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Explore the multifaceted nature of tourism as a global economic sector, its impact on power dynamics, and its role in shaping consumption patterns. Discover how tourist gaze, tourist bubbles, and the Disneyization of tourist experiences contribute to standardized and predictable mass consumption. Understand the power dynamics, internationalization, and economic implications of tourism in the globalized world.
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Today’s Class • What is Tourism • The ‘Tourist Gaze’ • Tourism as Consumption • Tourism, Power, and Political Economy
Today’s Readings • Susan Fainstein and Dennis Judd ‘Global Forces, Local Strategies, and Urban Tourism’, 1-17. • Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning, ‘Say “Cheese”: The Disney Order that is Not So Mickey Mouse’, 317-323. • Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 19-21, 31-35, 40-41 • Jamaica Kincaid A Small Place New York: Penguin, 1988, 3-19.
Tourism • “At the end of the 20th century, travel to distant places has become an ordinary experience, taken for granted as a routine part of life. In this way, tourism has shrunk the globe as much as the revolutions in telecommunications and computers.” Fainstein and Judd
Tourism • one of the world’s most important economic sectors over past half century • by the mid-1980s, employed more people than the oil industry • Connected to: rise of middle class in post-WWII industrialized economies, mass consumerism, and technological developments
Tourism? • “any person who stays away from home overnight” Fainstein and Judd • “To be a tourist means to have someone else make your bed” Enloe
Tourism • An activity primarily of citizens of the West • An act of consumption • Lifts us out of everyday experiences • Connected to the commodification of leisure time • a process that is both produced andproductive
how to look at places and interpret what we see through familiar signs and signifiers learn heritage, architecture, mythology, folklore and then look for it through the markers that are placed and organized in the destination We are coached on how to be a tourist Fainstein and Judd The Tourist Gaze
“The new urban tourism typically superimposes onto the template of old streets and buildings various combinations of festival markets and shopping districts, arcades and atriums, sports stadiums, pedestrian malls…” Fainstein and Judd Create a place in the city that is separated from the daily ‘threats’ of urban living Tourist Bubbles
Consumption “…the tourist is a consumer away from home” Fainstein and Judd • Buying prolongs the visit: enables you to relive, remember the place • Bought objects retain the associations with the place • Gifts become ‘vehicles’ for sharing the visit
“…the pressure of handling large numbers of people and the efficiencies that can be achieved by selling a uniform product motivates suppliers to provide standardized services and facilities” Fainstein and Judd Efficient Predictable Organized in standardized ways to promote mass consumption Standardization
Disneyization • Extension of principles of Disney theme parks… • standardization, • predictability, • Commodification …to all tourist experiences
…control is embedded, preventative, subtle, co-operative and apparently non-coercive and consensual Shearing and Stenning Disney: an example of modern, private policing Constant (but invisible) surveillance A Panopticon effect facilitates a strategy of efficient mass consumption Disneyization
“Tourism is not just about escaping work and drizzle; it is about power, increasingly internationalized power” “A lot is riding on sun, surf and souvenirs” Enloe a means to attract foreign currency and relieve debt burdens A source of jobs (low-wage, labour intensive) A new form of dependency Tourism, Power and Globalization