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The tourist a theory of the leisure class
TOURISM IN REVIEW
SECOND R E V I E W . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BY PROF. R O Y C. BUCK Department o f Sociology The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
William Shakespeare claimed that "all the world is a stage." He saw people making their entrances and exits as simply players. Shakespeare, in reflecting on the play-like character of man, does not inform us of his views of the audience. Dean MacCannell, like the bard of Stratford, also sees the world as a stage. For him, however, the people are not only part of the act, they are also the audience. Looking and being looked at compose for MacCannell the central theme for ?'he Tourist. He executes an important service in bringing under his discerning and critical eye how post-industrial society is taking on the character of a comprehensive and continuous packaged tour. /'he Tourist is a guidebook into the expanding world of staged tourist attractions and siinultaneously an unsettling preview of post-industrial society where looking and being looked at order more and more of the daily round of life. MacCannell sympathizes with Daniel Boorstin and others who lament the rise of staged and packaged tourism and the decline of "authentic" travel-exploration. But MacCannell is a realist. He does not permit his sympathy to degenreate into idealistic lament. He sees the tourist industry and tourism as integral attributes of post-modern industrial societies. Arid as such he proceeds to render a pioneering ethnography of this heretofor unexamined phenomenon. In nine chapters, MacCannell literally guides the reader-tourist through his structural anthropology and ethnography of the modern tourist scene. MacCannell is a superb guide. His exegesis is sufficient unto the task and is not labored. The Tourist is compact and parsimonius. It is not burdened with conspicuous sociological cant. In an important way, and one recognized but not sufficiently explored, The Tourist points toward a new sociology. By new is meant a sociology that is not grounded in presuppositions about man as an active participant in community, but man as passive member in tautological contact. Casting The Tour~st against Etzioni's The Active Society (Free Press, 1968), one cannot escape the contrast. If one is comfortable with MacCannell's thesis, then The Active Socie~/tells best how things could be, not how they are or how they will likely be. In MacCannell's view, the overriding motif is visual tautology. Everything is worth looking at. Everything is arranged for show. And things pan out about as planned and advertised. Sewage systems join with schools, churchs, zoos and museums as musts on the tourist's agenda. If MacCannell is a credible guide, travel bureaus, air terminals, American Express, Holiday Inns, and tourist journalism are examples of neglected items in socio-cultural studies. In MacCannell's world, everything, yes, everything, has sight value. It's just a matter of staging, flashy brochures, and oldfashioned enterprise, willy niUy economic philosophy. In a suggestive observation, MacCannell reflects on the possible desirable conse-
220
ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Mar/Apt '77
INTER-DISCIPLINARY REVIEWS
quences should third world nations and other regions undergoing industrial development design plants and industrial layouts with an eye on tourists and their coin. He guesses that in doing so, scarring landscapes and overall uglifying which often accompany industrialization may be forestalled. One wonders. In a sub-section tucked away in Chapter Two, MacCannell writes of "sight sacralization." In the reviewer's judgment, this is one of the most important contributions The Tourist makes toward understanding the development of tourist enterprise : "In structural studies, it is not sufficient to build a model of an aspect of society entirely out of attitudes and behavior of individuals. It is also necessary to specify in detail the linkage between the attitudes and behavior and concrete institutional settings. Perhaps there are, or have been some sights which are so spectacular in themselves that no institutional support is required to mark them off as attractions. The original set of attractions is called, after the fashion of primitives, by the name of the sentament they were supposed to have generated: The Seven Wonders of the World. Modern sights, with but a few exceptions, are no so evidently reflective of important social values as the Seven Wonders must have been. Attractions such as Cypress Gardens, the statue of the Little Mermaid in the harbor at Copenhagen, the Cape Hatteras Light and the like, risk losing their broader socio-symbolic meanings, becoming once more mere aspects of a limited social setting. Massive instituitonal support is often required for sight sacralization in the modern world. The first stage of sight sacralization takes place when