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The tourist and the local

Article  in  Tourist Studies · November 2015


DOI: 10.1177/1468797615618120

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Dean Maccannell
University of California, Davis
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TOU0010.1177/1468797615618120Tourist StudiesMacCannell

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Editorial

Tourist Studies

The tourist and the local


1­–8
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DOI: 10.1177/1468797615618120
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Dean MacCannell
University of California at Davis, USA

The seven case studies in this Special Issue were originally presented at the 17th Berlin
Roundtable on Transnationality in the summer of 2013. Our work at the Roundtable was
generously supported by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation. It was a pleasure and an honor
for me to direct the Roundtable and to continue to work with this group of young
researchers as they developed their presentations for publication.
Each case illustrates one or several ways that tourism inflects local community arrange-
ments—life styles, identities, politics. Together, these cases provide an empirical brief
that calls into question the utility of existing conceptual models of the human community
derived from the major traditions in the social sciences—sociology, anthropology, geog-
raphy, political science. That the arrival of tourists alters the local community has been a
theme from the earliest years of tourism research. These modifications in the name of
tourism have not yet been identified as the defining theoretical challenge of tourism stud-
ies that distinguishes our research from work in older fields and disciplines from which
we continue to draw concepts and methods. They have been treated idiosyncratically and
descriptively: for example, the “Golden Hordes’ brought chain stores in their wake and
destroyed the uniqueness of a place that was the source of its attraction.” Or, “the arrival
of tourists opened up opportunities for cash income from women’s work and disrupted
traditional gender hierarchies,” and so on.
What we aim for in this Special Issue is to raise the level of awareness of this unique
and defining characteristic of tourism research and inaugurate discussion of it.
Transnationality, in general, and tourism, in particular, challenge epistemological assump-
tions that are implicit in existing models of society, culture, politics, and human interac-
tion. Existing models of the human community assume that social compacts are a function
of the dominant local economic activities, political arrangements, class hierarchies, reli-
gious and ethnic composition, internal to the community. At minimum, tourism research
alerts us to the fact that these paradigmatic social and cultural features of communities are
increasingly susceptible to being reframed as “local color” as providing imagery in the
grand spectacle of global tourist desire.
The studies in this Special Issue, from small resorts on the Adriatic to major urban
centers like Hiroshima and Detroit, reveal that localities are shaped and dominated by
their imagined relations with putative tourist desire. Each case demonstrates conclusively

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2 Tourist Studies 

that local tourist bureaus, planners, politicians, and entrepreneurs base decisions that fun-
damentally alter local society and physical space on what they believe tourists want.
What is at stake here? Begin with the concept of “locality” or the “local community.”
In the major social science traditions, localities are defined by normative difference.
Local norms cover everything from the grammar and vocabulary of the language in use,
to what is considered to be appropriate attire, matters of taste in cuisine, music, and
humor; to laws proscribing who one may and may not marry; and to far from universal
prohibitions against heinous crimes. Discovery of a world of difference set the first
travelers in motion and continues to animate the itineraries of tourists today (see, for
example, Cartier, 2005; Urry, 1990). Establishing conceptually defensible boundaries
around culture, class, ethnicity, gender, region, languages is a messy but necessary step
not just in geographic research but anthropology, linguistics, and sociology as well. Not
merely “destination differentiation” but also the structure of the university colleges and
departments and academic careers is based in large part on creating and maintaining
these boundaries. Often overlooked in methods courses is the crucial importance of
determining what not to study, that is, drawing lines and ruling certain observations in,
and others outside the purview of the research.
For the most part, the major traditions in the human sciences have ruled that the
consummate “outsider,” the tourist, is beyond the scope of their primary research
agenda. But the transnational invasion of tourists into traditionally bounded subject
matter areas has already changed the world forever. The failure of traditional fields and
disciplines to recognize the changes wrought by tourism has already forced tourism
researchers to set up shops and journals of their own. But as we do so, we mainly utilize
theories and methods borrowed whole cloth from the major traditions, that is, we are
importing their incapacity to deal with our subject. With few exceptions, tourist studies
continue to treat the movement and practices of tourists as if they occur within the fixed
grid of well-established socio-cultural-political-economic differences and boundaries.
The articles in this Special Issue highlight ways existing assumptions about conceptu-
ally meaningful “difference” are being undone by tourism at the local level. And taken
together, they suggest the need for new ways to conceptualize “the local” and the emer-
gence of new social and cultural arrangements at the local level that is now occurring
everywhere on earth in response to tourism.
From the twisted ruins of Hiroshima Ground Zero to the supposedly picturesque ruins
of industrial capitalism in Detroit, this Issue is about places that are defined as much by
the ways they hook, or attempt to hook, tourist desire as by the way they situate the life
of the people who live in them. The contributions often highlight tensions between the
local as tourist destination and the local as a place where the citizens live, work, relax, go
to school, raise their families, and form meaningful and lasting bonds with one another.

