ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two alternative readings of tourist brochures advertising holidays in South-East Asia. Two sets of brochures are used: the first collected in 1990 from travel agents in Camden Town, London; the second drawn from the World Travel Mart at London’s Olympia exhibition hall in 1991. The chapter focuses on the innovative work on tourist brochures by Dann. The change in emphasis from ‘structuralism’ to ‘post-structuralism’ in the anthropology of tourism may be associated with the work of several writers, especially those who have been concerned with tourism and cultural ‘commoditisation’. Several of the brochures emphasise the closeness of the relationship between traditional and modern, frequently linking this to a comparable closeness between ethnically diverse populations. One lesson to be learnt from many of the brochures is that the key players in the development of tourism are increasingly the large development corporations and large tourist companies who, as Redwing puts it, can exercise their ‘tremendous buying power’.
