The Ethics of Sightseeing (English, Dean MacCannell)

Product description Review Select Guide Rating From the Inside Flap "This is quintessential MacCannell. It is quirky, brilliant, profound, and thought provoking. There are new insights on almost every page. A great read." Edward Bruner, author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel"This is an extraordinary, engaging, and provocative work by one of the distinctive leaders in what has become a lively intellectual field. It also speaks to much broader questions about culture, economy, social life, and experience than the touristic this is powerful social theory in transit." Don Brenneis, co-editor of Law and Empire in the Pacific The Ethics of Sightseeing is vintage MacCannell. It draws together topics some of which have already appeared as separate papers in an analytical whole in the same way he did in his original 1976 book The Tourist. And like The Tourist, this book is full of brilliant insights drawn from personal experiences, anecdotes, and a wide knowledge of the humanistic and social science literature. It is eye-opening and pushes the boundaries of knowledge and disciplines. It will go well beyond academic and classroom audiences in providing a new twist to cultural studies interpretations of modern society. Nelson Graburn, co-editor of Multiculturalism in the New Japan From the Back Cover "This is quintessential MacCannell. It is quirky, brilliant, profound, and thought provoking. There are new insights on almost every page. A great read."—Edward Bruner, author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel"This is an extraordinary, engaging, and provocative work by one of the distinctive leaders in what has become a lively intellectual field. It also speaks to much broader questions about culture, economy, social life, and experience than the touristic – this is powerful social theory in transit."—Don Brenneis, co-editor of Law and Empire in the Pacific“The Ethics of Sightseeing is vintage MacCannell. It draws together topics—some of which have already appeared as separate papers—in an analytical whole in the same way he did in his original 1976 book The Tourist. And like The Tourist, this book is full of brilliant insights drawn from personal experiences, anecdotes, and a wide knowledge of the humanistic and social science literature. It is eye-opening and pushes the boundaries of knowledge and disciplines. It will go well beyond academic and classroom audiences in providing a new twist to cultural studies interpretations of modern society.”—Nelson Graburn, co-editor of Multiculturalism in the New Japan About the Author Dean MacCannell is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of The Tourist (UC Press). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Ethics of SightseeingBy Dean MacCannellUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSCopyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-520-25782-5ContentsList of Illustrations, vii, Preface, ix, Prologue: I Was a Tourist at Freud House, London, xiii, PART ONE. THE UBIQUITOUS TOURIST AND POSTMODERN PARANOIA, 1 Tourist/Other and the Unconscious, 3, 2 Staged Authenticity Today, 13, PART TWO. RECENT TRENDS IN RESEARCH AND THE NEW MORAL TOURISM, 3 Why Sightseeing?, 41, 4 Toward an Ethics of Sightseeing, 46, 5 Trips and Their Reason, 63, PART THREE. CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE AS SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTS, 6 The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic, 91, 7 Looking Through the Landscape, 117, PART FOUR. THE IMAGINATION VERSUS THE IMAGINARY, 8 An Imaginary Symbolic: From Piranesi to Disney, 141, 9 The Touristic Attitude: Acceding to the Imaginary, 152, 10 The Bilbao Effect: Ethical Symbolic Representation, 158, 11 Painful Memory, 167, 12 The Intentional Structure of Tourist Imagery, 182, 13 Tourist Agency, 196, Appendix: Tourism as a Moral Field, 211, Notes, 231, Index, 255, CHAPTER 1Tourist/Other and the UnconsciousI am thinking of getting rich in order to be able to repeat these trips. —Sigmund Freud, letter from Florence to Wilhelm Fliess, 1896TOURISM AND ITS SUBJECTIVE FIELDIn important ways, those of us who study tourism have been let off the hook by the magnitude of our subject. Few assessments have been made more often or contested less than "tourism is the world's largest industry." Several recent empirical studies qualify this statement, finding most trips classed as tourism began as family visits. If that is true, it would be no less accurate or more absurd to say "family is the world's largest industry." My central argument here is that tourism contains keys to understanding recent changes in the ways we frame our humanity, and key to understanding tourism are some delicate, decidedly noneconomic relations that I gather under the term "the ethics of sightseeing."Tourism statistics usually do not distinguish between a trip to a trade show (or a family visit) versus travel for the sole purpose of enjoying a destination's beauty, culture, and amenities. From the industry