the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy of preservation. This stage may be arrived at deductively from the model of the attraction or it may be arrived at inductively by empirical observation .... Second is the framing and elevation phase. Elevation is the putting on display of an object -- placement in a case, on a pedestal or opened up for visitation. Framing is the placement of an official boundary around the object. On a practical level, two types of framing occur: protecting and enhancing .... When the framing material that is used has itself entered the first stage of sacralization (marking), a third stage has been entered. This stage can be called enshrinement. The model here is Sainte Chapelle, the church built by Saint Louis as a container for the true Crown of Thorns which he had purchased from Baldwin of Constantinople .... The next ~tage of sacralization is mechanical reproduction of the sacred object: the creation of prints, photohraphs, models or effigies of the object which are themselves valued and displayed. It is the mechanical reproduction phase of sacralization that is ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Mar/Apr '77
9.9.1
TOURISM IN REVIEW
most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object. And he is not disappointed. Alongside of the copies of it, it has to be The Real Thing. The final stage of sight sacralization is social reproduction, as occurs when groups, cities, and regions begin to name themselves after famous attractions. Tourist attractions are not merely a collection of random material representations. When they appear in itineraries, they have a moral claim on the tourist and, at the same time, they tend toward universality, incorporating natural, social, historical and cultural domains in a single representation made possible by the tour....(pp. 43-45)." The reviewer has found the sacralization paradigm useful in his reconstruction of the development of a specialized tourist area in southeastern Pennsylvania. Sight sacralization in the hands of an imaginative curriculum committee could very well metamorphose into a "major in tourist sight development." It will be instructive to observe The Tourist's advance into course syllabi and reading lists in courses of study emphasizing travel, tourism, hotel administration, recreation, and leisure studies. "A Semiotic of Attraction" is the title of Chaper Six. Here MacCannell endeavors to develop a theory of signs. In the reader's judgement, the chapter is underdeveloped and misplaced. George Herbert Mead and his classic analysis of significant symbols do not "make the scene" in Chapter Six. The impact of the touristic experience on the tourist-self is only marginally attended to throughout the book. Given the title of the book and the portrait of a "freaked out" tourist on its cover, one might have expected a little more attention to touirsts "qua tourist." The Tourist is only indirectly about tourists. As indicated earlier, MacCannell guides the reader through contemporary tourist attraction culture and its infrastructure. As a student-tourist playing to MacCannell's teacher-guiding, the reviewer is now ready for an equally imaginative turn around, a more pointed assessment of the consequences of tourism on socialization. Professor MacCannell, what of tourists?
As of now, The Tourist virtually stands alone as a specialized treatise on an important development. MacCannell has done sociology and its sister discipline, anthropology, a service. Some reviewers will no doubt take MacCannell to task for perhaps too much flirtation with the "bitch goddess alienation." This reviewer was tempted to offer abundant evidence that if tourists are generally alienated, most of them seem to enjoy it. Those who are at work researching tourism and tourist enterprise and not wandering off into mindless analysis of tourist satisfaction on the one hand and "hard headed" market and transportation projections on the other, have in The Tourist a valuable guidebook, MacCannell's implicit forebodings notwithstanding. As a sociologist, the reviewer recommends The Tourist to instructors who want 22~
A N N A L S OF T O U R I S M RESEARCH, Mar/Apr '77
I N T E R - D I S C I P L I N A R Y REVIEWS
students in introductory sociology to study a "live" piece of specialized scholarship in conjunction with an introductory text. This book will be a welcome respite from crime,drugs, and ghettos. He plans to use The Tourist the next he teaches Social Institutions. In closing, this work is in many ways a prolegomenon to what is hoped will be a more comprehensive and fleshed out examination of order and process in post-industrial modernized society. The Tourist will surely excite all but the most encrusted adherents to discipline-bound orthodoxy. The social sciences generally and sociology in particular need a renewed vision of their intellectual task. MacCannell, through the metaphor of tourist, has given us a glimpse of his view of emergent man. The reviewer eagerly awaits MacCannell's further instruction.
