Tourism Studies and the Lost Mandates of Knowing: Matters of Epistemology for the Inscriptive/Projective Industry

Abstract

This chapter tracks its companion chapter on ‘ontology’ by scrutinising epistemological concerns in advanced qualitative research (or rather in critico-interpretive inquiry) in Tourism Studies in Asia. It labels epistemology as the metaphysical endeavour to inspect the manner by which (within a society or institution) knowledge is procured, i.e. how it is won, secured, and turned into ‘truth’. In it, tourism is adjudged to be an involved political arena where many different actors think variously about the cultural/social/environmental/psychic/other complexities of travel and respond differently to vogue representations of space and place. To deal with these contested outlooks on the inscribed drawcards/projected narratives of tourism – and map the epistemological fault lines of embedded populations and interest groups – the chapter calls for new imagination in the metaphysics of knowing. In demanding regular engagement with ‘open’ and ‘critical’ inquiry, it particularly advocates experimentation with transdisciplinary and postdisciplinary approaches to capture ‘old Asian mandates of knowing’ (often lost under the weight of Western/Eurocentric certitudes in the marketplace of tourism or in the Tourism Studies academy) but also to corral emergent/hybridised/transitional forms of ‘new Asian knowing’, today. In this light, the work of Indian-born cultural theorist Homi Bhabha is harnessed to help those who operate within tourism (or who research the felt/the said/the known per tourism) in the involved double hermeneutics of truth-making, viz. to not only know how a society knows things but how a researcher herself/himself reflexively knows that.