ABSTRACT
This book is inspired by classic theoretical texts in tourism studies, those scholarly works that have developed theories which encompass touristic experience and tourism site dynamics. Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist, a crucial text upon which we build in this book, offers an ethnographic examination of modernity that hones in on the act of sightseeing as exemplary of the era. Following the tourist from the alienation of everyday life through the ritual attitude of tourism, MacCannell also explicates the semiotics of attraction and the staging of authenticity. John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze further interrogates the notion of tourism as extraordinary, compared to our ordinary everyday lives, thereby considering the production and consumption of tourism with greater attention to the economics of tourism as an industry. In addition to these two foundational texts of tourism theory, Nelson Graburn’s (1983; 1989; 2001) work regarding the ritual aspects of tourism, Edward Bruner’s (2005) rich investigations of the politics of tourism encounters, and Erik Cohen’s (1973; 1979; 1992) theories of touristic motivation and experience have been essential to thinking more holistically about tourism. Building from existing theories of tourism, this book identifies four broad theoretical constructs-ritual, semiotics, ideology, and performance-that each hold the tourist experience and tourism site together while also necessitating others. In Part One, each conceptualization is the focus of a single chapter, but as will become apparent to the reader, a discussion of tourism requires a conversation among many theoretical approaches.
