A History of Modern Tourism


Book Description

Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, yet leisure travel is more than just economically important. It plays a vital role in defining who we are by helping to place us in space and time. In so doing, it has aesthetic, medical, political, cultural, and social implications. However, it hasn't always been so. Tourism as we know it is a surprisingly modern thing, both a product of modernity and a force helping to shape it. A History of Modern Tourism is the first book to track the origins and evolution of this pursuit from earliest times to the present. From a new understanding of aesthetics to scientific change, from the invention of steam power to the creation of aircraft, from an elite form of education to family car trips to see national 'shrines,' this book offers a sweeping and engaging overview of a fascinating story not yet widely known.




The Making of Modern Tourism


Book Description

At the end of the twentieth century, tourism is the world's largest single industry. Tourism, however, is not only an economic and social phenomenon but can be 'read' in semiotic terms centred around dreams of alternatives to everyday life. The images, which today dominate advertisements for tourist products, had to be constructed and sustained, invented and remoulded over a long historical process. It seems that without this distinctive historical and cultural 'baggage' the remarkable social practice of taking holidays would not have evolved. Even if tourism saw its most spectacular development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of the numbers involved, it rests on a cultural foundation inaugurated in the early modern period. The Making of Modern Tourism was a long-term process, deeply rooted in the cultural and intellectual, economic and social history of Britain.




Making the Modern Primitive


Book Description

Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropology, she examines the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact "Trobriandness," and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience. MacCarthy offers an anthropological critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, and cultural commodification, based on long-term fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders and tourists. These notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are also used and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. Ideas about primitivity and cultural essentialism, while critiqued by anthropologists, are nonetheless used by both parties in tourism interactions to conceptualize and contextualize difference. MacCarthy demonstrate how such tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and how these tropes are reproduced both in individual narratives of both tourists' and Trobrianders' experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural Others with whom they interact. She examines the social dimensions of cross-cultural exchange in these four arenas (performance, village life, souvenirs, photography) to argue that cultural commodities are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a "primitive" economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis contributes new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, and its relationship to exchange; that is, how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter with reference to ideas about what is and isn't authentic.







Touring China


Book Description

In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.




Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History


Book Description

When tourists travel, they often seek the exotic. The farther they venture, the more unique the cultures they gaze upon, the greater the prestige accrued; cross-cultural contact is commonplace. Yet despite the obviously transnational character of the tourist experience, national borders define existing studies of tourism. Spanish, French, or German tourism is treated almost in isolation and there are only hints of a larger transnational impetus behind the creation of national tourism products. This volume tells a different story. Although modern tourism first evolved in Europe changes were never confined to national borders. The Grand Tour, the birthplace of modern tourism, was consummately transnational in both its execution and its influence. Although seaside resorts originated in Britain, the aesthetic and scientific ideas that made beaches desirable emerged through conversation among Dutch painters, English travellers, and both British and Continental scientists and philosophers. When travel was finally available to the masses, Irish tourism advocates looked to England, Continental Europe, and America for ideas. The Nazi leisure organization, Strength through Joy (KdF), was based on an earlier Italian model, the Dopolavoro. World's Fair promoters raided previous fairs in other countries for ideas. European-wide demand and taste helped shape nudist practice in France and beyond. At every turn, practices and products developed because tourism lent itself to trans-national discourse. The contributors examine a wide range of topics that together make a powerful argument for the adoption of a new transnational model for understanding modern tourism. An essential addition to the library of academics studying the history of tourism, popular culture and leisure in Europe, the book will also provide interest to scholars of transnational topics, including Europeanization and globalization.




Making Machu Picchu


Book Description

Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the "lost city" of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu "is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering." Millions of travelers have since followed Bingham's advice. When Bingham first encountered Machu Picchu, the site was an obscure ruin. Now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu is the focus of Peru's tourism economy. Mark Rice's history of Machu Picchu in the twentieth century—from its "discovery" to today's travel boom—reveals how Machu Picchu was transformed into both a global travel destination and a powerful symbol of the Peruvian nation. Rice shows how the growth of tourism at Machu Picchu swayed Peruvian leaders to celebrate Andean culture as compatible with their vision of a modernizing nation. Encompassing debates about nationalism, Indigenous peoples' experiences, and cultural policy—as well as development and globalization—the book explores the contradictions and ironies of Machu Picchu's transformation. On a broader level, it calls attention to the importance of tourism in the creation of national identity in Peru and Latin America as a whole.




Tourism Information Technology, 3rd Edition


Book Description

Fully updated, this new edition covers IT applications and social media across the industry, including airlines, travel intermediaries, accommodation, food service, destinations, events and entertainment. Organized around the visitor journey, it considers how tourists use technologies for decision making before, during and after their travels.




Dynamics of Modern Tourism


Book Description

With special reference to India.