New Configurations of Business, Technology and Culture: Insights from Tourism and Techno-Anthropology

With our contribution, we would like to share our experiences with relating to and interfering with ‘non-ethnological’ fields of education and research. We will focus on how such relating and interfering has led (forced?) us to reconfigure our notion of culture. We discuss this from the intersection of two research fields, a rather established one of tourism research and an emerging one, that of techno-anthropology. Both are located as educations and research groups at Aalborg University. While the fields of tourism research and techno-anthropology are deeply multidisciplinary, culture and research on culture is often commonsensically understood as the binary opposition to, within tourism, business and business-oriented research and, within techno-anthropology, the technical and technically-oriented research. Our teaching and research thus risks becoming the icing on the cake; a tasty add-on to what is understood as really mattering, namely business and technology. To remedy this situation, in our teaching and research we continuously point to the intricate entanglements of ‘culture’, ‘business’, ‘technology’ and other spheres and view the purification of such spheres as an effect rather than ontologically predetermined. One crucial implication of the reconceptualization of culture is that we move from cultural differences (differences amongst peoples and other cultural groupings) to ontological differences (reality as done differently in different socio-material practices). We would like to discuss what is lost and what is gained in terms of how we as ethnologists come to matter with this reconceptualization of culture.