ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interconnections between identity and landscape, on the one hand, and landscape and tourism on the other. It also provides a necessary introduction to the central themes of landscape studies. The current theorization of tourism has its basis in the early work of Michel Foucault, who is among the most influential of twentieth-century thinkers. In this way the tourism landscape is the end result of a process of social construction that has played out over a number of decades and perhaps centuries and millennia. Further complexity is encountered when fully explores the meaning of landscapes for tourism theory since the interplay of concordance and geography results in meaning being geographically contextual. Zaring (1977), in her analysis of tourism in the Welsh mountains, reminds us that, in the absence of endemic meaning, we fall back onto that more general meaning of objects and places in our experience.
