Who is Nelson Graburn?
Nelson Graburn was educated in Anthropology at Cambridge, McGill and Chicago (PhD 1963), and Northwestern (Postdoc). He has taught at U C Berkeley since 1964, serving as Curator of the Hearst Museum, Chair of Anthropology, Chair of Canadian Studies, and Co-chair of Tourism Studies (www.tourismstudies.org).
He also taught in Canada, France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Poland, Japan, and Brazil.
He has lectured at forty-one universities in China and is presently Master of a 111 Project at Minzu University, Beijing.
He has carried out research on change, identity, multiculturalism, museums, art, heritage and tourism among the Canadian Inuit (1959-2014), in Japan (since 1974) and in China (since 1991). His works include: Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976); Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983); Anthropology of Tourism (1983); Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008); 旅游人类学论文集 [Anthropology in the Age of Tourism] (2009); Tourism and Glocalization in East Asia (2010); Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), Cultural [Indigenous] Tourism Movements (2018)
Nelson Graburn married Katherine Kazuko Yaguchi(谷口) – in 1966 and in 1974, with her mother and our two young children, Mariko and Atsuko, we visited the family in their home village of Kamou (鴨町) Kagoshima, as well as Kyoto and friends in Tokyo. In 1978-80 he was invited to visit the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku 民泊) for 4 months, commuting from Kyoto’s Tsuruyama-cho.
He returned to Minpaku again invited by Prof. Shuzo Ishimori, to help with his national developing of the Anthropology of Tourism, (March 1989 – June 1990).
In 2005 he was invited as visiting researcher to Kyudai, Fukuoka, Korean Studies Group (韓国研究委会) to study the Korean wave (韓流) following Fuyuson. He has continued to visit Japan to visit family and friends, and to lecture at many universities, including Ritsumeikan.
He has published research on Japanese tourism in general, and specifically on onsen and rural tourism, mainly in Wakayama, Kagoshima and Miyazaki. He has co-authoured with Doshita Megumi, Ishimori Shuzo, Matsubara Hiroshi, Matsuoka Hideaki, Shioji Yuko, Yamashita Shinji, mainly on the anthropology of tourism in Japan and East Asia. He recently returned from a delightful trip to Wakayama, Sakai, Osaka and Tokyo in February 2020.
