Synopses & Reviews
Tourism is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary life. More of us travel for pleasure than ever before, yet the social scientific literature on tourism is relatively scant. This book provides an original contribution to the field of tourist studies. The contributors to Tourism reconceptualize the local and the global, avoiding such crude oppositions as centre v periphery, modern v traditional, macro vs. micro and North vs. South. Instead, they demonstrate that the local cannot be understood without the global, and that the global can never be isolated from the regional setting within which it operates. Providing new insights into theories of touristic practice, this volume places tourism within the same framework as other transnational global studies Contents: Introduction/Part One: Questions and Scope/What Is Tourism?/The Foundations and Traces of Modern Tourism/Elaborations of Tourism/Part Two: Objects and Rituals/Tourist Objects, Tourist Rituals/Objects and Rituals of Seaside/Objects and Rituals of Heritage/Part Three: The Embodied Tourist/Tourisms of Body and Nature/Sex and Tourism/Conclusion: A World of Tourism
Synopsis
Argued with a real verve, it makes a plea to rethink the role of tourism in modernity seeing it not as a fleeting and marginal element, but as something enduring, emblematic and constitutive of contemporary society. Tourism is seen as a key element of modern life, not an escape from it′ -
Mike Crang, Department of Geography, University of Durham
Tourism is a rapidly growing area of student enrolment. Lecturers and students who have waited patiently for an up-to-date, lucid and indispensable teaching and research text, need wait no more. This book is a matchless guide to understanding the theory, practice, development and effects of tourism.
Tourism: An Introduction
- equips students with a critical perspective of the central processes of tourism and the relationship between tourism and culture
- places tourism at the heart of modern life rather than as a peripheral feature added on after work
- illuminates the relationship between tourism and nation formation, citizenship, consumerism and globalization
- reveals the ritual, performative and embodied dimensions of tourist experience
This book offers readers a major synthesis of modern thought on tourism. It breaks the mould of approaching tourism as a self-contained, compartment of contemporary life and treats it as a major and exciting cultural phenomenon. This is a landmark work in the study of tourism.
Adrian Franklin is the editor of the acclaimed journal Tourist Studies (SAGE Publications).