Erik Cohen

• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This comparative study examines the complex, changing configurations of the relationships between the state and mediumship cults, under different regimes and histories in three Southeast Asian states and China. Spirit mediums are endowed with charismatic authority, owing to their access to the supernatural sphere, which stands in implicit tension w...

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 and 2020 has resulted in a worldwide pandemic characterized by severe pulmonary inflammation, effusions, and rapid respiratory compromise. The result of this pandemic is a large and increasing number of patients requiring endotracheal intubation and prolonged ventilator support. The rapid rise in endotracheal...

This article aims to explore an emergent sub-field in the study of tourism: the relationship between plants and tourism, which has been neglected in the literature. We discuss plants as a life form and confront the animal–plant divide, implicitly permeating tourism studies, with recent findings in biology and arguments in contemporary ontological a...

This review article starts with an examination of the shifting nature of tourism discourse from the 1960s up to the present, and then focuses on seven topics that we consider to be on the forefront of current developments in the sociological study of tourism: emotions, sensory experiences, materialities, gender, ethics, authentication and the philo...

This article introduces the concept of the 'publication regime' into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently...

This article has three interrelated aims: first, to examine the achievements of the study of the phenomenon of backpacker congregations as ‘enclaves’, and present the principal historical trajectory of those enclaves in terms of a sequence of transitions: from inception and enclavisation, to conventionalisation and eventual medialisation. Second, t...

There has been an inherent bias in studies of 'mobility regimes' toward the perspective of the authorities. This article suggests the concept of 'subversive mobilities' to offer a novel perspective on the construct of mobilities regimes, by stressing the ways such regimes are penetrated by adversaries through diverse routes and practices, despite t...

This book covers (i) theoretical perspectives on mass tourism (including ethics, political economy, sustainability and environmentalism); (ii) the historical context of mass tourism development, particularly in the UK; and (iii) the current challenges to mass tourism and its future trends. Case studies of modern mass tourism in China, Thailand, Bul...

Space tourism is widely considered to be the next step in the expansion of tourism. In this article, I focus on several paradoxes inherent in the long-range development of space travel and space tourism within the scope of the wider project of human expansion in the cosmos. I discuss the future of space tourism development from a critical sociologi...

The gruesome murder of two British tourists in September 2014 on “paradisiac” Koh Tao, a world-renowned diving site in Thailand, attracted widespread international attention. The authorities therefore urged the police to swiftly resolve a case threatening foreign tourism arrivals and the country’s image. Using Innes’ concept of police “investigatio...

The considerable amount of sociological and anthropological research on tourism in Thailand notwithstanding, its popular " floating markets " have received surprisingly little attention. This paper offers a fourfold sequential typology of the markets, highlighting the permutations which they have undergone in recent decades, as they were transforme...

This paper will examine the state of the study of ethnic tourism in mainland Southeast Asia in light of Wimmer’s and Brubaker’s paradigmatic approaches to ethnicity. The prevailing ‘ethnic regimes’ and their impact on ethnic tourism policies and development in four of the region’s states, China (whose Southwest area is customarily considered part o...

This article expands Simmel's classic concept of the “stranger” from humans to aliens as “cosmic strangers.” It deploys this concept to the study of cartoons depicting human–alien encounters on Earth and on other heavenly bodies. An analysis of a small database of such cartoons shows that their humorous point is primarily derived from an incongruit...

Zoos serve as recreation facilities and tourist attractions, but their primary roles also include education, research and conservation. Conservation in particular has emerged as a vital component of zoos, with the aim of diversifying the genetic base of many species that have been rendered threatened or endangered. However, conservation is often co...

This comparative study combines conceptual approaches of the mobilities paradigm and postcolonial theory, with the notion of identity politics, in the analysis of two “mobile cultures”: the gauchos of the South American pampas and the cowboys and Indians of the American West. It examines the permutations that the representations of these myths unde...

This paper addresses critiques of Eurocentrism in tourism studies, which have called for a ‘paradigm shift' in response to the rapid rise of tourism from emerging world regions. We clarify the concept of a paradigm shift, and examine arguments for a shift in tourism studies on epistemological, theoretical and empirical levels. We argue for a shift...

Commercialized surrogacy services, attracting an international clientele, used to be a big subterranean business in Thailand, but also made the country notorious as the “womb-of-Asia” (BBC News Asia 2015); the notoriety affected the country’s image, the preservation and defense of which is a crucial consideration in the national authorities’ polici...

