UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

Gordon, B. M. (2025). A personal remembrance of Nelson Graburn. Journal of Tourism History, 1–3. [LINK]

I am saddened to write that Professor Nelson Graburn of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley passed away in February 2025. Although he taught from 1964 through his retirement in 2007, I became acquainted with him only after I joined the UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG) in 2008. The TSWG had been created five years earlier by Stephanie Hom, Naomi Leite, and Charles Carroll, three of his graduate students. From its beginnings, the TSWG has attracted scholars from several different disciplines, including anthropology and sociology, drawn together by their interest in studying the culture of tourism. It conducted meetings for Social Science specialists in tourism studies roughly every two weeks during the academic year at UC Berkeley, enabling scholars from throughout the world to participate.

I came to the field of tourism studies relatively late in my career, after having written primarily about the German occupation of France during the Second World War. What turned my attention to the study of tourism was my discovery, in a no- longer existing annex of the French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale Française) at Versailles, of a bi-weekly magazine, Der deutsche Wegleiter für Paris: Wohin in Paris? [The German Guide to Paris: Where in Paris?]. Because I had originally specialised in Central European history with a Fulbright year at the University of Vienna, I was fluent in German and could easily read the Wegleiter. It had been published in Paris by the German forces during their occupation in World War II and listed restaurants, films, and tourist sites for the German soldiers, as if in peacetime. By working in the French archives, as well, I soon discovered that the German military authorities had organised tours in Paris and elsewhere in occupied France for tens of thousands of their military and civilian personnel stationed there. Virtually nothing had been written about this kind of war tourism in France. In a totally unexpected way, this discovery enabled me to combine my newer interest in tourism studies with the work I had done previously on Second World War France. Eventually, I taught courses in the history of tourism at Mills College and for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Santa Clara University.

For Nelson and the TSWG it didn’t matter that I was an historian – all disciplines were welcomed as long as they studied the phenomenon of tourism. Following my introduction to the TSWG, I was able to participate in its meetings, meet internationally known scholars in the field of tourism studies, and learn more about crafting my own work. Over the years, with Nelson’s encouragement, I was able to present papers at conferences in the U. K., France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and China. These presentations included a talk entitled ‘Tourism and “Heritage”: The Maginot Line’, in May 2015, and another, ‘Monuments, Memory, and Tourism’, in September 2020, the latter online because of the pandemic. Reactions to the September 2020 talk were especially helpful in preparing my chapter ‘Monuments and Memorialization’, to be published, at last report, in Michael Di Giovine, Josep- Maria Garcia Fuentes, and Teresita Majewski, eds., Handbook of Heritage and Tourism by Routledge in 2025. Another of my talks was an online presentation ‘Tourism and War’, for the Moscow State Linguistic University, during the Covid pandemic in September, 2021. Nelson was invariably supportive, encouraging me in preparing these talks. Most recently, I have signed a contract with Routledge to publish my book Tourism and War: Their Links through History, which extends my study of the connections between the two beyond the topic of Second World War France. This book is a work in progress and I expect to have a draft ready sometime in 2026.

One of the many conversations over the years with Nelson stands out in my memory. With a friend in France in June 2012, I visited the Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux [Museum of the Great War of the Pays de Meaux], which opened in eastern France on 11 November 2011, the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. Located in and near Meaux, some 45 kilometres from Paris, were the sites of battles fought between the English and the French from October 1421 to May 1422, during the Hundred Years’ War, as well as the first Battle of the Marne during World War I, in which a German military advance was halted some 55 kilometres east of Paris, leading to the trench warfare that characterised the next four years of the conflict. I subsequently presented a paper ‘Architecture and Tourism: The Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux – A Simulacrum of the 1914–1918 War?’ at the conference ‘Architecture and Tourism, Fictions, Simulacra, Virtualities’ that Nelson helped organise in Paris in July 2017. I published a version of this paper, titled ‘The Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux – A Simulacrum of the 1914–1918 War?’ in the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change in April 2019. In an interesting comment, Nelson, after reading an earlier draft of my essay, asked whether the museum had reproduced the smells of the battlefield, thereby suggesting some of the limitations in mimicking the experience of warfare. One can imagine the smell of death on a large scale but I had not thought of that before and we discussed the possibilities of war museums adding smells to their exhibits. Once again, Nelson had raised a provocative question. Perhaps future historians may take up Nelson’s point and address the smells of warfare.

Nelson very much enriched the TSWG by inviting scholars who were visiting at UC Berkeley, as well as from elsewhere, both colleagues and students, among his wide- ranging network of contacts, to offer presentations of their work at group meetings. The meetings, usually held beginning at 4:00PM every second Friday afternoon during the academic semesters at the University, would generally run for about two hours, the first hour or a bit more being the speaker’s presentation, followed by a second hour of discussion. This would be followed by a group dinner at a nearby restaurant, in recent years invariably the Great China, within walking distance of the University. In short, the Group was a first-rate combination of professional and social activity.

In addition, the Group was most helpful to me in writing my book about tourism and World War II in France, about which I did a presentation while the work was in its early stages in 2010. In my talk, I discussed tourism during the war by the German occupation forces, both military and civilian personnel, as well as the French themselves, along with postwar heritage tourism to sites in Normandy and elsewhere. Later, in 2017, Daniel Letouzey, a friend and colleague living in Lisieux, in Normandy, served as an informal guide during a tour of Normandy for my wife Suzanne and me. During the question and answer session that followed my 2010 talk to the TSWG, I asked the group whether they thought I should write one book on all the aspects related to France and World War II tourism or separate the project into two books, one on the various aspects of German and French tourism in France during the war, and a second on postwar heritage tourism. Nelson immediately advised combining it into one book and the others in attendance agreed. The result was War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage published by Cornell University Press in 2018.

The TSWG was also involved in arranging international tourism studies conferences held in Paris and Geneva, which Nelson helped organise and in which I was invited to participate. Conversations with the participants helped me to develop my own thinking about the relationships between tourism and war in Second World War France. Subsequently, I presented my paper ‘Music, Power, and Tourism: Occupied France during the Second World War’, at the Tourism and Musical Imaginaries 2022 Conference, organised by the TSWG, together with the Interdisciplinary Group of Tourism Studies (EIREST) and the Institute of Advanced Studies and Research on Tourism (IREST) at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, which took place at the university in Berkeley in March 2022.

Even though most of the TSWG members came from disciplines other than history, as did Nelson, he repeatedly encouraged me to present my continuing work on war and tourism to the Group. In January 2010, borrowing the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ from John Urry, I presented ‘War and the Tourist Gaze: Tourism, Memory, and World War II France’, and, following some time spent visiting the city of Vichy and talking to local historians there, ‘The Reinvention of a Tourist Town: Politics, Medicine, Society, and Tourism in Vichy’, in April 2012. Residents of Vichy have for years resented references to the Second World War government, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, as the ‘Vichy government’ or the ‘Vichy regime’. They argue that the people of the city of Vichy suffered twofold, first for having endured the Occupation as all the French had, and second, for having their city later branded as the capital of the pro-German collaborators, as if the people of Vichy had chosen their city to be selected as France’s provisional capital.

Through all these projects, Nelson was a continual source of inspiration and friendly encouragement. Even though his own work centred on topics far removed from my own, on Inuit arts and Asian topics, he was knowledgeable about my interests and encouraged my pursuit of them. As noted at the beginning of this essay, Nelson was a pioneer in the academic study of tourism in all its cultural aspects. He changed the landscape of cultural studies and these changes will continue. I owe a lot to Nelson for his encouragement and intellectual stimulation.