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TOURISM CULTURES
(Slides + Class Notes)
Introduction
Tourism Cultures is an invitation to interrogate tourism not as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon that permeates identities, societies, and global flows.
A Critical Cultural Theory of Tourism
● Why do we travel? ● How do cultural narratives shape our encounters? ● What power dynamics emerge between hosts and guests?
Four Theoretical Foundations
● Eric J. Leed ➩ Historical mentalities of travel ● Orvar Löfgren ➩ Social rituals of leisure ● John Urry ➩ Sociological consumption of place ● Noel B. Salazar ➩ Anthropological diffusion of fantasies
ERIC J. LEED, THE MIND OF THE TRAVELLER (1991) ➩ Historical Mentalities
● Traces travel’s evolution from ancient epics (Gilgamesh) to mass tourism, arguing that journeys reshape the mind of the traveller through embodied experiences. ● Embodied Experience: Journeys reshape the psyche, blurring lines between body, mind, and culture. ● Explores tourism’s transformative potential and examines how cultural shifts imprint on modern wanderlust. ● The history of travel is the history of society. It is a driving force that leads us to modernity. By exploring, people evolve and change.
ORVAR LÖFGREN, ON HOLIDAY: A HISTORY OF VACATIONING (1999) ➩ Social Rituals
● Anthropological history of vacationing in 19th, 20th century Europe and America. ● Dissects holidays (=holy) as cultural inventions. Reveals how vacations encode class, gender, and national identities. ● Frames tourism as ritualistic performance.
JOHN URRY, THE TOURIST GAZE (1990/2002)
● Tourism as a visually mediated encounter, where sights are collectively constructed through signs, media, and social conventions. ● The romantic gaze of solitary awe and the collective gaze of group selfies. ● How power circulates in defining the gazeable. ● Prioritizes interpretive critique over descriptive inventories.
NOEL B. SALAZAR, TOURISM IMAGINARIES ➩ Anthropological Approaches
● Conceptualizes imaginaries as shared, media-fueled visions that precede and inflect real encounters, originate in global discourses. ● Examines how these shape local cultures: Safari imaginaries redefining Maasai identities. ● Dissects how narratives and visuals co-produce cultures in tourism. ➩ Diffusion of inequalities, fostering ethical reflection.
Distinct from Adjacent Disciplines
● English for Tourism (language proficiency) ● Tourism Management (operational efficiency) ● Heritage Studies (site preservation)
A critical cultural theory that prioritizes critique over practicality, examining how travel constructs culture rather than merely consuming or managing it.
● Tourism as a lens for broader inquiries into globalization, identity, and inequality.
THE MIND OF THE TRAVELLER - Overview
The history of travel is fundamentally the history of all human society and is the driving force behind the development of modernity.
Travel has produced the distinctive mark of modernity ➩ Consciousness of freedom.
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF TRAVEL
Ancient View
● Departure as exile ● Travel as fate ● Journey as suffering ● Women confined to home
Modern View
● Journey as choice
SIGNIFICANCE & LEGACY
Mobility is intrinsically tied to human existence and self-discovery. Leed’s work stands as a critical voice in tourism studies, positioning travel as the fundamental force driving human consciousness toward freedom.
The Mind of the Traveller - A Journey into the Meaning of Mobility
SOCIETY OF TRAVELLERS
We live in an age of unprecedented mobility. ➩ Tourism is a profound human experience that has shaped our history, our societies, and our very identities. Travel as a fundamental force of change.
● $2.3 Trillion ➩ Global spending on travel in the late 1980s. ● By the turn of the millennium, tourism was set to become the world’s most important sector of world trade (Surpassing Oil).
These statistics exclude the vast ecosystem of non-leisure mobility ➩ business travelers, commuters, itinerant labourers, refugees, and members of armed services.
The History of Travel Is the History of Western Consciousness
● Travel evolution is the soul of civilization. ● It recounts an evolution that gave rise to the peculiar mentality of the modern traveller and the autonomous individual.
THE 1986 US OVERSEAS TOURIST
● Class ➩ 61% professional, managerial, or technical. ● Experience ➩ 91% were repeat travellers. ● Motive ➩ 57% were travelling for pleasure on a holiday ● Income ➩ Average annual income of $55,
Travel for pleasure remains a mark of status, travel from necessity is a common fate. Mass tourism is misleading. The profile of the average international pleasure-traveller reveals a position of significant privilege.