The aim of this article is to re-examine the concept of community and of host and visitors’ interaction in studies of tourism in less developed, remote areas. The re-examination proceeds along two lines: first, a critique of the concept of ‘community’, stressing the importance of its de-structuration into networks and linkages for the examination o...

This article focuses on the consequences of the contemporary global crises on the global, and, more specifically, the Asian tourism system. The effects of the economic slow-down in Western countries on the rate of growth and the shape of the global tourism system are discussed. From a broader perspective, the possible implications for tourism of th...

Starting with the paradox that hunters claim to love the animal species they hunt, this article examines three inter-related issues: the ethics of hunting, the hunting experience and the commoditization of hunting in the contemporary world. I discuss two contrary philosophical approaches to hunting in general, and then turn to the specific problem...

In contrast to the more spectacular ‘land grabs’ for tourism development, the smaller-scale, progressive encroachment by tourist establishments into protected environments has attracted little attention in the literature. This article seeks to highlight the issue by a case study of the Thai authorities' crackdown on resorts and second homes encroac...

This article investigates the changing forms of human engagement with tigers—in terms of manner of interaction, perceptions, experiences, and activation of the senses—in a four-fold sequence of settings. It outlines the process by which the fascinating ‘Otherness’ of the tiger in the wilderness has been gradually attenuated, as he was mastered by h...

This department has been specifically created to include findings of special significance and problem areas of subtle nuances in tourism research. Insightful contributions presenting the state-of-the-art, preferably from the developing societies, will be appreciated. It will also encourage scholars and authors to think against the grain, probing th...

This article advocates the introduction of the discourse of ‘authenticity’ into the study of (non-travel) everyday leisure. It poses the question of whether everyday leisure offers opportunities for experiences of subjective, particularly existential, authenticity, resembling those found in tourism. Its wider aim is to open a window towards the uni...

Based on a longitudinal study of Pai in northwestern Thailand, this article explores some little-researched issues in backpacker studies, particularly the distribution of benefits from backpacker tourism, relations between backpackers and other tourists and the dynamics of backpacker enclaves. Though the claim that communities are the main benefici...

This article critically assesses some of the principal claims made regarding the scope, direction, composition, structure, significance and social consequences of medical tourism, epitomized in the prevailing “master narrative,” which perceives the emergence of new medical hubs in the non-Western world primarily from the perspective of its signific...

Spirit possession festivals are of particular interest for tourism studies, since they are not staged specifically for tourism, but appeal to tourists for their ‘exoticism.’ Two spirit possession festivals in Thailand, differing considerably in their respective scope and duration, the Chinese Vegetarian Festival in Phuket and the so-called ‘Tattoo...

A new paradigm for the study of disaster has shown that disasters, rather than caused by factors exogenous to the social system, are at least partially socially constructed or produced. This article seeks to induce the insights of contemporary disaster research into the study of specific issues on the interface of tourism and disaster. It proposes...

Tourism-related environmental politics in Thailand are examined in a case study of the controversy surrounding the shooting of the film version of ‘The Beach,’ a book on a backpacker commune on an undiscovered ‘island paradise’ by Alex Garland (1996). The article focuses on the paradox of the film-maker's insistence to transform Maya beach, a spect...

Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article, we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist...

The author's 1978 nine-day trek to hill tribe villages in the remote Mae Kham River Valley in the extreme northwest of Thailand is analysed, on the basis of excerpts from his diaries, in terms of Cresswell's mobilities approach. The trekking guide's choice of the route, and the representations, experiences and practices of the participants on the t...

Bullfighting is introduced into tourism studies as the iconic example of a class of human–animal relations, involving agonistic animal contests initiated by humans. The article focuses on the most popular form of bullfighting, the corrida, at which a matador, fighting on foot (rather than mounted) kills a bull in an arena in the presence of a mixed...

This article seeks to deflect the discourse on the built heritage from the conventional definitional and methodological issues to the more political question of who has the power or authority to authenticate it. Deploying Cohen and Cohen's distinction between two modes of authentication—hot and cool—it inquires which of these modes was dominant in...

Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article, we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist...

In late 2010, about 2000 human fetuses were discovered in the mortuary of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. This article examines the subsequent affair from two perspectives: the magico-religious and the socio-political. The first deals with the fetuses as a symbol: it examines the beliefs regarding fetuses in Buddhism and Thai folk religion, and the m...

Abstract The Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi province, western Thailand, is a popular tourist attraction, offering visitors a unique opportunity to interact closely with tigers. It presents itself as a “tiger sanctuary,” whose tigers have been tamed by nonviolent Buddhist methods. This claim has been disputed by visitors and animal welfare activists....