k__A
THIRD REVIEW
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BY JEAN-PAUL DU~/IONT
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Department of A n t h r o p o l o g y University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA
It is for the second time that I read MacCannell's The Tourist. The first time was professional duty, the second, sheer pleasure. It is also the second time that I am reviewing it. Indeed, 1 wrote about it at first with sympathy, although I was somehow unhappy with the all-encompassing prospective of the book. Starting with today's tourism in Paris, it is with gusto that MacCannell dives into history to explore earlier guides to the City of Light and scampers through space to frame and coordinate the attractions of the French capital: somewhere between Lenin's t o m b and Telegraph Avenue, between the canals of Amsterdam and those of Venice: and "somewhen" between pre-industrial times and post-industrial ones. But it was precisely the multidimensional extent of such a macro-sociological study that 1 felt some reluctance with, experiencing a sort of historico-geographical vertigo in front of the quantity of examples provided. Clearly, The Tourist is not the kind of micro-sociology in depth with which the ordinary fieldworking anthropologist feels familiar. In fact, MacCannell's tourist is two-sided. On the one hand, he is a concrete individual who not only visits the world, but also explores it and makes sense of it. In this respect, he is a sociological "object" susceptible of empirical micro-studies. On the other hand, he is considered as transcending this empirical status to become the very model of modernity: hence the tourist is also the subject of a metasociology. MacCannell recognizes the pioneering works of Edward T. Hall, Robert Sommer, and Erving Goofman, but he finds their scope to be limited because it prevents him as well as them to generalize and pass from a sociology to a meta-sociology. He is basically unhappy with academic sociology because of the artificial fragmentation that it introduces into reality;in other words, sociology is reductionistic in its reifications. Accurately, the author notes: "Sociology will not progress much A N N A L S OF T O U R I S M R E S E A R C H , Mar/Apr '77
223
SECOND R E V I E W . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BY PROF. R O Y C. BUCK Department o f Sociology The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
William Shakespeare claimed that "all the world is a stage." He saw people making their entrances and exits as simply players. Shakespeare, in reflecting on the play-like character of man, does not inform us of his views of the audience. Dean MacCannell, like the bard of Stratford, also sees the world as a stage. For him, however, the people are not only part of the act, they are also the audience. Looking and being looked at compose for MacCannell the central theme for ?'he Tourist. He executes an important service in bringing under his discerning and critical eye how post-industrial society is taking on the character of a comprehensive and continuous packaged tour. /'he Tourist is a guidebook into the expanding world of staged tourist attractions and siinultaneously an unsettling preview of post-industrial society where looking and being looked at order more and more of the daily round of life. MacCannell sympathizes with Daniel Boorstin and others who lament the rise of staged and packaged tourism and the decline of "authentic" travel-exploration. But MacCannell is a realist. He does not permit his sympathy to degenreate into idealistic lament. He sees the tourist industry and tourism as integral attributes of post-modern industrial societies. Arid as such he proceeds to render a pioneering ethnography of this heretofor unexamined phenomenon. In nine chapters, MacCannell literally guides the reader-tourist through his structural anthropology and ethnography of the modern tourist scene. MacCannell is a superb guide. His exegesis is sufficient unto the task and is not labored. The Tourist is compact and parsimonius. It is not burdened with conspicuous sociological cant. In an important way, and one recognized but not sufficiently explored, The Tourist points toward a new sociology. By new is meant a sociology that is not grounded in presuppositions about man as an active participant in community, but man as passive member in tautological contact. Casting The Tour~st against Etzioni's The Active Society (Free Press, 1968), one cannot escape the contrast. If one is comfortable with MacCannell's thesis, then The Active Socie~/tells best how things could be, not how they are or how they will likely be. In MacCannell's view, the overriding motif is visual tautology. Everything is worth looking at. Everything is arranged for show. And things pan out about as planned and advertised. Sewage systems join with schools, churchs, zoos and museums as musts on the tourist's agenda. If MacCannell is a credible guide, travel bureaus, air terminals, American Express, Holiday Inns, and tourist journalism are examples of neglected items in socio-cultural studies. In MacCannell's world, everything, yes, everything, has sight value. It's just a matter of staging, flashy brochures, and oldfashioned enterprise, willy niUy economic philosophy. In a suggestive observation, MacCannell reflects on the possible desirable conse-
