Historicity, fieldwork, and the allure of the post-modern: A reply to Ryan and Gu

In the past two decades, the field of tourism studies has expanded far beyond laments for the presumed destruction of 'authentic' culture at the hands of an all-pervasive mass tourism. Researchers in a variety of fields and disciplines increasingly are cognizant of the fluidity of cultural practices and norms, the role factors such as gender, age, socio-economic class, and ethnicity play in tourist-local encounters, and the de-centering of Europe and North America in the discussion of the source of tourist flows. Yet these welcomed changes also bring potential research problems, not least of which are the practical and theoretical limits to a wholesale embrace of unreflective social constructivism.