WHO'S WHO?

We are a group of CADES students who come from six different regions of the world* and hold diverse academic and professional backgrounds as well as a wide range of personal interests. For starters, we have different reasons for studying anthropology and development and we have different reasons for coming to Leuven to study it. For some of us, Belgium is home, but for others, it is not just the second country to live in, but the third, or the fourth country which we have called home. Our different experiences have been to our advantage by creating a multiplicity of gazes and perspectives with which we view the most basic interactions of daily lives. We perceive the ordinary differently. Everything from buildings and sceneries to the people, sounds and smells that came with our experiences were processed by us in a range of ways leading to different and sometimes opposite outlooks. Our differences eventually became a valuable tool for us to deepen our observations and understandings of the interactions we experienced and observed. These different opinions added a challenging complexity to our research but ultimately helped us to gain a wider and more holistic educational experience.

Apart from being tourists ourselves or residents of countries popular with tourists, our knowledge of the subject was rather limited. In particular, our knowledge of the anthropology of tourism was non-existent. While we were curious as to how social and cultural interactions unfold in the context of tourism and in those unique touristic spaces, we struggled with how to begin approaching this topic. From which concept should we consider tourism and the problems that come with mass tourism in particular? Whose perspectives should we consider? Whose actions should we observe and research? Our process took us from concepts of touristification and disneyfication of places to the ways places adapt and change in the form of gentrification. We considered the phenomenon of tourism from the visitors' eyes through their imaginaries but also from the residents' perspectives. This latter viewpoint became our main research focus as we shifted the idea and scope of imaginaries from the tourists to the residents themselves. From here, we began to delve deeper into what the residents themselves envisioned for Amsterdam and to consider what exactly is bothering them, what is inconveniencing their living experience and what they are doing about it thanks to our stakeholders. Our research took us from libraries to Amsterdam itself (via a very tiring journey) where we observed the city's dynamics, conducted interviews and experienced tourism's interactions from the perspective of Amsterdam as a residential city.

Once in Amsterdam, we followed the noise of tourists, mapped key locations and began understanding Amsterdam's neighbourhoods and boundaries. From this, we gained familiarity with the character of Amsterdam as seen and experienced by both sides. We listened to the outcry of residents living in Amsterdam and made frequent comparisons with other residents' movements in popular tourist destinations such as Venice and Barcelona. We read their action-plans and analysed their strategies.

(*) Flanders, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, East Asia, the Middle East and Central Africa.

We kicked off our research by looking through news media coverages on mass tourism to navigate issues on the surface, and we read literatures of anthropology and tourism studies at the same time to see what are being studied in the field. With tourism studies, we were able to equip ourselves with an anthropological perspective which enriched our knowledge in various concepts and impact. Online news media was also useful in that it offered recent phenomena regarding globally increasing tourism and its impact on human settlement. In addition, it provided practical information such as location, dates, and most importantly names of people involved in the issues. With the practical information we got from various sources, we started reaching out to involved people to ask questions, conduct interviews, and acquire information in general. Among them, we got into contact with people engaged in policy-making and academics, such as Hiske de Ridder who is communication specialist at Amsterdam City Government, Professor Jacques Vork and Professor Antonio-Miguel Nogués-Pedregal who are researching tourism and its impact, to name a few. They have been without a doubt a great help in the research process of our group whose previous experience in tourism studies was insubstantial.

We looked at how residents in the canal district perceive the changes induced by mass tourism in the region. Ideally, we hoped to follow residents through their daily doings. Given the limited time, however, we chose the resident associations as our stakeholders and observed how they perceive the liveability of canal districts and how they deal with the change. We conducted interviews and attended meetings where they expressed their sentiments and discussed the way forward. For further understanding, we also attended an EU conference on tourism and tried to place their challenge on the regional/global, socio-economic, and socio-political context.

In December, ahead of our mid-term presentation and fieldwork trips to Amsterdam, we sat together and framed a research plan that contains clearer research question. It took us substantial amount of time to come up with one right research question as it has been just over a month since the project initiated and we were still overwhelmed by group work. Once we received feedbacks from the mid-term presentation coupled with advices from our mentor, our direction towards our question became much clearer than before. Our main struggle after we received feedbacks was about which concepts should be applied to the fieldwork, which were later narrowed down for clearer presentation of the issues.

Our fieldwork did not come without challenges. Our first consideration for research site was Bruges in Belgium. Due to our time and budget constraints, Bruges was a good candidate as it satisfied both tourism subject and the proximity. Following that consideration, we tried to find the cases of mass tourism and issues that ensue. However, finding something we can work on in Bruges was especially challenging as there weren’t many mass tourism issues we can grasp and break down into pieces so that it matches our initial topic of interest. Eventually, we moved on to Amsterdam where the voices of discontent residents are already being heard. Moving back and forth between Leuven and Amsterdam for research proved difficult as we expected in terms of time management and physical distance from our stakeholder. Nevertheless, we found a case to work on which was most challenging part in the beginning and we were able to finally get to work.

That being said, more difficulties followed during our research. Since we agreed on the abstract version of the research topic, we were left with the most important decision: choosing a stakeholder. Knowing that, we had to be careful about where the priorities should be given in choosing a stakeholder. One of the priorities were the availability. If we were to follow them in a rather short period of time, they had to be available for us to invite ourselves for observations and interviews. We chose our stakeholder cautiously with this factor in mind. In the midst of our research, however, we found ourselves lost in touch with our stakeholder as they were increasingly busy with their own work towards their deadline. Emails were sent and resent as we were worried about losing our stakeholder in the middle of research. We decided to go to Amsterdam and attend the meeting that they were present at, and planned another field trip in the meantime so that we maintain our rhythm.

Overall, it has been a firsthand and hands-on experiencing of the distinctiveness of the anthropological perspective when trying to understand social phenomena. It made more clear the benefits of the particularistic vocation of Anthropology versus generalist studies and their essentializations. Meeting actors, trying to understand the histories, backgrounds, feelings, attitudes of our stakeholder against a backdrop of pre-existing theories, concepts and descriptions of globalized capitalism was the exercise in zooming-in and out as proposed by (and seen in) ethnographies, in identifying social science concepts in the practices and phenomena of everyday life and in teasing out broader explanatory meaning from the observation of such practices and phenomena.

Reinventing the wheel was an amusing if very instructive experience in terms of epistemological awareness (knowing what and how one knows or doesn’t). Yet, encountering the surmised concepts in the literature -and whole new bodies of literature (e.g. the anthropology of place and space) was a gratifying as ‘coming up’ with them.