Ethnography of tourism: An analysis of ethnic tourism in Turkmen Sahara

Purpose- Ethnic tourism plays an important role in the development of community-oriented tourism. Due to the diversity of different ethnic groups in Islamic Iran, the strengthening of ethnic tourism can lead to the all-round development of these regions from social, cultural and economic landscapes. The composition of races and ethnicities in Iran is not uniform and the diversity of the population that has been created for centuries due to the mixing of races and migrations has led to the emergence of Persian, Azeri, Kurdish, Ler, Baloch, Bakhtiari, Talshi, Turkmen, Qashqai, Shahson and It has become Arab that each of them has different rituals and customs in fields such as music, celebration (birthday, circumcision, obligation celebration, etc.), wedding ceremony or mourning and mourning, prayer, hospitality, handicrafts, food , setting up a tent, hunting, etc., which have many capabilities to attract tourists. Turkmen Sahara is one of the rare and pristine regions in the northeast of the country, which attracts and welcomes thousands of travelers every year with its unique tourist attractions. The reason for the popularity of this area is its attractive geographical location and the nature of tourists. In this research, an attempt is made to look at the phenomenon of ethnic tourism with an ethnographic perspective, focusing on the Turkmen region of the Sahara.
Methodology- This research is interpretive from the perspective of philosophy, inductive from the perspective of approach, ethnographic from the perspective of strategy, qualitative single-method from the perspective of method selection, and cross-sectional from the perspective of time horizon. In the ethnographic research, the researcher will deal with the scientific description of ethnic tourism in the Turkmen Sahara region in order to determine the attractive cultural features and components of this region to attract ethnic tourists. The tool used was unstructured interviews with 38 indigenous people and ecotourists of the Turkmen Sahara region. The sampling method is a combination of convenience and snowball and it was carried out up to theoretical saturation.
Findings- 412 meaningful verbal statements from the interviews, 312 codes were extracted, after discarding the duplicate codes, 246 concepts and eight organizing themes were extracted. The themes identified include eight components of ethnic tourism in the Turkmen Sahara region, including ecotourism due to the presence of numerous and unique natural attractions in the region, food tourism due to the variety of local foods, art tourism due to the works and creative industries of the region, heritage tourism to The reason for the existence of numerous historical monuments was sports tourism due to the existence of traditional games and sports of the region, and cultural tourism due to the existence of cultural components and special and unique customs of the Turkmen Sahara region.Despite the presence of special components and features in the Turkmen Sahara region that can lead to the attraction of more and more tourists, due to various reasons such as the lack of special attention of the government to the ethnic tourism sector, lack of economic infrastructure, lack of adequate advertising of the culture of the Turkmen people, etc., has not been able to use these components in line with the economic development of Golestan province