Dean MacCannell's The Tourist

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. California: University of California Press, 1999.

“I wanted the book to serve as a new kind of ethnographic report on modern society” (XV), states the author in the introduction to the text, and then goes on to make a criticism on postmodern theory by stating that social sciences and humanities deal with real people and events rather than texts. Therefore, his method will be an ethnographic one, that will allow him to encompass the humanity involved in the actual phenomenon of tourism.

For the author, “Tourism is an alternate strategy for conserving and prolonging the modern and protecting it from its own tendencies toward self-destruction. Ground zero at Hiroshima, the Kennedy assassination site, the ovens at Dachau, the Berlin Wall all figure in The Tourist as important attractions. Sightseeing, rather than suppressing these things from consciousness brings them to our consciousness, “as if” we might assimilate them.” (XIX- XX) According to MacCannell, the tourist finds himself in the same break of modernity as postmodernity and, in contrast to the second that abandons historicity, the tourist and tourism itself, recover it.

In the book, the tourist will operate simultaneously as two different subjects: the traveler and the modern man. The author believes that modernity produces a phenomenon of museization that is closely related with the question about authenticity that up to certain point motivates tourism. Tourism produces also a sense of solidarity and belonging to one world.

The touristic experience, for the author, is composed of three basic elements: the tourist, the sight and the marker, which is defined as any kind of media in which information about the site/object is given to the observer in order to assure his/her proper identification and understanding of the place or object. This process is reinforced by the fact that, according to the author, the modern man always knows where and what the important is, to the tourist will always know where to look for the experience.

Tourism in most cases implies a process of sight sacralization, and that is composed of several stages:

1. The object/site is marked as worthy of preservation.
2. The object/ site is evaluated and subsequently enshrined.
3. The already sacred object/ site is reproduced mechanically through prints, photographies, models or effigies that will turn into souvenirs and portable markers for the tourist.
4. The object/ site goes through a process of social reproduction, in which places and regions start naming themselves after famous attractions.

After these stages, the object/ site becomes a sort of sacred place that demands a specific ritual behavior when visited by the tourist. The touristic experience involves also a process of recognition: this means that, after being in touch with different kinds of markers and reproductions of the site, when the tourist faces the actual place or object, he/she recognizes what was already expecting and confirms the experience by contrasting the sight with the previous image of it.

Regarding the question about authenticity, the author believes that there is something authentic that he calls “back regions” which, in opposition to “front regions” are those that were not specifically designed for touristic display, but rather represent the “real thing” behind the marketed performance. However, the author doesn’t conceive these to regions as absolute opposites to each other, but states that in the middle there are many spaces that move between these two and create more or less “authentic” spaces.