TourismTourism, holidaymaking and travel these are days more significant social phenomena

Tourism

Tourism, holidaymaking and travel these are days more significant social phenomena than most commen tators 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.

Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organized work. It is one manifestation of how work and leisure are organized as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in "modem" 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 organized within particular place and occurs for regularized 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.

A substantial proportion of the population of modern societies engages in such tourist practices; new socialized forms of prevision 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 sustainedthrough a variety of non-tourist practices, such as films, TV, literature, magazines, records and videos which construct and reinforce this daydreaming.

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.

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 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 selfperpetuating 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 Americanstyle. hotel which insulates t

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