220
ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Mar/Apt '77
INTER-DISCIPLINARY REVIEWS
quences should third world nations and other regions undergoing industrial development design plants and industrial layouts with an eye on tourists and their coin. He guesses that in doing so, scarring landscapes and overall uglifying which often accompany industrialization may be forestalled. One wonders. In a sub-section tucked away in Chapter Two, MacCannell writes of "sight sacralization." In the reviewer's judgment, this is one of the most important contributions The Tourist makes toward understanding the development of tourist enterprise : "In structural studies, it is not sufficient to build a model of an aspect of society entirely out of attitudes and behavior of individuals. It is also necessary to specify in detail the linkage between the attitudes and behavior and concrete institutional settings. Perhaps there are, or have been some sights which are so spectacular in themselves that no institutional support is required to mark them off as attractions. The original set of attractions is called, after the fashion of primitives, by the name of the sentament they were supposed to have generated: The Seven Wonders of the World. Modern sights, with but a few exceptions, are no so evidently reflective of important social values as the Seven Wonders must have been. Attractions such as Cypress Gardens, the statue of the Little Mermaid in the harbor at Copenhagen, the Cape Hatteras Light and the like, risk losing their broader socio-symbolic meanings, becoming once more mere aspects of a limited social setting. Massive instituitonal support is often required for sight sacralization in the modern world. The first stage of sight sacralization takes place when the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy of preservation. This stage may be arrived at deductively from the model of the attraction or it may be arrived at inductively by empirical observation .... Second is the framing and elevation phase. Elevation is the putting on display of an object -- placement in a case, on a pedestal or opened up for visitation. Framing is the placement of an official boundary around the object. On a practical level, two types of framing occur: protecting and enhancing .... When the framing material that is used has itself entered the first stage of sacralization (marking), a third stage has been entered. This stage can be called enshrinement. The model here is Sainte Chapelle, the church built by Saint Louis as a container for the true Crown of Thorns which he had purchased from Baldwin of Constantinople .... The next ~tage of sacralization is mechanical reproduction of the sacred object: the creation of prints, photohraphs, models or effigies of the object which are themselves valued and displayed. It is the mechanical reproduction phase of sacralization that is ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Mar/Apr '77
9.9.1
TOURISM IN REVIEW
most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object. And he is not disappointed. Alongside of the copies of it, it has to be The Real Thing. The final stage of sight sacralization is social reproduction, as occurs when groups, cities, and regions begin to name themselves after famous attractions. Tourist attractions are not merely a collection of random material representations. When they appear in itineraries, they have a moral claim on the tourist and, at the same time, they tend toward universality, incorporating natural, social, historical and cultural domains in a single representation made possible by the tour....(pp. 43-45)." The reviewer has found the sacralization paradigm useful in his reconstruction of the development of a specialized tourist area in southeastern Pennsylvania. Sight sacralization in the hands of an imaginative curriculum committee could very well metamorphose into a "major in tourist sight development." It will be instructive to observe The Tourist's advance into course syllabi and reading lists in courses of study emphasizing travel, tourism, hotel administration, recreation, and leisure studies. "A Semiotic of Attraction" is the title of Chaper Six. Here MacCannell endeavors to develop a theory of signs. In the reader's judgement, the chapter is underdeveloped and misplaced. George Herbert Mead and his classic analysis of significant symbols do not "make the scene" in Chapter Six. The impact of the touristic experience on the tourist-self is only marginally attended to throughout the book. Given the title of the book and the portrait of a "freaked out" tourist on its cover, one might have expected a little more attention to touirsts "qua tourist." The Tourist is only indirectly about tourists. As indicated earlier, MacCannell guides the reader through contemporary tourist attraction culture and its infrastructure. As a student-tourist playing to MacCannell's teacher-guiding, the reviewer is now ready for an equally imaginative turn around, a more pointed assessment of the consequences of tourism on socialization. Professor MacCannell, what of tourists?