The contributions
Historian Stefanie Schaefer argues that a single event can dominate the identity of a
place, and in the context of global tourist flows, local identity can trump regional and
even national identity. She provides a meticulously researched article on the rhetorical
framing of Hiroshima bomb memory. Using archival evidence, she found that making

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MacCannell 3

this horrific act of war a symbol of “Peace” was originally suggested by United States
military occupational forces in Japan immediately after the war. Hiroshima political
elites listened very carefully as the US Command argued the need for a “correct” bomb
memory narrative for future international tourism development, especially if there was to
be any hope of attracting tourists from the United States. Semiotics 101 teaches us that
the meaning of all symbols is arbitrary (“guerre” can mean war just as “war” can mean
war) and is based on nothing other than conventional agreements between their users.
Once established in conventional usage, however, the original arbitrariness of the sym-
bol is necessarily forgotten. Hiroshima’s success at establishing a global agreement that
the bombing should be remembered as a symbol of “Peace” is perhaps the most dramatic
contradiction that tourism has ever been called upon to obscure. Schaefer also documents
concerns expressed during the early efforts to preserve artifacts of the bombing. There
was well-founded official worry that any suggestion that these charred objects were
being saved to attract tourists would constitute a kind of reflexive denigration of the
seriousness of the event. Hiroshima takes great care to articulate the pretense that their
representation of A-Bomb memory is not really for the purpose of attracting tourist dol-
lars. For their part in this charade, the tourists at Hiroshima mainly claim to be peace
pilgrims or activists. Schaefer further suggests that heritage tourism (especially at “Dark
Tourism” sites) cannot work unless the tourists are enabled to deny, at least to them-
selves, that they are “tourists.”
Basing her contribution on extensive fieldwork in Northern Ireland, Bree Hocking
revises and updates Goffman’s concept of “a veneer of consensus” to show how new
regimes of political repression are inaugurated in the name of “tourism.” In considering
the official response to the 2012–2013 loyalist protests over limits on flying the British
flag at Belfast City Hall, Hocking explores how the tourist gaze was invoked as a “neu-
tral arbiter,” a means to order and regulate allowable expression within post-conflict
Northern Ireland. The protests are subsequently assessed as a form of power negotiation,
whereby contestation over the right to define the image of a place in both physical and
virtual space assumed a quasi-political role. She specifically argues that the definition of
the image of a place, an image that might receive currency in global tourist flows, is sup-
planting prior civic compacts. She finds it necessary to distinguish between “the spatial
staging of the tourist city” and the “actual spatial practices of residents,” going on to say
that “In many ways, simply to live in such a city is to become a part of the tourist prod-
uct.” It is evident from her account that under the regime of global tourism, local politics
are pressured to become content free. She describes a “political” event that aimed to
advance the theme of “no to silence” (without a “yes” to any specific demand) and
another “operation sit-in” which was an initiative to get local people to patronize restau-
rants and cafes catering to tourists.
Igor Tchoukarine provides a historical case comparison of the 1960s development of
resort villages on the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia long before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
One of the villages was conceived, built, and administered in the framework of Western
market principles by Club Med. The other was built by a Czechoslovakian labor union to
service the leisure needs of its workers. Tchoukarine provides a richly detailed account
of the planning and construction of both villages and the mixed motives and political
concerns of the Yugoslavian socialist planners who facilitated the creation of these two

