Travel as Performed Art

Although travel has been performed, appreciated, and formally criticized as an art for at least five centuries, this cultural classification has yet to be taken seriously in the nascent field of tourism research. Present-day tourism is best understood as a recent manifestation of an enduring art of travel whose performance entails movement through space in conventionally stylized ways. Sociological research on current and historical manifestations of this art can benefit from theoretical traditions developed in the study of other domains of expressive culture. Drawing on the sociology of art as well as on recent literary scholarship, this paper proposes that the reproduction and modificaton of distinctive travel styles be examined in terms of the social worlds of their producers.