ABSTRACT
When we think of tourism we often think of travel to exotic destinations, but modernization has also dispersed and extended our network of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Fewer people live out their lives in a single place or even a single region of their natal country. Modern forms of dwelling, working, and playing involve circulating through a geographically extended network of social relations and a multiplicity of widely dispersed places and regions. Much of the “postmodern” discourse on tourism leaves the impression that tourists seek out only the exotic, authentic “other” and experience every destination through a detached “gaze” that rarely engages the “real” (i.e., uncommodified) aspects of the place (MacCannell 1992, Selwyn 1996, Urry 1990). Contrary to images of “gazing” tourists on a pilgrimage for the authentic, much of modern tourism is rather ordinary and involves complex patterns of social and spatial interaction that cannot be neatly reduced to a shallow detached relation. Leisure/tourism is often less packaged, commodified, and colonial than contemporary academic renderings seem to permit.