TRAVEL TO BE TESTED
The conceptual link between travel and transformative experience in the roots of our language. The original English word for travel was travail ➩ Ordeal, suffering, test.
Proto-Indo-European root: per (to try, to test, to risk)
● peril (English) ➩ Danger, risk
● experimentum (Latin) ➩ For experience (trial, proof, knowledge) ● Erfahrung (German) ➩ For experience, derived from irfahren , to travel (practical knowledge, lesson) ● fear, fare, ferry (Gothic cognates) ➩ Related to danger, journey, passage.
For the ancients , the journey was a process of reduction, of being stripped of power, companions, and ambition to reveal one’s essential self.
● Gilgamesh: A king too strong for his city, his journey’s weary labour transforms him from a predator into a wise ruler. ● Odysseus: Ground down by suffering (hostile warriors and battering waves), his ability to endure proves his heroic nature.
In the ancient model , the journey does not create something new in the traveller, but rather reveals something ineradicably present.
Even Today, Hardship Authenticates the Journey: The ancient idea of travel persists. ➩ It is what separates the true traveller from the mere tourist. Travel fatigue remains a measure of how much a traveller is marked and tested by experience.
● The Scholar: The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss endures boredom for a genuine discovery. ● The Adventurer: The tourist pays for a calibrated experience to feel like Indiana Jones. ● The Wayfarer: Fear makes the unaccommodated traveller porous and sensitive to the world (Camus).
Travel is a social act that creates unique forms of community among strangers bound by common motion. These mobile societies are primary agents of historical change.
● Nomadic hordes and Viking longships ● Merchant companies and crusades ● The secular communion of the modern freeway ● The transatlantic steamer, a brave village amid the desert of waters.
SELF DISCOVERY FROM THE OTHER
Collective identity is not innate ➩ Born from the contrast and reflection that occurs during cross-cultural encounters. An absence of alternatives absolves a group from the need to question its own customs.
Historical Proofs:
● The Greeks: According to Thucydides, the Greeks were not conscious of themselves as Hellenes until their encounter with the Persians. ● The Renaissance: European identity was forged and modernised through its encounter with the New World.
CROSSING BOUNDARIES
● Escape: Alexander Kinglake (Fleeing stable civilization)
Beneath departure lies a consistent emotional sequence: what psychoanalyst John Bowlby termed “separation anxiety”
● PROTEST: The initial, vigorous attempt to recover what is lost (Gilgamesh’s sacrifice of tears before his god Shamash). ● DESPAIR: A later stage of hopelessness, vigilant for return. ● DETACHMENT: The final phase, where interest is lost.
THE HEROIC JOURNEY: GILGAMESH, KING OF URUK (c. 2500 B.C.)
● Voluntary, ceremonious act designed to extend power and status. ● Faced with the finality of death, Gilgamesh departs to create a name that endures. ● The journey is a circuit, assuming a return to a home where the story can be told and fame can be recognised. It is a bypass of death by creating a legacy.
THE NON-HEROIC JOURNEY: ADAM & EVE
● Archetype of forced departure: a punishment, not a choice. ● The journey is one-way, a permanent state of exile where return is impossible. Losing home is a loss of self, a social death. ● Anders, a modern refugee, described this feeling as the experience of being no longer there. This suffering of exile is the very condition (the separation from a defining context) that modern travelers seek as freedom.
A SOLITARY QUEST: THE MEDIEVAL KNIGHT
● The journey becomes an individuating act. ● Departure is secret and non-ceremonious, undertaken alone to achieve status, not merely demonstrate it.
AN ESCAPE FROM CIVILITY: THE MODERN GENTLEMAN
● Departure becomes a form of therapy. ● Travel as liberation from stale, respectable, and oppressive European social orders.
PASSAGE
● State between departure and arrival. ● Experience defined not by place, but by motion. ● The in-between state is unnarratable , often appearing as a blank in travelogues, yet it is where the deepest transformations occur. ● The traveler’s mind is forged, as the world becomes a sequence of continuously unrolling pictures and thin pictures and motion itself becomes the medium of perception.
