Tourism geopolitics: routes and worldings

This article brings into conversation foundational concepts in the sociology, anthropology, and geography of tourism, specifically those of the tourist gaze, tourism performance of place, the hospitality pact, tourist encounters, with the most recent tourism geopolitics. Historically the first four concepts contributed to legitimizing tourism as an object of social scientific research beyond business and economics. They provided important terminology to conceptualize tourism not merely as an industry, but also as a powerful social force. Yet, they also contributed to nurturing anthropocentric worldings that separate tourism from geopolitics and enact Western-centric, liberal, universalist, and optimistic ideas about nature, culture, and the self that remain problematic to date. Expanding on the conceptual matrix traced by these terms and with a stronger foundation in tourism geographies research, the concept of tourism geopolitics is conducive to otherwise worldings. It points at the historically specific and artificial barrier between tourism and geopolitics, laying the groundwork for nuanced vocabularies that explore the intimate relationships among tourism, power dynamics, geographical locations, the body, materiality, physicality, affective experiences, and imaginative processes within the field of tourism geographies research. I approach these concepts as part of the heterogeneous intellectual frameworks that understand tourism as an ultimately Euro-American spatial, cultural, political, and embodied milieu that is subject to questioning, critique, and transformation.