Nelson Graburn, the “academic serendipity” of a great researcher
Maria Gravari-Barbas[1]
IREST, EIREST, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Professor Graburn’s scientific and academic work is immense, and it is difficult to give more than a summary of a career that spanned over sixty years – Prof. Graburn was continuously active even after his retirement and throughout the world: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania...
Nelson Graburn played a pivotal role in IAST[2]. He joined the Academy early and participated enthusiastically—and vocally to the Academy meetings! He will be remembered for his passionate engagement, standing to share his thoughts, offering arguments and counterarguments, and always striving to ‘understand.’
What most characterised Nelson was his ability to create connections, to bring people, cultures and places together. This text modestly emphasizes the role that Nelson Graburn played uninterruptedly in academic relations between the United States and France from the 1980s until his death. It is written from a personal perspective, as it is marked not only by a great admiration for what Nelson represents in tourism studies, but also by a sincere friendship[3].
A prolific career
Nelson Graburn was born in England in 1936. After his studies in King's School, Canterbury (1950-55) he enrolled Clare College, Cambridge, where he obtained in 1958, with Distinction, his B.Sc. Honors in Natural Sciences and Social Anthropology. He pursued his studies in McGill University, Montreal (1958-60) (Samuel Lapitski Fellow, McGill-Carnegie Arctic Fellowship, Canada Council Fellowship), where he obtained a M.A., in Anthropology. He obtained his PHD studies in Anthropology at the University of Chicago (1960-63).
In 1964 he becomes Assistant Professor of Anthropology, in 1970 Associate Professor of Anthropology, and in 1976 Full Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Nelson Graburn has spent more the 60 years in UC Berkeley.
From 1975 to 2014 he is Curator of North American Ethnology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, a museum located on the University of California campus at Berkeley. In 1979 is Guest Researcher at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; in 1980 Guest Researcher at the Centre des Hautes Etudes Touristiques, Universite Aix-Marseille III, Aix-en-Provence, France; in 1989-90 Distinguished Visiting Professor to the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; in 2005 Visiting Professor, Research Center for Korean Studies, Kyushu National University, Fukuoka; in 2007 Visiting Research Professor, U. Rio Grande del Sol, Porto Alegre, Brazil; in 2008 Visiting Professor, School of Tourism Management, Beijing International Studies University; in 2012 Visiting Professor, Central University of Nationalities, Beijing; in 2013 Visiting Professor, Ningbo University, Ningbo. Globally he has lectured at twenty-four Chinese universities.
Between 2007 - 2010 he was Senior Professor - for 25% of his time- at the International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development, London Metropolitan University.
From 1986 to 2009 he was the Co-Chair of the Canadian Studies Program, U. C. Berkeley.
His first anthropological works deal with the Inuit communities: His PhD dissertation was on Taqamiut Eskimo Kinship Terminology (1964) and subsequently published extensive works on the transitions and evolutions of these peoples. His first monograph on a tourism topic dates from 1976 (Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. (Ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press).
Nelson Graburn and France
Nelson Graburn’s visitorship in the Centre des Hautes Etudes Touristiques Aix-en -Provence, France, was decisive for the touristic orientation of his research. He publishes in 1980 Le Musée et l’experience du Visiteur Aix-en-Provence. Since then, all his published work will be on tourism-related topics.
The history of Nelson Graburn's scientific relations with France is decisive. It can be said without hesitation that Prof. Graburn paved the way for Franco-American intellectual cooperation in the field of tourism. In 1980, he worked at the Center for Advanced Tourism Studies (CHET, University of Aix-en-Provence) and published two monographs (one in English and one in French) in the CHET publication series. In 1989, he collaborated with the tourism sociologist Marie-Françoise Lanfant (research director at URESTI, CNRS) in the creation of the Research Committee on International Tourism in Nice. He was the translator of Marie-Françoise Lanfant, with whom he published International Tourism Reconsidered: The Principle of the Alternative[4] in 1994. He was also one of the instigators of the new RC50 (Research Committee) created within the International Sociological Association following the conference “International Tourism between Tradition and Modernity” (Nice, 1992), with other Americans including Dennison Nash and Dean MacCannell, in collaboration with Marie-Françoise Lanfant, who became its scientific director. The RC50 was behind a major scientific meeting on “Heritage, Tourism and Nostalgia” at the University of Bielefeld in 1994. Over the following decade, Nelson continued to work on subjects such as “Ethnic and Tourist Arts” in collaboration with French specialists including anthropologist and historian Jean-Loup Rousselot, anthropologist and ethnologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure and anthropologist Marie Mauzé. In 2003, Nelson Graburn was elected member of the Anthropology, Objects and Aesthetics Research Group (National Center for Scientific Research, in France - CNRS). During the period 1996 - 2007 he remained in contact with researchers in France. However, direct collaboration on tourism research only resumed following his meeting with the sociologist Bertrand Réau in 2007.
