UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

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Abstract
While doing fieldwork for my book on Pakistani national tourism in Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan, I found comments and guest entry registers kept at local hotels. There are two kinds of registers that we found. The first kind was where the guests entered their personal information such as their nationality, profession, DoB, destination etc., etc., and the second, where the guests entered their comments and drew sketches. Entries in the first register were mandatory while comments in the second register were optional. In total, we managed to collect twelve registers from these four inns dating between 1982 and 2019. Four are entry registers and eight are comments registers. The entry registers show that about twenty thousand travelers stayed at these four inns between this period (1982 to 2019). We categorized these twenty thousand travelers by nationality and professions. There are more than twelve hundred comments inscribed in these registers ranging from two liners to three pages long. The average length of a comment is about one paragraph of an A4 size page. The twelve hundred odd comments inscribed in these registers are in twenty-six different languages. The most common language is English representing about 500 comments followed by Japanese representing about 300 comments. Thus far, out of twelve hundred comments, we have coded three hundred comments and generated 44 codes. We also think we have reached the saturation point as far as codes are concerned as no new codes were added in coding the last 30 files. We are also getting all the other files translated and transcribed into English.

Speaker Bio
Shafqat Hussain is a Professor of Anthropology and George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Shafqat obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, USA in 2009. For his doctoral research he worked in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan, looking at conflict between a local yak-herding community and the government forest department over the establishment and management of a National Park. He is the author of two books: Remoteness and Modernity (2015, Yale University Press) and The Snow Leopard and the Goat (2020, University of Washington Press).