Perceptual psychologist James Gibson argues that we must move to perceive. The experience of passage is structured around two perceptual invariants:
● The Future ➩ Point of outflow from which the world appears to originate and expand ● The Past ➩ Point of inflow into which the world diminishes and disappears
MOTION CREATES THE OBJECTIVE OBSERVER ➩ Passage alters the relationship between self and world. Physical and psychological distance, transforming the traveler from a participant into an observer.
● Objectification of the World: Home culture becomes an object to be studied. ● Subjectification of the Self: Identity is defined by the act of observing. ● Comparative Consciousness: The habit of looking for points of difference and resemblance becomes second nature.
THE PURPOSE OF THE PASSAGE ➩ For the habitual traveler, passage is end in itself.
● Surrendering to motion induces an autotelic experience or flow state , where action follows action without conscious intervention.
Motion dissolves boundaries and the recurrences of time:
● The linear sequence of the path imposes a progressional ordering of reality. ➩ The experience can be tranquilising and addictive, replacing a connection to place with a connection to movement itself.
ARRIVAL
● A protracted process of identification and incorporation. ● The stranger and the settled world negotiate their relationship. ● These encounters create the very structure of place: The rules of inclusion, the bonds of community, and the material architecture of walls, gates, and thresholds.
ARRIVAL IS AN ORDEAL TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY:
● The arriving stranger is a figure of ambiguity: A potential source of power or pollution, friend or enemy, god or man. ● Arrival procedures are designed to resolve this ambiguity through a series of tests.
The Battle of Entry ➩ An ancient, physical test of strength to establish status and relationship. The act of violence is a boundary-marking act.
● Enkidu, the wild man, wrestles King Gilgamesh to determine his place in the city of Uruk. His defeat turns him from challenger to servant.
The Ordeals of Civility ➩ A modern, intellectual test of knowledge, manners, and cultural fluency. Documents, examinations, and etiquette replace battle.
Travel as a Journey in Time - PHILOSOPHICAL TRAVEL
For the ancient and medieval mind, the world had a clear centre.
Philosophical travel ➩ Journey toward this centre to find the origins of order, wisdom, and culture. The peripheries were intellectually hostile territory, home only to barbarism and chaos.
● To the ancients, the peripheries were places of confusion. ● Civilisation was defined by good government, a community of language, and proximity to the cultural heartland.
THE FOUNT OF WISDOM: EGYPT AS THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION
To the ancient Greeks and Romans, Egypt was the cradle of all arts, government, and knowledge. It was the first destination for the philosophical pilgrim seeking to drink at the fount of wisdom.
● Mythic Origins ➩ The god Osiris was believed to have invented language, the alphabet, and the sciences, spreading them on a paradigmatic civilising journey. ● Generations of Greek legislators and heroes were reputed to have visited Egypt to study its laws and institutions ( Plato, Pythagoras, Solone, Homer, Lycurgus, Daedalus ). ● The Power of Place: The experience of visiting such a centre could trigger a profound psychological reaction, a prisoner where the imagined past and the real present collide. ● Alexander Kinglake , upon seeing the Pyramids, felt a sense and understanding of the pyramid’s enormity, triggering a forgotten childhood nightmare of solid immensity.
FROM SACRED PLACE TO SACRED TEXT
In the early Christian era , the concept of beginning invested in canonical works like the Bible. The text and the holy site became mutually reinforcing
● The text gave meaning to the place. ● The place proved the truth of the text.
THE MAKING OF A HOLY LAND
Holy sites were created through a process of purification (clearing pagan temples), sacralisation, framing (building basilicas), and reproduction (distributing relics of the True Cross).
THE WANDERING SCHOLAR
Medieval philosophical travel became a quest for texts and teachers who could interpret them.
● Motive ➩ To recover lost knowledge, copy texts, and learn from famous masters. ● Power ➩ Their monopoly on knowledge gave them immense authority. ● Decline ➩ By the 15th century, universities became fixed institutions. The mobile scholar became suspect, often classified with vagabonds.
The voyages of the late 15th century shattered the old map. ➩ Encounter with the New World which shifted the search for origins from the ancient centres to the newfound peripheries of the globe.
