The Tourist as Juggler in a Hall of Mirrors: Looking Through Images at the Self

One aim of this chapter is to explore the idea that signicant strands of both tourism marketing and tourism itself are underpinned by a dialogue between image-makers and tourists on the nature of the self. This aim is implicitly underwritten by familiar assumptions that tourists and tourism operate within philosophical frameworks made up of relations between, inter alia, self, persons, places, natural and cultural landscapes, objects, products and the multifarious images of all of these. A second aim, developed towards the conclusion of the chapter, is to suggest that the conversations about the self articulated by the kinds of images to be examined here are embedded, with surprising precision, within the ideological shape and structure of the global politico-economic environment in which contemporary tourism takes place. The overall purpose of what follows is thus to indicate a starting point for wider discussions on the dynamics in the tourism world of the relations between the personal and emotional/cognitive on the one hand, and the global and the political/economic on the other. In various ways the chapter pursues lines of work consisting of anthropological/semiotic readings of promotional and other forms of tourism related imagery (see for example Dann 1989, 1996; Selwyn 1993, 1996; Edwards 1996; Pritchard and Morgan 2003; Pink 2007).