ABSTRACT
The relations between tourism, society and culture are characteristically complex. Societies and cultures are simultaneously objects of the tourist gaze – ‘products’ to be consumed by global travellers – as well as arenas of interaction in which social and cultural attributes are modified by the practices of tourist consumption and the varying forms of contact between visitors and host communities that modern tourism enables. However, these relations are not only complex, but they have also become contested and there is a growing body of empirical evidence acquired through case studies that reveals significant variation and inconsistency in the effect of tourist relations with the societies and cultures that are toured. More importantly, perhaps, this is a field in which critical thinking has developed in some significant ways. Traditional understandings tended to locate tourist relations with society and culture in Smith’s (1977) rather comfortable conception of ‘hosts and guests’ and with an assumed directionality to the relationship in which tourism primarily created impacts on host societies and cultures. More recent thinking around the concept of power relations has, however, challenged traditional representations of tourism destinations and their communities as comprising predominantly passive recipients of tourism impacts (Mowforth and Munt, 2003). Instead, alternative interpretations have been substituted that characterise social and cultural contact as a negotiated relationship (Crouch et al., 2001) in which influences are far from unidirectional and affect all parties in differing ways. Urry’s recent work around mobilities (Urry, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2004) adds further intriguing dimensions to this subject by highlighting how – in increasingly mobile societies – the issue of who is local and who is a visitor is often less than apparent.
