ABSTRACT
'Popular culture' has become a ubiquitous term in contemporary social life in the greatest part of the socially organized world. This chapter explains how conceptual and experiential modes connect to the social and cultural activity of tourism. No scholarly analysis of popular culture can stand without specifying what 'culture' is and how it connects to the 'popular'. A cultural approach to tourism brings to the fore the experiential dimension of engaging with other places and their people beyond any consumerist imperatives. The mode of socialization prompts us to think of tourism as a popular culture in its own right, endorsing, or generating forms of sociality. Studies of modes of socialization in tourist contexts were originally influenced by Victor Turner's communitas as a loose and ephemeral form of solidarity manifest in subcultural and counter-cultural mobilities and rituals from the 1960s and the 1970s onwards.
