ABSTRACT
Who is a tourist? The question appears as impossible to answer as it is necessary to pose. The almost obsessive preoccupation of this question has given fruit, and a previously grossly ethnocentric tourism studies now stands corrected. The fact that people outside the Western world can be tourists, and not merely immobile hosts, is today an indisputable fact. Because of this, instead of rushing ahead in search of every new tourism type, it is now appropriate to take a moment to reflect on the specifics of this expanding category of tourists. There is, for starters, a crucial distinction to be made between asserting the empirical fact that the indigenous elite in early 20th-century French Indochina was touring the country along with the colonialists, and to search history and pre-modern cultures for primitive tourism or ‘proto-touristic’ (Nash, 1981) features or elements such as pilgrimage.
