Ethics of Sightseeing

"This is quintessential MacCannell. It is quirky, brilliant, profound, and thought provoking. There are new insights on almost every page. A great read."

and#151;Edward Bruner, author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel

"This is an extraordinary, engaging, and provocative work by one of the distinctive leaders in what has become a lively intellectual field. It also speaks to much broader questions about culture, economy, social life, and experience than the touristic and#150; this is powerful social theory in transit."

and#151;Don Brenneis, co-editor of Law and Empire in the Pacific

and#147;The Ethics of Sightseeing is vintage MacCannell. It draws together topicsand#151;some of which have already appeared as separate papersand#151;in an analytical whole in the same way he did in his original 1976 book The Tourist. And like The Tourist, this book is full of brilliant insights drawn from personal experiences, anecdotes, and a wide knowledge of the humanistic and social science literature. It is eye-opening and pushes the boundaries of knowledge and disciplines. It will go well beyond academic and classroom audiences in providing a new twist to cultural studies interpretations of modern society.and#8221;

and#151;Nelson Graburn, co-editor of Multiculturalism in the New Japan

and#8220;Provocatively illustrated and supported by excellent references. . . . Highly recommended.and#8221;

and#8220;MacCannell acts as an erudite and entertaining companion throughout this discursive and profound text.and#8221;

and#8220;Intellectually stimulating, the product of a prodigious intellect, the book is provided with illuminating sidebars, brilliant notes to chapters, as well as a comprehensive index and bibliography.and#8221;

Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? In this challenging book, Dean MacCannell identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through his unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, MacCannell ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: and#147;picturesqueand#8221; rural and natural landscapes, and#147;hipand#8221; urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. He shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as and#147;staged authenticity.and#8221; Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, the book shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world.

Dean MacCannell is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of The Tourist (UC Press).

List of Illustrations

Preface

Prologue: I Was a Tourist at Freud House, London

Part One. The Ubiquitous Tourist and Postmodern Paranoia

1 Tourist/Other and the Unconscious

2 Staged Authenticity Today

Part Two. Recent Trends in Research and the New Moral Tourism

3 Why Sightseeing?

4 Toward an Ethics of Sightseeing

5 Trips and Their Reason

Part Three. City and Countryside as Symbolic Constructs

6 The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic

7 Looking Through the Landscape

Part Four. The Imagination Versus the Imaginary

8 An Imaginary Symbolic: From Piranesi to Disney

9 The Touristic Attitude: Acceding to the Imaginary

10 The Bilbao Effect: Ethical Symbolic Representation

11 Painful Memory

12 The Intentional Structure of Tourist Imagery

13 Tourist Agency

Appendix: Tourism as a Moral Field

Notes

Index