"You Are the Clever One": A Semantic Contest in a Transient Host/Tourist Community in Nepal (Essay‪)‬

By developing a conceptual model of social discourse, based in part on a rites-of-passage model of tourism, this article illustrates how tourists and hosts employ different assumptions of social interaction to pursue competing goals in touristic encounters. An ethnographic example--the author and a young souvenir peddler in Kathmandu, Nepal, haggling over an inexpensive necklace--demonstrates the nature of some tourist/host social encounters. The participants in this example attempt to "one-up" each other socially, engaging in a linguistic contest over who is "clever" as they vie for social status in the fleeting community they establish with each other. Interrogating Initial Touristic Encounters