As of now, The Tourist virtually stands alone as a specialized treatise on an important development. MacCannell has done sociology and its sister discipline, anthropology, a service. Some reviewers will no doubt take MacCannell to task for perhaps too much flirtation with the "bitch goddess alienation." This reviewer was tempted to offer abundant evidence that if tourists are generally alienated, most of them seem to enjoy it. Those who are at work researching tourism and tourist enterprise and not wandering off into mindless analysis of tourist satisfaction on the one hand and "hard headed" market and transportation projections on the other, have in The Tourist a valuable guidebook, MacCannell's implicit forebodings notwithstanding. As a sociologist, the reviewer recommends The Tourist to instructors who want 22~
A N N A L S OF T O U R I S M RESEARCH, Mar/Apr '77
I N T E R - D I S C I P L I N A R Y REVIEWS
students in introductory sociology to study a "live" piece of specialized scholarship in conjunction with an introductory text. This book will be a welcome respite from crime,drugs, and ghettos. He plans to use The Tourist the next he teaches Social Institutions. In closing, this work is in many ways a prolegomenon to what is hoped will be a more comprehensive and fleshed out examination of order and process in post-industrial modernized society. The Tourist will surely excite all but the most encrusted adherents to discipline-bound orthodoxy. The social sciences generally and sociology in particular need a renewed vision of their intellectual task. MacCannell, through the metaphor of tourist, has given us a glimpse of his view of emergent man. The reviewer eagerly awaits MacCannell's further instruction.
k__A
THIRD REVIEW
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BY JEAN-PAUL DU~/IONT
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.
.
.
Department of A n t h r o p o l o g y University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA
It is for the second time that I read MacCannell's The Tourist. The first time was professional duty, the second, sheer pleasure. It is also the second time that I am reviewing it. Indeed, 1 wrote about it at first with sympathy, although I was somehow unhappy with the all-encompassing prospective of the book. Starting with today's tourism in Paris, it is with gusto that MacCannell dives into history to explore earlier guides to the City of Light and scampers through space to frame and coordinate the attractions of the French capital: somewhere between Lenin's t o m b and Telegraph Avenue, between the canals of Amsterdam and those of Venice: and "somewhen" between pre-industrial times and post-industrial ones. But it was precisely the multidimensional extent of such a macro-sociological study that 1 felt some reluctance with, experiencing a sort of historico-geographical vertigo in front of the quantity of examples provided. Clearly, The Tourist is not the kind of micro-sociology in depth with which the ordinary fieldworking anthropologist feels familiar. In fact, MacCannell's tourist is two-sided. On the one hand, he is a concrete individual who not only visits the world, but also explores it and makes sense of it. In this respect, he is a sociological "object" susceptible of empirical micro-studies. On the other hand, he is considered as transcending this empirical status to become the very model of modernity: hence the tourist is also the subject of a metasociology. MacCannell recognizes the pioneering works of Edward T. Hall, Robert Sommer, and Erving Goofman, but he finds their scope to be limited because it prevents him as well as them to generalize and pass from a sociology to a meta-sociology. He is basically unhappy with academic sociology because of the artificial fragmentation that it introduces into reality;in other words, sociology is reductionistic in its reifications. Accurately, the author notes: "Sociology will not progress much A N N A L S OF T O U R I S M R E S E A R C H , Mar/Apr '77
223