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

Abstract

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 surprisin…