This paper traces of construction of the notion of an “Arab tourist” and its shifting definition from the 1920s through the mid-1970s. Using Lebanon as both framing lens and tourist destination, this paper shows how hoteliers, tour operators, guidebook writers, journalists, and ‘average’ citizens identified different “tourist publics”, and explores the assumptions that underwrote how those groups were defined as leisure consumers and producers, and to what end. In large part, the leisure desires, attributes, and backgrounds of the constructed ‘Arab tourist’ occurred alongside the exhibition, defining, and marketing of the political territory of “Lebanon”. Who was delineated as an “Arab” tourist, and how did this person differ from other categories to emerge including “non-Lebanese,” “Syrian,” and “foreign”? This paper thus reveals the central role that tourism, leisure mobility, and the building of national economies, would play in defining those categories over the middle decades of the twentieth century. What currency does Lebanon’s famous nomenclature as “the Paris of the Middle East” have, in this historical light? This paper ultimately attempts to use tourism as a lens to analyze densely nested structures of power and their impact on social and cultural organization. It employs guidebooks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tourist brochures and pamphlets, the press, oral history narratives, and official archival records of the French mandate and Lebanese republic.

With tourism as the primary vehicle by which individuals experience foreign peoples and places, activists and scholars alike have recognized the importance of tourism as a mechanism to transmit nationalist sentiments, provoke moral outrage, and mobilize international networks for social change. Though both Israelis and Palestinians employ tourism to advance their political interests, the Israeli state maintains near total control over the tourism industry, which in turn prevents foreign tourists from accessing Palestinian perspectives on the conflict. In response, Palestinian organizations along with critical Israeli/Jewish-led groups have attempted to inform foreign visitors of Palestinian narratives through offering alternative tours to the Occupied West Bank (OWB). A subset of these alternative tours includes programs that target non-Israeli Jews who arrive in the country through well-known, traditional tours such as Birthright. This project investigates these alternative tours and their effects using ethnographic methods, participant observation, and in-depth, longitudinal interviews with tour participants. Although there is a growing body of research on both Zionist tours to Israel and alternative tourism in Palestine, this study fills a gap in the literature, as few scholars have analyzed the intersection of these two tourism industries. Through focusing on this contradictory, and therefore revealing point of collision, this project analyzes the role of tourism in cultivating transnational allegiances, and the power of tourism to shift political thinking and action on Palestine in the American-Jewish community.

Since the 1980’s, a policy of renovating and rebuilding Islamic heritage has been developed in Jordan. Around 50 holy sites have been turned into enormous Islamic complexes, deeply marking the national territory. Initially conceived as places of worship for local communities, these sites have been turned into touristic hubs. In addition, Jordanian representatives have taken part in the first international conferences about Islamic tourism in order to promote those new touristic destinations and the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have started to promote this Islamic heritage through Internet websites, brochures and publications. Since then, the national holy sites are included in international Islamic itineraries, usually for pilgrims travelling for the hajj or umra. Thus, it is as part of the Muslim Holy Land, located between the Holy sites of Jerusalem and Mekka, that Jordan is promoted as a destination for Islamic tourists. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the new representation of the Jordanian territory that has emerged at the national and international levels. My talk will focus on the itineraries followed by the Islamic tourists in Jordan in order to understand how the former were elaborated by the Ministry of Tourism and tourism agencies and what representation of the national territory they induce. Based on the analysis of interviews, my presentation aims to understand how tourists themselves perceive Jordan as an Islamic destination and if they have some specific expectations in terms of accommodation, according to «halal» criteria. By underlying the progressive inclusion of Jordan within a regional Islamic territorial unit, I will show how the attendance of those sites has gradually changed, involving more and more international tourists and pilgrims. This process has led to the emergence of local resistance movements, as the inhabitants are sometimes opposed to the visit of the sites by new religious groups or wish to symbolically reinvest these places of worship.

The January 25 Revolution offered to the world a very different picture of Egypt, far from the usual idyllic travel postcards. More than that, it dramatically affected tourism, a strategic sector of the Egyptian economy. In 2010, 14.7 million foreigners visited the country and generated 12.5 billion dollars of revenue. In 2011, the number of visitors to Egypt dropped to 9.8 million—of which 7 million were European nationals and the hotel occupancy rate decreased by 80 to 90 percent in cultural tourism sites located in the Nile Valley. In 2014 and 2015, tourism activities showed a slight recovery, but the killing of Mexican tourists in the Western desert (September 2015), and the Russian plane crash in Sinai (October 2015) definitely ruined, both the image of Egypt on the international market, and the tourism sector. However, the Egyptian tourism sector demonstrated in the past a strong capacity of resilience to crisis. In the 1990’s, and especially after the Luxor attack in 1997, the sector managed to recover in very few months. In the 2000’s, Egypt was also hit by several terrorist attacks, without harming the sector. However, it seems that the sector is nowadays structurally affected, and the crisis factors cannot be only attributed to the political instability, the regional situation and dramatic events, but also to the consequences of a tourism development policy that the Egyptian government has pursued for the last 20 years. In two decades, international tourism in Egypt shifted from incentive heritage/cultural practices to leisure and seaside mass activities. Egypt has abandoned its “comparative advantage” (heritage sites) on the global market, to a more standard offer adjusted to the international demand, in accordance with a neo-liberal vision supported by international agencies. Moreover, the Egyptian strategy shifted from a qualitative to a quantitative postulate: offering more infrastructures along the coast would attract more tourists and more hard-currency revenue. In the meantime, heritage sites have been neglected, if not forgotten. Such a strategy did work for a while, but not anymore. Here we would like to discuss the political economy of Heritage tourism in Egypt in the last two decades and the consequence of neo-liberal choices on the sector, and its primary resources, i.e. heritage, natural and cultural sites management), as a structural factor of explanation to the current crisis.

In the six years since the January 25th Revolution, Egypt has fallen on hard times, wracked by ongoing state instability and the consequent unraveling of its economy. Against the backdrop of this political and economic turmoil, however, Cairo has emerged as an object of sustained local, national, and international attention–an unexpected canvas onto which a range of actors have painted their social and political aspirations for the country’s future. This attention has manifested itself in myriad ways, but it is most visible in the numerous sociospatial interventions that have recently proliferated across the capital–a staggering array of state and non-state sponsored activities focused on the city and its residents. Predictably, heritage-making projects have been central to such initiatives–from traditional conservation work to restore architecturally significant buildings to education programs designed to cultivate cultural heritage awareness among Egyptian youth. These interventions have been dizzying in both scale and scope, suggesting in the aggregate that the entire urban landscape is being reclaimed and reconstituted. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cairo from 2014-2016, my paper narrows in on such efforts in the area of “Historic Cairo.” This neighborhood, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has long been the object of state and international attention due to its rich architectural heritage; however, since 2011, it has witnessed a surge of non-state sponsored activity by local organizations. My paper explores the work of one such group involved in this area: Megawra, an Egyptian NGO that was conceived just as the January 25th Revolution was unfolding. Headed by a well-known conservationist, the organization has been focused on cultural heritage management and urban revitalization in the vicinity of Shari’a al-Khalifa, a secluded, residential street with several important historic structures. My paper queries how and why the Khalifa neighborhood and its architectural heritage were mobilized by Megawra–and what they represent to the organization at both the practical and the symbolic levels. In addition though, I explore the consequences of their interventions for local residents and community members–the professed beneficiaries of the NGO’s work. Through an analysis of Megawra’s activities, I engage the broader question of how and why, in a moment of protracted political turmoil, local actors have been turning to specific urban spaces and historicized structures to articulate changing sociopolitical values and ideas.