ABSTRACT
A few years ago, Meethan (2002) produced the most valuable work which challenged much of the received thinking in Tourism Studies about the role of tourism in the production of ‘society’ and ‘space,’ and of the marketplace ‘consumption’ of those phenomena. Meethan's book ‘Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture, Consumption’ (hereafter Tourism in Global Society) is a solid and well-reasoned treatise which remonstrates against many of the conventional orthodoxies of and about tourism that Meethan found to be essentialist and reductionist (Meethan, 2002, p. 90) [hereafter citations for Meethan 2002 are shown as ‘M90’, in which the last two numbers represent the page number]. It is a fine read for those who wish to ground themselves in Pre-Fordist, Fordist, and Post-Fordist matters of cultural production (M72). It is a compact but searching treatment for those who wish to explore the role of tourism vis-à-vis key aspects of consumer aesthetics — or what some commentators call commodity aesthetics (Fjellman, 1992; Hollinshead, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). And it is a refreshing re-rumination about the matters of authenticity, appropriation, and alienation which arise as various corporate, government, and special interest playmakers in tourism produce their contested representations of ‘the primitive’ and ‘the modern.’
