ABSTRACT
Tourism, the world's largest industry, despite derision and sleaze, is ever more important in global cultural life. All of us are tourists now and then, reluctantly or eagerly visiting the exotic, consuming the foreign, watching the great universal show. The past is particularly important for tourism: jet travel since about 1960 has become a form of time travel, allowing us glimpses of lost worlds, making us into historians of heritage and connoisseurs of the alien. Though tourists buy physical objects like souvenirs and clothing and great quantities of food and drink, as they once converted wild beasts into travel trophies, what they are actually after is immaterial. Tourists are modernity's paradoxical consumers who seek not merchandise but. experience; the attractions of the world draw them with promises of sensation or renewal, inspiration or plain diversion. Experience is hard to commodify. Visits can be structured as in safaris and cruises, but the touristic site is only the occasion for the adventure: seeing the Acropolis, touching its stones, is ultimately a prompt for an event that occurs in the mind of the visitor, as the meaning of a performance occurs in the mind of spectator.
