Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 16
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Popular Culture Review
bly opposing desires: our need for authenticity and our seemingly endless capacity
to structure the world in order to avoid it.
“Don’t be a tourist,” reads a commercial for The Travel Channel, a popu
lar cable television network that provides, as its name implies, travel documenta
ries, promotions, and information. The message has potentially two contexts: the
direct one encourages viewers to tune into The Travel Channel to learn about for
eign cultures and thereby avoid mistakes and embarrassing situations while travel
ing; the indirect one encourages viewers to stay at home and watch the rest of the
world from the comfort of their armchairs. “Don’t be a tourist,” indeed. We need
also to consider a third implication, a message that has been intertwined with tour
ist behavior since the beginning of the first boom in the mid-nineteenth century.
The sub-text of the direct message reads: by learning of foreign cultures-by watch
ing television in this case-one can transcend from “tourist” (a lowly creature) to
“traveler” (an altogether likable creature). The promotion is a clever one; it easily
taps into one of the most pervasive and powerful sentiments of the Age of Tour
ism: everybody wants to travel, but nobody wants to be a tourist, at least conceptu
ally. And there is the rub-a great popular movement in which hordes of people
want to participate but for which the same people refuse to admit their participa
tion. As Dean MacCannell, in his seminal study The Tourist (1976), wryly notes,
“tourists dislike tourists” (10).
Tourism is thriving; without question it continues to reshape the economic
and social makeup of the world, and it shows no sign of abating. Our cultural
ambivalence towards tourism-our embracing of its trappings in practice versus
our denial of our complicity in theory-has engendered, then, a continuous battle
between “travelers” and “tourists,” a struggle for identity that ultimately may exist
only semantically. There is no resolution in the foreseeable future.
However, it is important to remember that this phenomenon is not a latetwentieth-century creation; the conflicts over travel identity were well in place by
the time the tourist boom in America began in earnest after the Civil War. More
over, the word “tourist” has been around for quite a while (The Oxford English
Dictionary cites the earliest reference at 1780), yet it did not begin to take on
widespread negative connotations until the mid-nineteenth century, coinciding, it
should come as no great surprise, with the increased numbers of tourists moving
energetically around the globe. Blackwood s Magazine in England, for example,
provides one of the most aggressive attacks upon this supposedly new breed of
traveler. In an article titled “Modem Tourism” (1848), the editors note that tech
nological advances in travel have had beneficial effects but have also initiated a
decidedly unfortunate one: “they have covered Europe with Tourists...” (185). The