ABSTRACT
Tourism has been de ned and rede ned many times through a variety of theoretical and practical viewpoints. Tourism has often been understood as the leaving of one’s familiar surroundings for the purposes of leisure, but tourism in the modern globalized world goes far beyond this. Tourism is also an industry developed from the elite class’s “Grand Tour” of the Victorian era. The anthropology of tourism may be said to have begun with Thorstein Veblen’s Victorian-era commentary on the leisure class (2001 [1899]). After World War II, travel became widely available to more than the elite classes. As long-distance travel became more affordable and common, beginning in the 1970s, travel to “exotic” places became a reality for the middle classes. The modern era of the eld is usually traced to Dean MacCannell’s path-breaking The Tourist (1976). MacCannell observed that tourism “is an alternate strategy for conserving and prolonging the modern and protecting it from its own tendencies toward self-destruction” (1976: xix). This backward look at the purpose and outcome of tourism implies that a form of seriousness of thought takes place over the course of the touristic experience, that tourism in and of itself is something other than a separation from the familiar. There is an assumption that the release from the familiar will somehow instill a quality of re ection in the tourist that was not present prior to the experience. We (the tourists) observe the places and
people we visit, make thoughtful decisions on our own positions in the world, and take measured steps to preserve ourselves and our modernity because of these observations.
