ABSTRACT
Although we invariably associate tourism with pleasure and a certain playfulness, Indian academic, Nina Rao, reminds us that ‘Tourism takes place in the context of great inequality of wealth and power’ (quoted in Gonsalves, 1993: 8), and power relations are central to our discussions in this book – we have already indicated in the previous chapter that power is crucial to a critical understanding of development. In pursuing this argument, we are seeking to address an identifiable weakness in much work on tourism. On the one hand, much tourism analysis has played down relationships of power, which remain either implicit or are absent. Such studies have largely consisted of identifying structural and deterministic models of tourism. These are examined more appropriately in Chapter 4. On the other hand, where power is invoked in a discussion of tourism it has tended to be in passing; references to ideology, discourse, colonialism, imperialism and so on, appear in a rather unstructured, even anecdotal, fashion. Although such analysis is commendable in signalling the importance of power in the study of tourism, the treatment of power needs to be approached more thoughtfully. As Crick (1989) concludes from a wide-ranging review of social science literature, there is an inadequate representation of the complexities of tourism.
