collected over the years. (photo BA)
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Valene Smith, Anthropology, with two of the hundreds of artifacts she has
collected over the years. (photo BA) |
One path is her work as senior editor of a scholarly book series on international tourism. An avid traveler, she displays a world map covered with pins indicating some of her travels. The map is a mass of pins,with no land mass untouched.
In 1951, she traveled to Alaska as a tourist and began a long relationship with the Inuit. When she went again in 1963, she was struck by the impact tourism was making on the culture. Taking her excitement to her graduate committee, she proposed to study tourism, but was told to pursue a more traditional ethnographic study for her dissertation. She returned to Kotzebue, Alaska, for several seasons.
One day, a young Inuit, John Schaeffer, came looking for his mother, who was visiting Smith. As they were talking, he told Smith, "You know more about us than we know about ourselves." Years later, in 1976, Schaeffer invited Smith to run a workshop sponsored by NANA, the Northwest Arctic Native Association. NANA brought the eighty-five Inuits—aged sixty-five or older—to a hotel for two weeks to discuss the old ways. Schaeffer told Smith, "They're yours. Get what you can from them." She recalled, "I know of no other time in the world when an anthropologist has been invited by the native people to come and study with them in such large numbers. It was a unique opportunity, and I was so fortunate. I was stunned, flabbergasted."
The workshop led to additional work by several younger Inuits. From this work "has come this tremendous sense of awareness," said Smith. "They now know more about themselves than I do and that's much better.... If we can somehow involve people in self-study for their own benefit and for the benefit of their descendents, that would be the ultimate goal."
In 1973, Smith pursued her interest in tourism by placing a notice in the American Anthropological Association newsletter asking if anyone shared that interest. She and the twenty-eight people who replied held a symposium at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Mexico City in 1974. At the end of the day, the participants asked Smith to edit a book on the material discussed. That volume, Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, is today considered a classic in the field of international tourism.
International tourism raises land values and lures youth to cash jobs. Agriculture is often neglected, leading to the importation of prohibitively costly food. Fragile environments, such as Antarctica, are opened to tourists. Smith pointed out that it takes fifty years to build one inch of tundra, and only several hundred tourists in boots to quickly destroy it.
There are some voices for tradition, "saying heritage is a commodity that can be sold," said Smith, citing the proliferation of museums. In the Arctic, the Museum of the North combines Inuit history with folklore shows. "They have commodified culture and they're selling culture," Smith said.
This has led to renewed interest in basket making, carving, and working with skins. The language, which was dying, is now taught in schools, "so heritage has been preserved. I say that tourism is a major factor in this renaissance," said Smith.
Smith believes Helen Keller's statement, "The world is moved along not by the mighty shoves of a few, but the tiny pushes of each individual."
Smith's second path is community service. She worked on the development of the Chico Museum for ten years and plans to continue to be of service to Chico.
Her third path is organizing her historic slides and photos to be donated to an archive developed by the Society of Women Geographers. For example, Smith led a tour to Nepal in 1957, before it became the destination of international trekkers. At that time there were no hotels in Kathmandu, so they stayed at an orphanage. The only three cars in the city were owned by King Mahendra, who loaned the tour party his cars and drivers.
Smith quoted St. Augustine, "The world is a book. She who stays home reads only one page," and added, "My book has a lot of pages." Valene Smith will be adding pages to that book for years to come.
BA