ABSTRACT
Underwriting all of these tourists’ narratives is the distinction between ‘tourist’ and ‘traveller’ and a deliberate will to assert a traveller over a tourist identity. The ways in which some tourists attempt to shake off a tourist identity has been discussed in a number of academic publications, revealing in a variety of ways the problematic nature of that identity.2 Riley (1988) and Dann (1999), for example, have both discussed ways in which travellers separate themselves spatially and temporally from tourists. Elsrud (2001) has looked at how the grand narrative of risk and adventure running through backpackers’ travel stories forms a key part of the identity narratives of these anti-tourists. Munt (1994a) has noted the ways in which certain ‘other’ tourists engage in an ‘alternative’ style of travel, often claimed to be more ‘authentic’, in order to enhance their cultural capital and thus differentiate themselves, in Bourdieu’s (1984) sense, from class fractions below and above them.