● Before: Travel was a journey to the past in Egypt, Rome, or Jerusalem. ● After: Travel became a journey to the infancy of humanity in the unknown islands of the world.
THE INDIAN AS ANCIENT PAGAN
Europeans categorised peoples of the New World through paganism. ➩ Living embodiments of the ancients from a pre-Christian Golden Age.
This idyllic image was immediately complicated by the presence of warfare, ambition, and cannibalism, creating the image of the savage.
FROM A STATE OF NATURE TO A STATE OF PROGRESS
Observing the different societies in the Americas, thinkers like José de Acosta developed a theory of linear social progress. ➩ Europeans defined themselves as mature, advanced cultures by positioning other peoples as earlier stages of their own past.
The Stages of Development:
- Wild State ➩ Solitary hunters without law or police (like Homer’s Cyclopes)
- Savage (Communitarian) State ➩ Live in communities, hold land in common, choose temporary leaders for war
- Empire ➩ The rise of permanent kingship and the state, born from excellence in force and wit.
Impact on European Thought
● Foundation for theories of social development that would heavily influence political philosophers like John Locke. ● Europeans could narrate the acquisition of money, property, and kingship as steps of progress from a state of nature to a state of political society.
THE BIRTH OF THE SCIENTIFIC OBSERVER
Europeans see themselves as the world’s mature age. ➩ This gave rise to a new kind of traveler: the disciplined, objective observer.
Implication ➩ Modern travelers, armed with an infinite number of experiments and observations from voyages, are superior to the ancients.
Renaissance ➩ Curiosity as a noble motive for travel.
● Francis Bacon provided its philosophical justification. Observing nature was a way to recover the eye’s primal innocence.
Bacon’s Theology of Observation: Science requires stripping away cultural biases (the stamps and seals of
environments.
● He realised that nature, by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, fits a species to its particular place.
Wallace in the Malay Archipelago ➩ Noticed that the distribution of species mapped onto the ancient, invisible geological history of the islands.
● He raised a boundary (Wallace’s Line) separating distinct faunal worlds, indicating proximity in time or space while difference indicated distance.
The Observer’s Paradox
● The journey of the scientific observer, which began as a quest to restore a lost coherence with nature, ends in a tragic recognition. ● The intelligent eye uniquely fitted to appreciate nature’s beauty, is also the agent of its destruction.
The Mind of the Traveller - Travel is a force that forges identity
The act of moving through the world is a primary force that constructs, deconstructs, and transforms our sense of who we are.
How the journey shapes human identity across three fundamental dimensions:
- The Gendering Journey: How mobility and sessility have historically defined masculinity and femininity.
- The Collective Journey: How mobile groups form unique social structures that have acted as primary agents of history.
- The Performative Self: How the traveller’s identity becomes a fluid performance, shaped by the gaze of others.
GENDERING JOURNEY ➩ The journey has historically been a gendering activity.
● A powerful dichotomy: the mobility of the male and the sessility of the female. ● Travel literature is overwhelmingly a male literature, reflecting a world where the wandering knight, the holy man, and the hero are masculine archetypes.
Spermatic Journey is not just about exploration, but about a search for confirmation of a self and paternity that is biologically uncertain.
The masculine drive for mobility can be understood as a complex compensation.
● Men’s participation in biological reproduction is momentary. ● To create their own necessity, men engage in travels, wars, and the building of civilisations ➩ Artificial, male nature: a way to forge continuities through deeds, names, and monuments.
Journey as a fictional death: a stripping away of self that reveals an irreducible core. Men become what they are not through what they lose.
Post-classical European culture ➩ Figure defined by an absence of relationships, freedom, separateness, and autonomy (Knight Errant).
● This conception of the person was generalised through common law and became the cornerstone of modern Western identity. ● What began as a projection of a specific masculine experience became generalised into a universal human nature.
COLLECTIVE JOURNEY
The social death of the solitary wanderer compels association. ➩ Mobility constructs its own unique forms of sociability.
