This study argues that the tourist experience depends on culturally-defined images, and that the tourist business relies upon the creation of fantasies about places and people. The contributors examine tourist images as represented by postcards, travel bro

"The strongest overview I have encountered of the scope and the current state of research across all the fields involved in advancing our understanding of tourism. For its range of topics, depth of analyses, and distinction of its contributors, nothing is comparable." - Professor Dean MacCannell, University of California, Davis "The breadth of vision and sweep of accounts is remarkable, and range of topics laudable... a rare combination of the authoritative, the challenging and stimulating." - Professor Mike Crang, Durham University Tourism studies developed as a sub-branch of older disciplines in the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology and economics, and newer applied fields of study in hospitality management, civil rights and transport studies. This Handbook is a sign of the maturity of the field. It provides an essential resource for teachers and students to determine the roots, key issues and agenda of tourism studies, exploring: The evolution and position of tourism studies The relationship of tourism to culture The ecology and economics of tourism Special events and destination management Methodologies of study Tourism and transport Tourism and heritage Tourism and postcolonialism Global tourist business operations Ranging from local to global issues, and from questions of management to the ethical dilemmas of tourism, this is a comprehensive, critically informed, constructively organized overview of the field. It draws together an inter-disciplinary group of contributors who are among the most celebrated names in the field and will be quickly recognized as a landmark in the new and expanding field of tourism studies.

Within the tourism industry there is a growing consensus on the need for research to investigate the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism. However, existing research methods texts are based solely on either the business approach or the social science approach to tourism. They often fail to provide real world examples of how to plan, implement or analyse tourism related research. This book aims to address this divide by integrating theory with practice through the inclusion of specific tourism research case studies alongside research theory. It considers a wide range of research issues, approaches and techniques with contributions from both experienced and new researchers.

A collection of essays from scholars evaluating tourism as a means of simulating economic growth and fighting economic inequalities in poor countries. It takes a look at the successes and failures of tourism in this role, and considers why tourism as a catalyst for economic development can be a controversial device.

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples as credible objects of tourism, “tourism imaginaries” have yet to be fully explored. Presenting innovative conceptual approaches, this volume advances ethnographic research methods and critical scholarship regarding tourism and the imaginaries that drive it. The various authors contribute methodologically as well as conceptually to anthropology’s grasp of the images, forces, and encounters of the contemporary world.

This collection of key articles from the most influential journals and books in the field examines what social scientists mean by the term tourism, and what it means to be a tourist. Carefully selected and introduced by the editor, this material charts the sociological changes that have occurred in tourism, and the change from the upper-class grand tours of the late nineteenth-century to the mass tourism of the present day. The collection also assesses the economic impacts of tourism on local economies, environmental considerations, and whether the growth of tourism is sustainable in a post-September 11th world. "Tourism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences" is an accessible and comprehensive resource designed for academics and scholars researching in tourism, globalization, and human geography.

Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropology, she examines the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact "Trobriandness," and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience. MacCarthy offers an anthropological critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, and cultural commodification, based on long-term fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders and tourists. These notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are also used and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. Ideas about primitivity and cultural essentialism, while critiqued by anthropologists, are nonetheless used by both parties in tourism interactions to conceptualize and contextualize difference. MacCarthy demonstrate how such tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and how these tropes are reproduced both in individual narratives of both tourists' and Trobrianders' experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural Others with whom they interact. She examines the social dimensions of cross-cultural exchange in these four arenas (performance, village life, souvenirs, photography) to argue that cultural commodities are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a "primitive" economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis contributes new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, and its relationship to exchange; that is, how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter with reference to ideas about what is and isn't authentic.