The symbolism immediately was clear to me, as the two had collaborated before on a similar project
back in 1991 when they co-edited a groundbreaking special issue of the Annals which summarized,
discipline-by-discipline, the current state of the relatively nascent genre of "tourism research" within
the social sciences (Graburn & Jafari, 1991). Graburn and Jafari had brought together some of the
biggest names in each discipline at the time, including Valene Smith, Dennison Nash, Erick Cohen,
and Peter Murphy. Yet what was striking about this issue was that each disciplinary paper had its own
trajectory of research and community of scholars, with little overlap. Th is underscored what Echtner
and Jamal (1997) would later call a "disciplinary dilemma" in tourism research, with clearly drawn
boundaries between perspectives and little interface, integration, or exchange of theories and methods.
At the time, it seems best anyone could hope for was for tourism research to meld together into two
major disciplines: those dealing with tourism as an industry and those dealing with the more intangible,
cultural dynamics of tourism (see Tribe, 1997).