened to international music, used mobile phones and the internet, maintained contacts abroad and, unusually for guides in their situation, some had travelled internationally themselves. Yet their professional success partly depended upon performing a recognizable form of “localness” for tourists. Their knowledge of the global actually helped them become more convincing representatives of the local. That paradox fascinated me then and still does. Tourists often travel enormous distances in search of cultural difference, yet what they recognize as genuinely different has already been shaped by global ideas about what authenticity, tradition and locality are supposed to look like. During the village tours described in the article, guides therefore did not simply reveal a pre-existing local culture. Together with villagers, tourism businesses and tourists themselves, they participated in producing a particular version of the local. For me, this was also an important methodological lesson. Grand concepts such as “globalization” become much more interesting when we examine how they are lived and negotiated in ordinary situations. Globalization could be observed in something as apparently mundane as a guide deciding what clothes to wear, which language to use, what story to tell, or which rice field to show visiting tourists. The article therefore strengthened my conviction that anthropology can make an important contribution by connecting large-scale processes with the fine-grained realities of everyday life. Perhaps the idea I would emphasize most strongly today is that the local is not disappearing. Nor is it a cultural residue that somehow survives globalization. Locality is continuously being made and remade through people's relationships with a wider world. Tourism makes this unusually visible because cultural difference is not merely encountered there. It is interpreted, performed, negotiated and given value.

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