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4 Tourist Studies 

very different resorts. The origins of the resorts in the two different and opposed global
economic systems, socialism and capitalism, eventually had little discernible effect at the
human level where the pleasurable pursuits of Eastern Block and the (mainly French)
Western tourists were remarkably similar. Tchoukarine finds that the culture of resort
tourism over-rides their opposing political/economic origins. He comments, “this matrix
of experiences and services constitutes a common and constant feature that cuts through
the ideological distinctions between the (capitalist) Club Med and (socialist) ROH
resorts.” The configuration of the resort experience is shaped more by efforts to cater to
tourist desire than by their different macro-economic origins. Tchoukarine further argues
that the peaceful co-existence of these two kinds of resorts and their commonalities reso-
nates with the larger role of Yugoslavia as an arbiter of East West differences during the
Cold War.
Sarah Gothie provides a lively analysis of how, once a place falls under the regime of
tourism, life begins to imitate art as a matter of economic necessity. Her case is Anne of
Green Gables tourism on Prince Edward Island (PEI). Tourists from all over the world
are drawn to PEI to walk in the 100-plus-year-old footsteps of a fictional character, an
orphaned girl child with fiery red hair. Gothie documents in detail the ways Lucy Maud
Montgomery’s fiction continuously and effectively mediates landscape design and com-
mercial development of PEI, and the embodied tourist performances and identifications
that occur in the liminal space between the real place and the fictional character that
inhabited it. PEI is now substantially reconfigured to conform to fictional Anne’s percep-
tions of it. Gothie’s explication of Anne of Green Gables tourism makes evident the
powerfully constitutive nature of the tourist experience of the PEI and the many ways the
place has made itself into what tourists want it to be. Gothie effectively responds to the
challenge made by Tim Edensor (2001) in the inaugural issue of this Journal that “tour-
ist” should be defined as a type of performance, not as a special social role or status. The
elaborate “Annefication” of PEI draws in almost every type of tourist (male, female,
young, old, from every continent) who are encouraged put on straw hats and false red
braids and play Anne in the homes, fields, and farms of her fictional childhood. Gothie
convincingly argues that as it is developed for tourism, the region is being framed as a
“materialized childhood imaginary.” There may well be something childlike in each
moment of a tourist’s first encounter with the other of their imagination not just at PEI
but everywhere. Playing at being Anne is not the same as experiencing the actual place
she (fictionally) inhabited, but the touristic success of PEI is clearly founded on making
both possible.
Louise Ryan’s study of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart,
Tasmania, focuses on the ways this “Temple of Provocation” is remaking Tasmanian
identity. Before the museum was built, Tasmanians believed that “anything important
happened elsewhere.” Now they have begun to lose that mind-set. Called the “Getty of
the Antipodes,” the museum mounts a permanent collection and special exhibitions
intended to shock conventional moral sensibilities. MONA was privately built and
houses a private collection, but it has succeeded in leveraging changes in public policy
in everything from the definition of cultural institutions to zoning laws and the tax code,
all in the name of tourism. Ryan argues that the conservative New Zealanders embrace

