The role of longitudinal ethnography in understanding tourism’s (un)intended implications: storying contradiction and ambivalence in Cappadocia, Turkey

This article reaffirms the valuable role that ethnography plays in extending our understandings of (un)sustainable tourism’s deep contradictions and ambivalences. In doing so, the article responds to broader calls within tourism scholarship to embrace rather than reject tourism development’s contradictory and disorderly aspects, discussing how and why longitudinal ethnographic research is particularly useful in storying the contradictory multiplicities and ambivalences in people’s lived experiences of tourism development over long periods of time. Drawing upon my own longitudinal ethnographic study of Göreme in Cappadocia, Turkey, it is argued that ethnography is useful not only to scrutinize the nuances of tourism’s impacts, but also to explore elements of resistance vis-à-vis globalized, capitalist and otherwise dominant regimes of value. Longitudinal ethnographic study in specific locations where tourism phenomena occur can therefore be viewed as forming a postcolonial resistance to its own colonial traditions through its capacity to effectively story the rich dynamics and spaces between of tourism development.