Tourism translations

This article discusses Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and its utility for tourism studies. It argues that ANT can be an effective methodological approach for studying tourism development due to two reasons. First, its ability to deal with relational materiality of the social world, immanent in the concept of translation which highlights the net-workpractices of different actors; and second, its willingness to grasp multiple relational orderings, thus drawing diverse forms of tourism spatiality into analysis. The article begins by briefly sketching out the discourse on tourism and tourism development in relation to ANT. It then discusses the origins and characteristics of ANT. Special attention is paid to the concept of translation and how the approach provides an alternative focus for tourism research. The last part of the article briefly illustrates ANT as a methodological orientation through discussion of a tourism development project in Iceland.