ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that the economic importance of mass tourism in the Mediterranean is matched by its significance as cultural and aesthetic phenomena. It emphasizes the need of a more creative approach to mass tourism that neither celebrates nor dismisses the banal, the corporeal and the vulgar, an approach that focuses on the productive effects of mass tourism rather than on its ideological underpinnings. The book demonstrates the cultural significance of mass tourism and the significance of mass tourism to mass culture. It explores a number of articulations of practice and subjectivity tied to mass tourism, including those related with photography, the coastal hotel and nightlife. The book illustrates how practices of tourism bleed back into everyday life, and how time in the Mediterranean relates to technologies of the self, imaginations and cultural understandings.