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MacCannell 5

their intentionally provocative attraction because it has put them on the map of global
tourism flows. Ryan’s article raises a number of questions. Does becoming an attraction
in the eyes of others change the locals’ self-perception? Does creating an attraction and
the arrival of tourists actually change local culture? Ryan provisionally answers “yes” to
all of the above. MONA and the tourist attention it has attracted is changing the psyches
of the people of Hobart as they express their appreciation for its exhibitions and mingle
with outsiders at the rock concerts it sponsors, and so on.
Duane Jethro provides a study of a commercial “Freedom Park” in South Africa.
His observations make clear the difficulties facing those who would attempt to forge a
link between heritage and tourist perceptions and desires. In this case, manufacturing
a heritage attraction by monument construction and marketing can yield mixed results.
The noble task Freedom Park set itself may be impossible—creating a popular (and
therefore commercially viable) symbol of “inclusive heritage” from the ruins of a his-
torically divided society. While it is intended to celebrate indigenous South African
groups and the successful struggle to end apartheid, in practice, it mainly exemplifies
a contradiction within tourism between heritage and commercialization. Simply mar-
keting a place as “sacred” and decorating it with words and affective design elements
does not necessarily open the way for its entry into the tourist symbolic order. Despite
its claims to relevancy in term of “heritage,” it is still functioning mainly in the interest
of a private corporation and not primarily in the interests of the people of South Africa
or the World (as, for example, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site would function). The capacity of a site
to provide symbolic cover for contradiction and conflict may be dependent, first of all,
upon its capacity to resolve its own contradictions in favor of heritage, not commer-
cialization. Jethro’s study makes it clear that Freedom Park has yet to confront its own
internal contradictions.
Lena Tegtmeyer gives us the case of Detroit now experiencing a growth of “ruin
tourism.” Increasingly, European tourists and others are visiting the ruins of Detroit as
symbolic of the death of modernity. Tegtmeyer proposes a novel application of my
model of “sight sacralization” to explain Detroit’s reframing of industrial failure as
touristic success (MacCannell, 1976 [2013]: 43ff). Initially, official Detroit ignored the
first tourists who spontaneously arrived to view the ruins of industrial capitalism. As
often happens in similar circumstances, an object eventually deemed to be worth seeing
was initially discovered by artists, photographers, explorers, poor students who cannot
afford commercialized attractions, and well-heeled hipsters with exotic tastes. It was
only after the process of sight sacralization was well underway that the potential larger,
commercial value of the Detroit ruins were noticed by the Detroit Tourist Bureau and
tourism developers. So the last stage of the first “naturally occurring” sight sacralization
(mechanical reproduction) became the first (naming) phase of the second (commercial)
sacralization process. Tegtmeyer’s main point is that sight sacralization, by and for tour-
ists, has the power to reframe physical evidence of disastrous economic “failure” into
neo-liberal service (tourist) economic “success.” As neo-liberal economies increasingly
understand and control tourism and its ideological powers, they vastly expand their
capacity to make money out of anything whatsoever even abject economic conditions.

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6 Tourist Studies 

Tegtmeyer notes that tourism’s capacity to package and commodify and profit from
urban decay, abandonment, unemployment, and failed markets does not change the
underlying human condition left in the wake of disaster and the tourist interest in
disaster.
These articles do not exhaust the ways tourism inflects and re-shapes social com-
pacts at the local level. But, together they cover a very wide range of tourist destinations
and behaviors and point the way to a reconsideration of the local in the light of the
touristic appropriation of it. They establish that tourism pressures localities to re-define
and re-package their historical narratives, morality, politics, and traditional lines of
socio-cultural difference. That this type of social change usually goes unnoticed within
general social theory only serves to underscore its ubiquity and inevitability. It is occur-
ring everywhere and it is taken for granted even before it occurs. And it is radically
under-theorized.

