ABSTRACT
In tourism theory the tourist is often understood as a postmodern figure, particularly connected to tourism as a postmodern phenomenon during the second half of the 20th century. But the understanding of the tourist as a genuinely modern figure is also well established in tourism studies. Tourism is in this understanding something that cannot be separated out from the development of an industrial and capitalist society during the 19th century. This chapter however, is based on the idea that the tourist, as an ontological figure (the metaphysical imagination of the nature of different faces and functions of the human in Western thought), is not a postmodern or modern creature, but a figure that has been a companion to the central ontological figure in Western metaphysics – the citizen – since the establishment of polis as an ordering principle of society (Ek and Tesfahuney, submitted). The tourist has literally been a paradigmatic figure, a figure that “shows itself beside” (from the Greek para meaning “beside” and deiknynai, “to show”). The tourist can thus be seen as a part, a fragment of society that has been separated out, has been excluded from the polis through the orderings of ontological politics, through performative distinctions that creates a topographical dichotomy of tourist and citizen as separated that simultaneously masks the topological relation between the two ontological figures (Agamben, 2009, see also the introduction).
