Ethnologia Europaea

The article examines how silence materialises and is performed in residential care homes for the elderly, and how these practices are intertwined with the cultural narrative of old age in Finnish society. The data consisting of ethnographic fieldwork in two care units shows that silence is involved in many aspects of the residents’ lives. Though these practices of silence do not mean the absence of the residents’ agency, here they both expose and construct stereotypical conceptions regarding old age and concretely narrows the experiences of old people. By considering the décor of care units and interactions, the researcher identifies silence as a central feature of doing old age. It is only partly produced by the elderly themselves, and it carries both negative and positive meanings.

This special issue devotes comparative and ethnographic attention to the topic of the tour guide as cultural mediator. Based on studies in a panoply of countries (UK, Israel, Peru, Cuba, La Réunion, Germany) and sites (museums, pilgrimages, casual street guiding, mountain treks, folkloric displays), we demonstrate how various settings, power relations, and tourist gazes enable or constrain intercultural guiding performances. Tour guides embody a wide range of roles, cultures and positions on the tourism stage. Their presentation of “their” culture to others carries a certain authority and implicates them in positions towards aspects of their own culture and those of the tourists that they may come to acknowledge, appreciate or resist over time. Thus, approaching tour guides as cultural mediators offers new insights into the anthropology of tourism and cultural contact as a whole.

To better conceptualize the tourism encounter, scholars have highlighted the importance of mediators, notably tourist guides, in framing visitors’ experiences of a destination, encouraging to move beyond “hosts and guests”, “tourists and locals” binaries. The study of informal touristic Encounters in Cuba helps problematize the identification of the tourist guide, highlighting the stakes of such categorization in a context of tightly regulated, state-led tourism development. Favouring a framing of tourist-Cuban interactions as genuine expressions of intimacy that escape the worker– customer binary, these encounters enact valued forms of informality, immediacy and authenticity. Their promise is to provide a “unique” glimpse into the “real” Cuba and the lives of “ordinary” Cubans, and to generate alternative possibilities for knowing and relating with the destination and its people.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, the article explores how tour guides transform the banalities of local everyday life into deeply moving tourist stories, and by that means position themselves as social characters within a wider tourism cosmology. At times they become actual extensions of the projected magical qualities of the destinations, at times enlightened mediators of a post-traditional condition in which a common global humanity melts into a perpetual movement of creolisation.

The performances of the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims by Jewish-Israeli immigrant guides are an expression of belonging to place and history. Through auto-ethnography of my Guiding performance and career path interviews with other immigrant guides, I illustrate how scriptural knowledge, mastery of Hebrew, and the invention of “biblical” rites of hospitality mediate between Christian pilgrims and the land, as well as between Christians and Jews. These performances not only make pilgrims co-producers of the tour; they also assert guides’ claims to nativity. I then compare the performances of such guides with Alaskan cruise guides. I show how the Submission or resistance to the commodifying tourist gaze varies under different gazes, different power conditions, and given other “native” practices of asserting identity and belonging.

The contact zone between groups of Christian pilgrims touring the Holy Land and the Jewish-Israeli tour guides leading these groups can become an area of intercultural intimacy, respect and mutuality, based on a form of shared understanding, despite the cultural differences. Thus, after making sense of the piecemeal and practical notion of “shared understanding” that develops in the day-to-day interaction between the guide and the pilgrims, three practical mediation techniques that are commonly used by guides, are identified through observations and interviews with guides regarding their practical handling of cross-cultural and ethical difficulties. These techniques, channeled into guiding practices, enable guides to engage other religions while fostering Relations of intimacy.

In Peru, in the tourist village of Chinchero located in the Machu Picchu region, tourism is often organized through guided excursions. This article deals with the complex relationships that urban male guides maintain with the local, often Quechua-speaking, women of Chinchero. These women have opened workshops where they offer tourists demonstrations of their weaving art as well as weavings to purchase in an atmosphere created to simulate the Andean home. To a large extent, the women depend on male guides to bring tourists to their workshops, and pay them commissions. Based on frequent field visits, informal conversations, interviews, participation and a survey, the study demonstrates how gender and ethnic inequalities are replicated through interactions between weavers and guides.

Tour guides in home museums perform a special mediating role: they connect past and present through stories that mark both proximity and distance from them. This paper is based on ethnographic research in four home museums in Germany, those of Konrad Adenauer, Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, Albert Einstein, and Kaethe Kollwitz. I analyze the performance of guides quoting the words, either written or allegedly spoken, of home museums’ protagonists. I claim that the quotes work along two axes coordinated according to the relative differentiation of hierarchical distance and temporal displacement. The guides navigate the space created by these axes and negotiate the meaning of histories through the perspective of home life. The axes help us understand both guides’ and visitors’ work and interpretation.

This article examines heritage-making first-hand through the techniques of the imagination visiting Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham – the summer house and Gothic castle of Horace Walpole. Walpole developed Strawberry Hill as an architectural experiment in visitor emotions. In a now seemingly empty historic house, Walpole’s sleights of hand are being carefully and authentically conserved to fulfil the imaginations and expectations of the tourist as though a tour guide from beyond the grave. A detailed exploration of this staged encounter in the Tribune Room during a temporary exhibition highlights the workings of the tourist imaginary and the techniques and technologies of the visit – in particular the use of a 1774 guidebook as a resource for self-guided tourists – in conservation work, and the virtual development of the house as an award-winning heritage destination.

CONCLUSION

AN EMERGENT PERFORMANCE PARADIGM IN GUIDING STUDIES