Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility

Travel seems to generate consistently ambivalent or contradictory representa­ tions. Why is it that Levi-Strauss opens his autobiography Tristes Tropiques, which brought him such fame, by declaring that he hates traveling and travelers ( 1 1 1 : 15)? Why do so many tourists claim that they are not tourists themselves and that they dislike and avoid other tourists ( 1 1 5 : 1 0): Is this some modem cultural form of self-loathing? In Innocents Abroad Mark Twain asserts that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and nar­ rowmindedness . . . ( 198 Vol. 2:407) and yet goes on, page after page, about the daily torture and anxiety involved in foreign . Fatigue, and the constant annoyance of beggars and guides fill one with bitter prejudice ( 198 Vol . 1 :253), he comments. Another beggar approaches. I will go out and destroy him and then come back and write another chapter of vitupera­ tion ( 198 Vol. 1 :269). Unlike Malinowski' s mythologizing record of par­ ticipant observation in his professional works with embarrassing confessions, ambivalence, and hostility confined to his diary ( 1 1 8) Twain serves up the negative, positive, and contradictory in a single work. Twain traveled and wrote at a time when the foundations of the modem industry were being laid; and if in 1 9th-century creative literature we have images of travel , in that of the 20th we find portrayed its contemporary degenerate offspring-mass tourism. Degeneracy is an image that keeps surfacing, and so not surprisingly representations of tourism are frequently even more hostile than those of travel. As MacCannell puts it, The term 'tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences ( 1 1 5 :94). John Fowles