Tourism & Heritage Topical Interest Group (THTIG)

The Tourism and Heritage Topical Interest Group (THTIG) is a sub-group of the SfAA that plans events at the annual SfAA Meetings, organizes student awards, and shares tourism and heritage related information and announcements with members through social media and our list-serve. We are currently updating and “revamping” our list-serve and social media presence.  If anyone would like to join us, please contact Stefan Krause at skrause1@lamar.edu.  

Featured THTIG (Virtual) Events, Norfolk 2021 

Tourism and Heritage TIG Business Meeting

THURSDAY, March 25th 4:00-5:45, Zoom/Whova

Learn more about the THTIG and get involved by attending our annual meeting virtually!  We will be discussing the student paper competition, the THTIG officer positions, and planning for the 2022 SfAA Annual Meeting. Students are encouraged to attend. 

Valene Smith Tourism Poster Competition

MONDAY, March 22nd 10:00-11:45, Posters available on demand throughout the meeting at Adobe Portfolio (Ex: sfaaposters.myportfolio.com/)

This student poster competition honors the legacy of Valene Smith, a pioneer of tourism studies in the social sciences, who first published her seminal work Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism in 1977. One poster will be selected to receive the top Valene Smith prize of $500 and two posters will receive honorable mention with travel awards of $250 each. Tourism &Heritage Sessions

THTIG Affiliated Sessions

  • (PR 24-6) WEDNESDAY 12:00-1:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Intentional Design in Tourism and Heritage Engagement

  • (PR 24-9) WEDNESDAY 2:00-3:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Community and Tourism in Natural and Cultural Conservation 

  • (26-6) FRIDAY 12:00-1:45 Channel 1 (live/simulcast): Ending the Silences in the Making of America: A Roundtable Exploring History, Policy, and Descendant Engagement in Public Institutions

  • (26-22) FRIDAY 6:00-7:45 Channel 2 (live/simulcast): The Year That Never Should Have Been: Reflections on the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Additional Sessions Including Tourism and Heritage Related Presentations:

  • (22-3) MONDAY 10:00-11:45 Channel 3 (live/simulcast): Reconnecting People, Tigers, Wolves, and Marching Bears with Homelands, Part I

  • (22-8) MONDAY 12:00-1:45 Channel 3 (live/simulcast): Reconnecting People, Tigers, Wolves, and Marching Bears with Homelands, Part II

  • (22-21) MONDAY 6:00-7:45 Channel 1 (live/simulcast): Ecopreneurship, Voluntourism, and Decolonization: An Anthropological Intervention, a COPAA Student Session

  • (24-9) WEDNESDAY 12:00-1:45 Channel 4 (live/simulcast): Integrating Human Rights and Environmental Security While Tackling the Challenges of Climate Change

  • (22-10) MONDAY 12:00-1:45 Channel 5 (live/simulcast): Pandemic, Hurricanes, and Heritage: Southeast Resilience Roundtable (Risk & Disaster TIG)

  • (22-18) MONDAY 4:00-5:45 Channel 3 (live/simulcast): Extending Citizenship and Engaging Diverse Disciplines and Perspectives to Enhance Resilience in Marine Social-Ecological Systems (Fisheries & Coastal Communities TIG)

  • (PR 24-10) WEDNESDAY 4:00-5:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Narratives of Displacement: Identity, Sense of Place, and Movement (Risk & Disaster TIG)

  • (PR 26-3) FRIDAY 10:00-11:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Applying the Anthropological Toolkit

  • (PR 26-8) FRIDAY 2:00-3:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Fallout from the Covid-19 Pandemic, Direct and Indirect (Higher Ed TIG)

  • (PR 27-1) SATURDAY 10:00-11:45 (Pre-recorded, on demand): Water Management and Fisheries (SAS)

 The “Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award”

The “Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award” was established to honor the legacy of Dr. Erve Chambers and recognize his contributions to the anthropology of tourism and heritage, as well as encourage new and innovative avenues of inquiry within the field through an annual student paper competition. The competition is currently on hold as the THTIG raises funds to build an endowment of $10,000 as a sustainable source of funding for the competition's annual cash award. So far, we have raised $2,575 through generous donations from SfAA members. Those interested in contributing to the endowment fund can make a donation online through the SfAA’s secure website at www.appliedanthro.org/donate and choosing "Chambers Tourism & Heritage Student Paper Award'' from the Funds drop down list. Any amount is helpful!  

THTIG Member Feature:

Collecting as Participation in the University and Communities Beyond

Jeanne Marie Stumpf-Carome, Kent State University

My travels are unique opportunities, thirty-three countries and most of the United States.  “Objects” and photos to use in my courses are my acquisitions.  Out of convenience, I turned to collecting textiles as cultural representations.  Textiles are easily packed and usually produced by women. 

My collections remain private to my home and for my courses and within the last three years for Anthropology Day at our Twinsburg campus.  However, around  2010, I began to experiment with broader ways of sharing.  My contacts with two museums, The Butler Museum of American Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, led to donations that were accepted. The donation process is not straightforward.  It has been a learning curve for me.  I knew that my mola donations to CMA were copied and used in the Education Department, but the announcement of an exhibition came as a surprise.

In December 2019, I was contacted  by Andrea Vazquez de Arthur, a curatorial research fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Andrea and Sue Bergh, Curator of Pre-Columbian and Native North American Art and Chair of the Art of Africa and the Americas were placing my donated molas https://www.clevelandart.org/art/collection/search?i=1&search=gift+of+jeanne+marie+stumpf as part of an upcoming exhibit. 

We met to discuss the details of my acquisition of the molas.  The exhibit “Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá” would open from November 22, 2020 to October 3, 2021. https://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/fashioning-identity-mola-textiles-panama  During my contacts with them I learned that my molas had been voted by the Trustees of the museum as part of the museum’s Permanent Collection.  So, ten years later, they would now be cared for in perpetuity by the museum.

Shared with my students, colleagues, and visitors to CMA and researchers using the Collections, and in mention of Kent State University in the Exhibit’s literature, the audience continues to grow.  The YouTube videos produced by the museum are available for anyone’s educational use.  The themes generated in conjunction with the exhibit encompass beyond “identity” to diversity topics such as gender and politics.  The exhibit literature is available in two languages, English and Spanish.

My collection activity in 1985-86, broadened its impact with my donation in 2010, and the world is now included in this sequence of events in 2020 and 2021.  I admit, I had no notion of these possibilities at the start.  However, I see now that my agency has “institutionalized” objects much as a fossil or archaeological find.  A personal outcome for me is the inspiration that I have many more objects to share and that the effort on my part has repercussions that I will never know.  This year the Western Reserve Historical Society accepted my contribution of my personal and professional documentation of The Flats Oxbow Association, a non-profit small business association organized to promote Cleveland’s Flats, but also to allow the business community  to control its physical and political environment beyond the “intrusion” of government agencies at the local, state, and federal level.  I imagine that anyone researching local history, small business in Cleveland, or non-profits will find these “finds” of interest.

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