The field of tourism studies is now addressing a range of issues which in part stem from the problems engendered by multidisciplinary approaches and from the post-modernist, post-colonialist, post-structuralist criticisms that its priorities and concepts have been determined by a Western-centric (Euro-American) view of tourism. This introduction provides an overview of papers on a range of tourisms: disaster, halal/Islamic, culinary/gastronomic, luxury, and Royal-sponsored community-based tourism. From this comparative perspective, it is suggested that we engage critically with binary modes of thinking which have sought to distinguish between the West (Euro-American/Occidental), and the East or Orient, and between Western-centred and Eastern-centred perspectives, and between insiders and outsiders. The issue of "emerging tourisms" on which most of the papers in this special issue focus only serves to complicate these matters. How do studies of tourism accommodate novel tourisms? Do we view them as simply variations on a theme to be addressed within existing conceptual frameworks? Is a "mobilities" or an "encounters" approach sufficiently robust and viable to handle apparent touristic innovations and differences? In an Asian and Southeast Asian context does the issue of emerging tourisms require us to re-engage with debates about Orientalism and Western academic hegemony? Keywords: emerging tourisms, multi-disciplinarity, binaries, Orientalism, Occidentalism difficult to determine unified and coherent themes for discussion in the wide range of papers offered but it seems that an introductory deliberation on the