ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Tourism is a complex sociocultural experience, one that cannot be properly understood except in relationship to other units of the whole in human society: the family, the economy, class structure, ideological constructions, the physical environment, and most importantly, in terms of what MacCannell (1976) labels a "semiotic of capitalist production" and what Baudrillard (1981) calls "the political economy of the sign."