In 2008 he was a guest of anthropologist Saskia Cousin and sociologist Bertrand Réau as part of the tourism seminar they were co-organizing at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). I met him during his Parisian academic visit. As well as discussing his research, I wanted to talk to him about his experience of the Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG), as we were currently considering setting up a tourism research team within IREST, at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Founded by UC Berkeley doctoral students in 2003, the TSWG defined itself as a “forum in which faculty and graduate students from a wide range of disciplines can exchange ideas, circulate and/or informally present works in progress, hear from visiting scholars, and receive feedback on their research”. Rather than a discipline in its own right, the group considers tourism studies “as a node at which numerous disciplines intersect and cross-fertilize”. This was also how we imagined our future tourism studies research laboratory at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne at the time: as an open, critical and resolutely interdisciplinary team. The TSWG was thus a decisive inspiration for the creation of our lab, EIREST, founded in the same year, 2008.
From this first meeting with Nelson at Cosi, a Corsican restaurant very close to the Sorbonne that has since disappeared, a whole series of collaborative projects immediately emerged. They were driven by a shared desire to work on emerging, somewhat offbeat themes, aimed at bringing together young and not-so-young researchers in France, the United States and elsewhere. The active and continuous exchanges between the TSWG and EIREST, took shape in particular in the international conferences on “Tourist Imaginaries”. The first of the series, organized in Berkeley in 2011 brought together 130 participants from all disciplines and geographical backgrounds. The results of this conference were manifold, both scientifically and institutionally. It was only the beginning of a long collaboration. Five other conferences[5] on the theme of tourism imaginaries were organized afterwards.
At the time these lines are written, the 6th conference on "World Tours and Globetrotters. Actors, practices and imaginaries, in Geneva, from June 11 to 13, 2025, has not yet taken place. Nelson Graburn was very actively involved in its organization until his illness prevented him from doing so. He had hoped to be able to attend until the last minute.
These five conferences have produced a large number of publications - more than 20 texts bear witness to this very intense collaboration between the Sorbonne and Berkeley and, from 2015, with the University of Geneva. The conferences and communications have enabled several doctoral students and young researchers, from all backgrounds and disciplines, to meet and collaborate. They have been incubators for several other projects, and for doctoral and post-doctoral mobility to France and the United States, but also beyond.
The overview of Nelson Graburn's collaborations with French scientists would be incomplete if we did not mention his important editorial activities here. He was thus associated from the beginning with the two French tourism journals, Les Mondes du Tourisme and Via Tourism Review. Graburn played a key role in Via Tourism Review: completely committed to the concept of the journal (interdisciplinary, open, free and multilingual), he not only co-edited special issues but also translated several articles and editorials.
Nelson Graburn, during the introduction to the symposium Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, practices and representations, June 2024. © M. Gravari-Barbas
Nelson Graburn was deeply committed to supporting young researchers. A 'nursing’ professor, he continued to mentor his students long after they graduated—keeping up with their academic achievements, visiting them, and even attending their weddings! The entire modest budget allocated to him by the Department of Anthropology after his retirement was devoted to supporting the mobility of young researchers from all over the world to conference venues. Generosity, a concern for transmission, and the ability to bring colleagues and students together were also among the qualities that characterized him and marked his way of being as a scientist.
Nelson Graburn has lived a long and wonderful life. His life - his wife Kathy's family is from Kyushu, Japan - and his research have brought him very close to Asia. When he was told at the Critical Tourism Studies Asia Pacific Atlas Conference in 2025 that he had won the award for his lifetime contribution to Critical Tourism Studies in Asia-Pacific, his response was: "Oh, it's a surprise, of which I am humbly proud! Like almost everything else in my life, much of it is unplanned or unexpected (...) Thank you all, and I hope the era of 'happy accidents' continues! [6]
His career, built on 'happy accidents' or on a wonderful ‘scientific serendipity', is remarkable. But it is his human qualities that have made it possible. This text therefore pays tribute to both the scientist and the person, the colleague and the friend.
Bon voyage cher Nelson
[1] I would like to thank Allison Strickland, PhD Student at EIREST, for editing this text in English.
[2] I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Professor Jafar Jafari for our exchange on Nelson Graburn
[3] A Tribute to Pr Nelson Graburn has been published in French and English in Via Tourism Review
[4] Lanfant, Marie-Frangoise and Graburn, Nelson Η. “Chapter 5. International Tourism Reconsidered: The Principle of the Alternative”. Tourism Alternatives: Potentials and Problems in the Development of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith and William R. Eadington, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, pp. 88-112. https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512807462-009
[5] “Worlds of Desire: the Eroticization of Tourist Sites”, in Geneva in 2015; “Architecture and Tourism. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra”, at the Sorbonne in 2017; “Tourism and Musical Imaginaries” in Berkeley in 2022; “Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, Fictions, Fictions” in 2022. Fictions, Imaginaries, Simulacra', at the Sorbonne, in 2017; 'Tourism and Musical Imaginaries', at Berkeley, in 2022; “Imagining Tourism and Tourists. Fiction, practices and representations”, at INHA, Paris, in 2024.
[6] Thanks to Eva Graburn for sharing some of Nelson Graburn's correspondence with CTSAP