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Edward Bruner (born 1924) is a anthropologist most known for his work on cultural anthropology. His research interests vary widely, but he has done work in tourism, interpretive anthropology, narratology, performance, processes of change, urbanization, ethnicity,  Indonesia, and American culture. In his early career he studied North American tribes such as the Navajo, Mandan and Hidatsa but his life's work largely consists of his research on tourism and the Toba Batak people in Sumatra. His studies on tourism have lead him all across the world but his New York Jewish background is still prevalent in his work. He is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Early life
Edward Bruner was born in New york city, NY in 1924. Attended Stuyvesant High school from 1938-1942. He was raised in a Jewish family. He later penned an article about his relationship with his father and Judaism called Remembering my Jewish Father. His background can be seen throughout his work in his writing and sense of humor.

Academic Career
Bruner took his first anthropology course in 1947, right after world war II. Bruner started his doctoral program at the University of Chicago in 1950. He received his Ph.D. in 1954 and started his teaching job at Yale the same year.

Early Career
Bruner conducted research on four different continents over the past 60 years. His studies on tourists helped shape the anthropological approach on tourism. His anthropology career began in 1948 as he studied different tribes of Indians in North America. His field work pertaining to his masters thesis on the Navaho Indians in New Mexico. Then through 1951-1953 he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Mandan and Hidatsa at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The latter half of his early career was spent with the Toba Batak, a faction of the ethnic group Batak found in north Sumatra in Indonesia.

Career
After he studied tourism in Bali, Bruner expanded his investigation to Kenya, Ghana, Java, Southwest China, Israel, and the U.S. his tourism work was multi-cited, global, and comparative. His three main studies are Native America, Indonesia, comparative tourist productions. There were two major shifts within his anthropological career. First, in 1957, he shifted his studies from the US to Indonesia. Later, in 1983, he shifted from Indonesia to comparative study of global tourism. He became the president of the American Ethnological Society that same year. Although his work has spanned across many countries, they are all still relevant. For instance he has said that his work in American Indian Studies helped him better understand his work in Sumatra and his work with the Toba Batak has contributed to his previous studies in America. His thoughts on tourism, inauthenticity, and tourist attractions show this and when speaking of the Lincoln Museum Bruner summarizes these thoughts as "contemporary American tourist attractions tend to be described in ways that replicate elements of the theory of postmodernism, emphasizing the inauthentic constructed nature of the sites, their appeal to the masses, their imitation of the past, and their efforts to present a perfected version of themselves."

Cultural Tourism
Bruner’s interest in cultural tourism first developed when he served as a tour guide on a trip to Indonesia. Bruner wanted to educate the tourists to the role that they played in tourism. His methods included flipping the camera lens around on his tour group as to create a subject of the observers. His attempt to educate groups of travelers about the interaction between local cultures and tourism got him promptly fired from this job, however. In his 2005 book Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, Bruner uses his twenty years of research in cultural tourism to analyze a wide array of tourist productions from around the world. His view on the world is very globalized and he mentions how major events in history have influenced his original notes on tourism "By the time I began my tourism research in the 1980s, the world had changed in major ways, and within anthropology there were corresponding paradigm shifts. We had lived through the 1960s and the Vietnam War, post-modernism was slowly becoming established in the academy, political sensitivity to inequalities in race and gender was widely recognized, colonialism was ending, and globalization was rampant. My work in tourism took note of these tectonic shifts"

In the book he critiques tourist productions as varied as a safari in Kenya to the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Edward Bruner's work on the correlation between Native populations and Tourism has brought relevance to the subject and attention to the cultural issues surrounding it.

Books

 * Bruner, Edward M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
 * Bruner, Edward M. International Tourism: Identity and Change. London : Sage, 1995.
 * Bruner, Edward M. The Anthropology of Experience . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
 * Text, Play and Story; The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Washington D. C.: American Anthropological Association, 1984.

Book Contributions


 * "The Tour as Imagined, Lived, Experienced, and Told." Great Expectations: Imagination, Anticipation, and Enchantment in Tourism. Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2011.
 * "Around the World in Sixty Years." Should I Stay or Should I Go? New Fieldsites, New Visions. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011.
 * "Foreword: Circulating Culture." Foreword. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond . Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2010.
 * Gottlieb, A. (2012). The restless anthropologist: New fieldsites, new visions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.