RPTA 182: Travel & Tourism

The Tourist Introduction (pp. 1 – 16)

Throughout the semester, for The Tourist and other readings, you’ll often have a set of questions to help guide you through as you read.

  1. When you hear the word “tourist,” you probably get a certain image in your mind as to what a tourist looks like and what a tourist does. You can’t help but associate the word with similar words like “touristy,” “touristic” or “tourist trap.” Not exactly flattering. Now, putting some (but perhaps not all) of those notions aside, how is the word “tourist” used in the book. The Tourist? There are two distinct different ways (pg. 1):


  4. Who is Claude Lévi-Strauss? You will most likely need to put his name in a Google search to find out a little about him and why he might be mentioned in this book.
  1. Reading page 5, the second paragraph, MacCannell sums up his reasons for using tourists to help create an ethnography of modern society. He parallels tourists and social scientists. The last sentence of that paragraph, “And modern tourists share with social scientists their curiosity about primitive peoples, poor peoples and ethnic and other minorities.” What from your own life experiences with tourism (even if you haven’t been there, but just in terms of where people like to travel) could you find to support this statement?
  1. The section (pp. 5 –7) called The Sociology of Leisure gets at several constructs of leisure studies, sociology, work studies and tourism. If you remember from RPTA 105, there was mentioned Marx and some of his theories on industrial society (Alienated Labor). We also know that society began to shift from industrial workers to having more “white collar” workers – the Modern society (and now, we have definitely passed on to the Postmodern and even Post-Postmodern societies according to some scholars).
    On pg. 6, MacCannell says that, “In every corner of the modern world, labor and production are being presented to sightseers in guided tours of factories and in museums of science and industry.” He also talks of “life-style” (a favorite leisure term) and “do-it-yourself” (long before DIY Network) and tours of the Ford Motor Company (no doubt including views of the assembly lines of workers doing work). What type of comment does this make on the relationship between work and leisure in modern society?
  1. Moving along, MacCannell points out that, “…’social problems’ figure into the curiosity of tourists; dirt, disease, malnutrition.” In reading to the end of this paragraph, what do you think of the fascination tourists have with places where people have been killed or at the very least, tortured? Surely you’ve been aware of this. Visits to Alcatraz, Ford’s Theatre, Auschwitz and more recently, Ground Zero, captivate tourist interest. Are we morbid? Why is this?
  1. In coming full circle to the thoughts on what a tourist is, look at pg. 9. Look at what Boorstin has to say about tourists. What does Claude Lévi-Strauss have to say? MacCannell himself writes about what a date said to him when returning her home.
  2. Have you ever been in a situation where you purposely avoided doing something that “only tourists do?”
  1. Read the last paragraph on that page. MacCannell reminds us that not too long ago, it was very acceptable in society to make statements about other groups of “outsiders.” Why then, if tourists are people too, is it more socially acceptable to speak negatively of them?