The Nomadic Condition reveals the essentials of mobile life:
● Ancient settled civilisations defined nomads by what they lacked: no cities, no agriculture, no walls, no honour. ● Modern observers see their characteristics as functional adaptations to mobility ○ Wealth is Fluid: Not land or buildings, but mobile herds invested in social relations. ○ Minimalism as Virtue: They travel most efficiently who travel light. ○ Leisure is Valued: Work is minimised. Adult males lead lives of relative leisure and sociability. ○ Mobility as Ritual: The migratory journey itself satisfies needs that settled societies meet with ceremony. The landscape becomes mythicised.
Mobile societies are defined by a dynamic of fission and fusion.
The defining feature of mobile societies is the autonomy of the primary unit. This leads to a structure that is:
● Segmentary: Composed of independent, self-sufficient units that can survive in isolation. This structure is fissionable. ● Oppositional: Fusion and cohesion are achieved through opposition to external forces. The level of unity is a direct function of the threat faced.
The Ancient Polis ➩The Greek belief that the city was its people, not its walls, was rooted in the nomadic segment’s transportable integrity.
The Medieval Lordship ➩ An institutionalisation of the leader.
● The comitatus (armed retinue bound to a lord) brought to feudalism. ● Relationships are mediated through the leader, not through equality among followers.
● Generations of journeys have created a single global culture connected by systems of transport, communication, and consumption. ● What was once the agent of liberty has become a means for the revelation of our containment.
The characteristic emotions of the modern post-tourist era are annoyance, boredom, and disillusionment. The tourists desperately wish to avoid other tourists.
RETURN ➩ The end of the outward journey is the beginning of the return.
● The modern world created by journeys is marked by an absence of content, a stimulating emptiness that creates a new motive for travel. ● The journey is no longer outward to unknown frontiers, but inward, a return.
A new species of philosophical travel has begun: Search for cultural origins, for the meaning and content left behind on the journeys that created the new world.
Critical Objections to Eric Leed’sThe Mind of the Traveler
The Premise ➩ Travel is not just movement, but a force that fundamentally transforms the “self” and consciousness.
The Structure = Based on Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage :
● Separation ➩ Liminality ➩ Reintegration
The Scope ➩ Attempts a universal grammar of travel spanning from the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern mass tourism.
Defining Liminality
● Meaning: From the Latin limen (threshold). It is the middle stage of the journey, the Passage. ● State: Suspension of social structure. The traveler is out of time and out of place. ● Leed’s Thesis: This in-betweenness is not just a transition, it is the transformative force that reshapes the traveler’s identity.
The Psychology of the Passage
● Anonymity ➩ The traveler is stripped of domestic social roles. Freedom to reinvent the self without the constraints of history. ● Communitas ➩ In the absence of hierarchy, travelers form intense, egalitarian bonds with strangers. It is a society without structure based on shared passage. ● Objectivity ➩ Distance creates detachment. The traveler gains the stranger’s gaze , allowing them to view their own culture critically and scientifically.
OBJECTION I: EUROCENTRISM
● Heavily relies on Western literature ( Homer, Darwin, Romantic Poets ) to define a universal experience. ● Ignores distinct non-Western traditions (the Hajj, Chinese scholarly travel). ● Colonial Gaze: The Western traveler is the active observer; the traveled-to lands are passive backdrops.
OBJECTION II: GENDER BIAS
The “Heroic” Model is Masculine
● Travel is coded as Active/Masculine, while Home is Stasis/Feminine. ● Travel is framed as a penetration of the world and seeding of the mind. ● Women are cast as the stationary figures, waiting for the hero’s return, rather than agents of movement (Penelope).
OBJECTION III: STRUCTURAL RIGIDITY
● Rite of Passage = Leed assumes all travel completes a cycle of Reintegration (Return). ● The model fails for Exiles (who cannot return), Refugees (forced liminality), and Migrants (one-way movement). ● He prioritizes circular travel ( The Odyssey ) over linear travel, ignoring the trauma of displacement.
OBJECTION IV: ELITISM
Controversial dichotomy between the Golden Age of travel and the fallen state of modern tourism.
● The Traveler (Leed’s Ideal) ○ Activity Level: Active, struggling, heroic ○ Authenticity: Authentic engagement with the world ○ Social Class: Implicitly Aristocratic, Elite ○ Goal: Self-transformation ● The Tourist (Leed’s Critique) ○ Activity Level: Passive, comfortable, insulated ○ Authenticity: Pseudo-events and staged culture ○ Social Class: Implicitly Working, Middle Class ○ Goal: Consumption of pleasure
THE TOURIST GAZE 3.
