Title:Imagined Commodities: The Global Business of National Destination Marketing
Speaker: Dr. Tim Rosenkranz (Department of Anthropology, CUHK)
Date: 27 November 2020
Time: 1:00-2:30 pm
Zoom Meeting Info
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/98394765836
Meeting ID: 983 9476 5836
Passcode: 226351
Abstract:
Before the Corona Pandemic, tourism was one of the fastest growing global industries and most nation-states are engaged in an intensifying global competition to attract the international tourists as resource for economic development. National culture in this competition is treated as an economic asset. While the commodification of national rituals, events, and customs into a destination for tourist consumption becomes apparent, the nation as an actual commodity of global markets remains illusive. Tourists obviously never buy the nation itself. Yet, without commodity there is no commodification. I therefore argue that the nation in global market commodification emerges as an imagined commodity. Based on 16 months of field research in India and the USA, this global ethnography of national destination marketing shows how various actors such as marketing professionals, travel journalists, or tour operators co-produce the nation as a destination for the imagination of potential tourists. The nation here is transformed into a commodity not because it can be bought or sold, but because the nation becomes imagined through various economic evaluations, as an object of investment, and within localized hierarchies of supply and demand. This talk explores this relation between the processes of national imagination as commodification.
Bio:
Dr. Rosenkranz is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at CUHK focusing on the ethnographic study of organizations, professionals, and markets. His current research examines how the processes of destination marketing constitute the commodification of the nation in global markets of tourism, and how economic crisis and technological innovation transform the relations of production and employment in freelance journalism. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation of the USA. He holds a PhD in Sociology from The New School for Social Research (New York) and a MA in Political Science from the Georg-August-University Goettingen (Germany).