This article reviews the changing nature of contemporary tourism and sociological approaches to its study. We examine the broad social trends and specific historical events that recently affected tourism and discuss how the focus of sociological inquiry in tourism studies shifted from earlier discourses of authenticity and the tourist gaze to three...

This article reviews the principal developments in ethnic tourism in the Southeast Asian region in the last decade, consequent upon the processes of capitalistic penetration and the opening up of post- communist countries. Following an examination of the dynamics of the expansion of the tourist system at the regional level, several major institutio...

Seeking to shift the discussion of the concept of authenticity in tourism scholarship from the dominant concern with tourist experiences to the more sociological problem of the processes of authentication of tourist attractions, we conceptualize two analytically distinct, but practically often intersecting, modes of authentication of attractions, “...

The spilling of blood in modern political protest is an exceptional event. This article discusses the deployment of blood as a means of struggle by the members of an extra-parliamentary movement, known as the ‘red shirts’, in March 2010, in the course of their prolonged attempt to topple the government of the Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva....

Western “modern primitivists” and spirit mediums at the Vegetarian Festival in southern Thailand are the leading practitioners of body piercing in the contemporary world. This comparative study finds that they share a similar marginal social background and aspirations for individual distinction through body piercing, but differ radically in the cul...

The Krabi Provincial Administrative Organization, in co-operation with the Krabi provincial government (southern Thailand), has since 2006 organized a conjoint street procession of the Chinese shrines in the province, in the course of their Vegetarian Festival, to a prayer at the Krabi City Pillar. Two heretofore unrelated rituals, one a popular Ch...

Studies of tourist enclaves have noticed their boundedness, but paid little attention to the theoretical significance of the strictness of their boundaries for their internal dynamics. This issue constitutes the point of departure of our study of a Middle Eastern Muslim tourist enclave in an international tourist zone in Bangkok, which plays a doub...

In Thailand spirit houses are often established at places of fatal accidents, but these are generally anonymous. Personalized roadside memorials for accident victims are rare. This article analyses three roadside memorials, located on main roads in northeastern Thailand, in a comparative framework. Like in the contemporary West, such memorials comm...

This chapter presents a general outline of the emergence, expansion, scope, and structure of medical travel and then discusses some of the principal issues in the relationship of medical travel and QOL: the advantages of medical travel for the patients’ QOL, the kinds of treatments sought, the manner of their provision in medical establishments abr...

This paper takes a step in the fledgling field of the study of the interface of tourism and humor: it proposes a conceptual approach to the study of visual cartoons, and applies it to an analysis of a collection of about 100 cartoons, from the First International Tourism Cartoon Competition (2010), a cooperative enterprise of the Anadolu University...

The devastation left behind after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in the coastal areas of South and Southeast Asia led to numerous attempts at “land grab”, the displacement by powerful individuals and authorities of the weaker groups of local inhabitants from their land, in order to re-allocate it to tourism development. Such manifestations of “disas...

The various ‘quests for meaning’of the ‘decentralized’contemporary Western youths are interpreted as so many attempts to ‘recenter the world’around new ‘elective centers’. Rather than being centers of the contemporary world into which the individual is born, such centers are located outside it, and freely chosen by the seekers. Four such elective c...

Dinosaurs are extinct, but enjoy a great popularity in contemporary popular culture, as fierce monsters or amiable “dinos.” Various dinosaur sites around the world are popular tourist attractions. While tourists' engagement with living animals has attracted growing attention in tourism studies, “dinosaur tourism” has been little investigated. The a...

In May 2009, during a period of rising political polarization in Thailand, a cub was unexpectedly born in Chiang Mai's Zoo to a pair of Chinese pandas. The authorities used the occasion to boost the crisis-ridden tourism to the northern Thai city, instigating an unprecedented national craze around the tiny cub, and promoting a massive pilgrimage of...

Although tourism crises have received increased attention in recent years, there has been a lack of research into coinciding crises and their effects on tourism. Correspondingly, there has been little theoretical work done on their nature, interaction and dynamics. In this article, we seek to redress this, and extend the study of tourism crises by...

Tourism has a playful side, and its apparent lack of seriousness has frequently been the butt of irony, derision, and satire, even by social scientists. Since MacCannell's attack on Boorstin's critique of tourism, social scientists have taken tourism seriously. An ironic critique of tourism became unfashionable. However, tourists are still frequent...

