Edward Bruner worked as an anthropologist cum tour guide in Indonesia in 1987.
On the second day of the tour in Jakarta, we had gone to the port, to the National Museum, and to visit other attractions. Because I had been to these sites many times, I began to photograph the tourists photographing the Indonesians. At the end of the day, Lisa [Bruner’s boss] told me to stop taking photographs of the tourists as it made them uncomfortable. My hope had been to discuss with the tourists how the Indonesians might feel being photographed by the members of an American tour group, as the tourists never asked the Indonesians for their permission. My aim was to induce some reflexivity and awareness of tourism itself, to ask the tourists to examine their own subject position, but it was not to be.
from Bruner’s Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, p2, which I almost didn’t start because the book jacket calls Bruner a professor of “interpretive theory,” among other things.
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