Abstract
In this article I discuss a revelatory moment that occurred in arguably the 15 slowest minutes of my ethnographic fieldwork on the cultural meeting between Indigenous people and tourists in Northern Australia. The challenge of doing multi-sited ethnography in tourism is to remain aware of our (tacit) inclination to privilege the subaltern perspective while establishing meaningful contacts with tourists, due to their inherently transient nature. Indeed, while I had set out with the deliberate aim to move away from the common scholarly (and popular) disdain for tourists, I realized during those 15 minutes that hitherto I had taken tourists seriously but had not been able to see beyond the part-personhood they are habitually granted. Through recognizing and analytically (re-)inserting the imperative influence of not only tourists’ bodily engagement but my own affective relations as a researcher as well, I was able to develop multiple and mobile empathies necessary for conducting research across cultural boundaries.
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