ABSTRACT
Why “real” tourism? Some readers may assume that our title signals some sort of claim to the truth about tourism, but our intention is quite different. Rather than establishing a definitive argument for what tourism actually is, as a particular category of social phenomena, our aim in this volume is to unbound tourism from the confines of a scholarly discourse that works to separate and distinguish tourism from the rest of the social world. Adrian Franklin (2003) has argued that we should not be treating tourism as a marginal space and activity located somewhere outside of presumably more central social phenomena such as work, production, and the everyday worlds of home and habit, but rather as a fundamental social force that assembles a broad array of social, political, economic, cultural, and material processes. Here we take this approach one step further by insisting on tourism as a comprehensive analytic capable of reassembling our understandings of contemporary life. Not only do we view tourism as a social force, then, but we also view tourism as an analytic through which new insights into “the social,” “the cultural,” and “the political,” and thus our theorizations about those domains, are gained. This is important, we believe, not for what it reveals about tourism, but for what it reveals about the social world and how it is changing. Tourism is “real,” then, as a constitutive force in the social world. It is also “real” in the sense of actual practices that defy simple categorizations or disembodied abstractions (on this see, for example, Bærenholdt et al. 2004; Crang, M. 1999, 2004, 2006; Crouch 2004, 2005; Edensor 2001, 2006a, 2007; Minca and Oakes 2006; Minca 2007; Obrador 2007). Our approach to tourism thus emphasizes placed practice and, as a result, a theoretical pluralism that resists closure around orderly ideas such as authenticity or modernity.