A way forward
Permit me to make a brief preliminary comment on the epistemological implications of
this reframing of “the local.”
The major social science traditions apply their methodological and theoretical powers
to the causes and results of differences within human communities and population aggre-
gates. They study tensions and oppositions, and life, on either side of the conceptual lines
they have drawn between ethnicities, classes, genders, the rich and poor, politics left and
right, center and periphery, rural and urban, and so on.
Tourism research deals with a different division, that between the locality (or region)
taken as a whole (no matter how it may be divided internally) and the rest of humanity as
represented by the desire of the tourist. This is most sharply evident in tourism marketing
studies where destination identity and difference are regarded as primary drivers of mar-
ket share. But it is quietly present in every other kind of tourism research.
The fact that tourist desire is founded on difference (natural and normative) is no
longer in dispute. This, combined with historically recent very large increases in global
tourist numbers, suggests that localities can no longer be assumed to exist in an innocent
state of original unreflected uniqueness. Failure to recognize this will result in all the
human sciences finding themselves in the same situation as cultural anthropology and
ethnology at the end of the twentieth century, desperately clinging to a disappearing
subject matter, searching in vain for new research sites, and problems that are relatively
untouched by the arrival of outsiders.
In The Ethics of Sightseeing (MacCannell, 2011: 81 ff.), I suggested the need to inter-
rogate classic assumptions about place and community. Can localities as conceived
within the major traditions continue to be regarded as some kind of bedrock of human
existence? Can subjectivity continue to be regarded as primarily a function of local, or
class, or ethnic origins? It may be theoretical heresy to suggest that locality, class, ethnic-
ity, and gender are now diffuse symbolic effects to be gazed upon and superficially
“experienced” as mainly aesthetic examples of human difference or “otherness.” But it
is a theoretical heresy that must be committed by tourism researchers whether they
acknowledge it or not.

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MacCannell 7

Today, every World City has more annual visitors than residents, with visitors some-
times outnumbering residents by a factor of two or three to one. Our understanding of
what is happening at the local level has been blocked because twentieth century social
science did not take the trouble radically to question and change the fundamentals of
“center” and “periphery,” “place,” “migration,” “class,” “ethnicity,” and so on, in response
to transnational mass movements of people, immigrants, refugees, and tourists, the largest
movements and physical displacements, and new juxtapositions, in human history. We are
still trying to study tourism in the twenty-first century using conceptual tools designed
mainly to understand the new identities and dislocations caused by the industrial revolu-
tion of the nineteenth century.
As occurs more often than we may care to admit, artists and activists are out ahead of
the social scientists when it comes to dealing with displacement and shifting meanings
of “locality.” See, for example, the photographer David Bacon’s (2006) Communities
Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration; Lucy Lippard’s (1999)
On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place; and (1997) The Lure of the Local, or the
canonical work of Dorothea Lange, or the good works of groups like Doctors Without
Borders.
Among colleagues in the human sciences, no one has gone further than Tim Oakes
in confronting the conceptual challenge of locality today. Oakes (2005) convincingly
argues against continuing to conceive of “place” as a bounded entity. He recommends
approaching place as the locus of an ongoing dialogue between tourists, locals, and
others who have an interest in the “place.” This dialogue produces new cultural forms
and subjects. Even if unrealized, every such dialogue contains the possibility for the
emergence of newly reflexive subject positions, or new insights about self and other.
According to Oakes, the tourist/local dialogue maintains a “critical focus on the
forces of determination within which subject formation occurs” (p. 52). But it is also
the primary crucible that reconstitutes the modern subject or subjectivity on both
sides of the tourist/local line. The modern subject is a space-making subject. It is not
a passive consumer of space but an active creator of new kinds of space and spatial
meanings.
Oakes is wise enough not to suggest that these new spaces and spatial meanings are
morally or aesthetically superior or inferior to the ones they are replacing. They are
newly constituted, exponentially increasing in numbers and dispersion, requiring study
that is unfettered by adherence to outmoded assumptions about human communities and
relationships. We have tried to provide several samples of this kind of study in the arti-
cles collected here.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Stefanie Schaefer for assisting me in Berlin and corresponding with the authors and
assembling and preparing this Special Issue for publication.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests


The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

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8 Tourist Studies 

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Lippard, L. (1997) The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-Centered Society. New York:
The New Press.
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MacCannell, D. (2011) The Ethics of Sightseeing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Other,” in C. Cartier and A. Lew (eds) Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on
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