This paper compares two very different tourism crises: the 2004 tsunami on the Andaman coast of southern Thailand and the occupation of the Bangkok airports in the course of Anti-government protests in 2008. The paper focuses on the significance of the different sources of these crises for their distinctive dynamics: exogenous or endogenous to the...

A conceptual framework for the classification of the totality of settings of tourists' engagement with animals/based of the degree to which they are “framed,” is proposed. Four types of settings are distinguished, ranging from those offering the experience of Otherness of wild animals, to those offering entertainment by humanized animals. This fram...

The topic of death of tourists on their trip has not been treated in tourism studies. This article departs from the prevailing approach to death in contemporary thanatological studies and focuses upon the specific issue involved in tourist death. It conceives the common characteristics of tourist deaths and raises some basic sociological questions...

This case study of the fatal shooting of a backpacker by a policeman in the otherwise peaceful town of Pai in northern Thailand aims to show that, though incidental, it was not just a random occurrence. Rather, the event can be interpreted in terms of wider social structural processes and personal agency. The growing tension between the police and...

Tourism, a domain of considerable importance in the contemporary world, has long been overlooked by social scientists, but has recently become a field attracting a growing body of research. In sociology, the relation between tourism and modernity at first constituted the issue of principal interest, the discourse focusing on the extent to which mod...

A linear temporal model has been underlying the pretsunami image of the tourist region along the Thai coast of the Andaman Sea, according to which a “pristine tourist paradise” turns, under the onslaught of tourism, irredeemably into “paradise lost.” The region suffered catastrophic destruction in the tsunami disaster of December 26, 2004. The arti...

Fireballs, allegedly shot from the Mekong River in northwestern Thailand by a mythical serpent known as Naga, recently became the focus of a major festival that attracts many (mainly domestic) tourist pilgrims. The popularity of the phenomenon engendered public controversy over the alleged origins of the fireballs. According to the master narrative...

This article extends the study of postcards, heretofore limited to the critical examination of photo postcards representing people and sites at destinations, to Christmas cards from Thailand, depicting the legendary figure of Santa Claus. While such cards appear to be unrelated to tourism, in this study an unexpected link is found: Santa’s figure b...

Talmon's concept of “totalitarian democracy” is generalized, to make it applicable to the variety of counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, we expanded Talmon's concept of political liberty into a more general desire for “liberation,” offered in different forms by these movements. Accordingly, the movements are classified...

Examines the backpacking trip usually taken by Israeli youth following military service. In the period after their military service, Jewish Israeli youth customarily embark on a unique touristic practice: the backpacking trip. Combining sociological, anthropological, and psychological research-based on innovative fieldwork conducted with Israeli ba...

FOREWORD The present volume was published in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Tourism Faculty at the Academy of Physical Education in Kraków. In the past decade tourism has been developing extensively. Some scientists have already named this period “the global touristification phase.” It is unlikely that this process will slow down in the...

The common perception of food as a mere attraction in tourism is challenged by stressing the complications and impediments experienced by tourists in the local culinary sphere in unfamiliar destinations, even when attracted to the local cuisine. Hygiene standards, health considerations, communication gaps, and the limited knowledge of tourists conc...

In this article we argue that ‘Border Tourism’ – intensive patterns of tourist visitation between adjoining countries – requires more systematic attention by scholars as an important sociological, anthropological and spatial phenomenon. Border Tourism and the often marginal spaces where it emerges exhibit some distinctive features: notably the juxt...

Reviews the body of sociological and anthropological literature on tourism. Following an historical survey of the field, the principal concepts and approaches to the study of tourism are surveyed. The main body of the paper discusses the four principal issue areas: 1) the tourist - motivations, attitudes, reactions, and roles; 2) the relations and...

Backpacking, a relatively little studied form of tourism, is a rapidly expanding phenomenon. This article follows the transition from the tramp to the drifter, and from the latter to the contemporary backpacker, and points to the diversity within this general category of tourists. The discrepancy between the ideal and the common practice of backpac...

Sustainability became a leading concept in tourism development practice and research, but should be submitted to a critical examination in the context of wider theoretical and practical concerns. Three issues are considered in this paper: the possible misuse of the concept of sustainability in advertisement and as a means of legitimising takeover o...

Tourism raises complex ecological, social and cultural issues, in part because its development, particularly in third world destinations, faces a fundamental paradox. Their initial attractiveness to foreign tourists is based on an inventory of what 1 call (Cohen, 1995) natural attractions - pre-existing environmental, cultural and historical sites...