Selected Reading Week 10
TOURISM
A-
Tourism, holidaymaking and travel are these days more significant social phenomena than most
commentators have considered. On the face of it there could not be a more trivial subject for a book.
And indeed since social scientists have had considerable difficulty explaining weightier topics, such as
work or politics, it might be thought that they would have great difficulties in accounting for more
trivial phenomena such as holidaymaking. However, there are interesting parallels with the study of
deviance. This involves the investigation of bizarre and idiosyncratic social practices which happen to
be defined as deviant in some societies but not necessarily in others. The assumption is that the
investigation of deviance can reveal interesting and significant aspects of normal societies. It could be
said that a similar analysis can be applied to tourism.
B-
Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work. It
is one manifestation of how work and leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social
practice in modern societies. Indeed acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being
‘modern’ and the popular concept of tourism is that it is organised within particular places and occurs
for regularised periods of time. Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to, and their
stay in, various destinations. This necessarily involves some movement, that is the journey, and a
period of stay in a new place or places. ‘The journey and the stay’ are by definition outside the normal
places of residence and work and are of a short term and temporary nature and there is a clear
intention to return ‘home’ within a relatively short period of time.
C-
A substantial proportion of the population of modern societies engages in such tourist practices new
socialised forms of provision have developed in order to cope with the mass character of the gazes of
tourists as opposed to the individual character of travel. Places are chosen to be visited and be gazed
upon because there is an anticipation especially through daydreaming and fantasy of intense
pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered.
Such anticipation is constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices such as films,
TV literature, magazines records and videos which construct and reinforce this daydreaming.
D-
Tourists tend to visit features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday
experience. Such aspects are viewed because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary.
The viewing of these tourist sights often involves different forms of social patterning with a much
greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than is normally found in everyday
life. People linger over these sights in a way that they would not normally do in their home
environment and the vision is objectified or captured through photographs postcards films and so on
which enable the memory to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured.
E-
One of the earliest dissertations on the subject of tourism is Boorstin’s analysis of the pseudo event
(1964) where he argues that contemporary Americans cannot experience reality directly but thrive on
pseudo events. Isolated from the host environment and the local people the mass tourist travels in
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Selected Reading Week 10
guided groups and finds pleasure in inauthentic contrived attractions gullibly enjoying the pseudo
events and disregarding the real world outside. Over time the images generated of different tourist
sights come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system of illusions which provide the tourist with
the basis for selecting and evaluating potential places to visit. Such visits are made says Boorstin,
within the environmental bubble of the familiar American style hotel which insulates the tourist from
the strangeness of the host environment.
F-
To service the burgeoning tourist industry, an array of professionals has developed who attempt to
reproduce ever-new objects for the tourist to look at. These objects or places are located in a complex
and changing hierarchy. This depends upon the interplay between, on the one hand, competition
between interests involved in the provision of such objects and, on the other hand changing class,
gender, and generational distinctions of taste within the potential population of visitors. It has been
said that to be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the modern experience. Not to go away is like
not possessing a car or a nice house. Travel is a marker of status in modern societies and is also
thought to be necessary for good health. The role of the professional, therefore, is to cater for the
needs and tastes of the tourists in accordance with their class and overall expectations.
Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
NB. There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them You may use any
heading more than once.
List of Headings
i The politics of tourism
ii The cost of tourism
iii Justifying the study of tourism
iv Tourism contrasted with travel
v The essence of modern tourism
vi Tourism versus leisure
vii The artificiality of modern tourism
viii The role of modern tour guides
ix Creating an alternative to the everyday experience
1. Paragraph A
2. Paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph D
5. Paragraph E
6. Paragraph F
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Selected Reading Week 10
Find words in the text with the following definitions to fill in the crossword exercise.
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