ABSTRACT
One of the major problems facing those analysing ‘communities’ is to find adequate definitions of the concept of community. The increasing popularity of community-based approaches to tourism development has led to a more widespread and in many cases relatively vague use of the concept in social and/or spatial terms. As Frank Howie points out in Chapter 7, ‘community’ has almost become a shibboleth. It has tended to become idealised, as if ‘communities’ are inherently good and external influences inevitably bad. It is as if the fashionable adoption of ‘community’ thinking has locked itself onto some kind of set of hegelian binary oppositions. But of course, as the range of case studies presented in this volume have indicated, there is a wide range of types of ‘communities’ and groups within ‘communities’ (‘sub-communities’?), all of whom can respond differently to tourism.
