ABSTRACT
Tourism is about difference. As British sociologist John Urry has established, the tourist gaze is constructed primarily ‘in relationship to its opposite, to non-tourist forms of social experience and consciousness’.1 Indeed, the quest for difference is a fundamental aspect of modern Western tourism; so much so that the designation ‘tourist’ has become a term of embarrassment, something almost everyone at some time is but no one wishes to be. ‘One among some fifty million globe trotters’, Trinh T.Minh-ha observes, ‘the traveller maintains his difference mostly by despising others like himself.2