● Foucault’s influence: Parallels the medical gaze supported and justified by institutions. ○ Distinction: Seeing is biological; gazing is cultural.
Characteristics of the Tourist Gaze
● Tourism presupposes work. It is a leisure activity defined by what it is not.
Post-Fordist Consumption (New Tourism)
● Differentiated consumption ● Niche markets, customisation ● The illusion of choice and freedom
THE GLOBALISATION OF THE GAZE
Experience Economy: Services are staged as memorable events (Pine & Gilmore).
● Disneyization: Theming, hybrid consumption, performative labour ( Bryman ) ➩ Spectacle &
variety. Transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
● McDonaldization: Efficiency, predictability, Homogenisation ( Ritzer )
International Division ➩ Places now specialise in specific tourist products (Britain = Heritage).
Time-Space Compression ➩ Jet travel and the Internet have shrunk the world, enabling Liquid Modernity (Bauman).
The boundary between tourism and everyday life is collapsing:
● Shopping malls are redesigned as tourist attractions. ● Tourist experiences are consumed in home cities. ● Almost every place on Earth is marketed as a potential destination.
MODERN VS. POSTMODERN CULTURAL PARADIGMS
Modern Paradigm:
● Structural differentiation ● Separation of spheres: High vs Low Culture, Education vs Entertainment, Work vs Leisure
Postmodern Paradigm:
● Implosion of boundaries ● Shopping, tourism, and culture merge ● Rise of the Post-Tourist who delights in inauthenticity
Places, Buildings, and Design:
● Themed Spaces: Malls as destinations ( West Edmonton Mall ). ● Simulacra: The copy is more real than the original ( Las Vegas, Trafford Centre ). ● Architecture: A shift to Consumerist Postmodernism ➩ Creating a cleaner, safer version of reality.
Manufacturing Heritage: A response to de-industrialisation ( Hewison ). We manufacture the past instead of goods.
● Accused of creating bogus history by offering popular access to the past. ● Dark Tourism: The growing fascination with gazing on death and disaster (Ground Zero, Auschwitz).
In the 21st century , tourists have become frontline targets in the global terror, turning sites of leisure into potential sites of mass violence (Changi Jail, The grassy knoll in Dallas, Bungee jumping in New Zealand, The Bali bombings)
The response to terrorism and risk has transformed tourist spaces into zones of intense surveillance. The anonymity once enjoyed by the flâneur is now illusory.
● Sophisticated panoptic sorting systems (CCTV, biometric scans, data-tracking) continuously monitor travellers. ● Airports have become the model for cities and resorts. To enter the gazing tourist must submit to an omnipresent institutional gaze.
The global success of the tourist gaze creates its own crisis:
● Fred Hirsch’s theory of positional competition argues that as more people seek an unspoilt view, the presence of the crowd destroys the solitude and authenticity they crave. ● Physical carrying capacity (how many people can fit on a path) ● Visual carrying capacity (how many people it takes to ruin the feeling of wilderness).
MEDIATISED GAZING
Imaginative Geography ➩ Tourism and media are intertwined.
● Film-Induced Tourism: Locations become destinations ( LOTR in NZ, Harry Potter in UK ). ● Places are consumed via texts and images before physical arrival.
The Dominance of Vision:
● History of the Senses: Shift from hearing, touch to the sovereignty of sight in the 18th–19th centuries. ● Technologies: Claude Glass, Camera Obscura, and Guidebooks framed the view. ● Visual Possession: Taking ownership of the environment through the eye, civilising the wild into scenery.
The Hermeneutic Circle ➩ Tourists look for images they’ve seen, capture them, and show them to prove they were there.
KODAKISATION & PHOTOGRAPHY
Kodak democratised photography, transforming it into a mundane family practice. ➩ Through marketing, featuring the Kodak Girl and slogans like Let Kodak Keep the Story , the company scripted how and what to photograph.
Tourism became the ideal stage for capturing idealised Kodak moments of family life, creating a powerful
