Nico Daswani on the readings
Most interesting to me in these readings is understanding the development of the study of tourism from a discrete discipline to, as Franklin and Craig see it, a social phenomenon that is part of the way we look at the world today.
Although many of McCanell’s methods seem out of touch, his front and back region analysis is very relevant. His tourist, whom Cohen identifies as the “experiential tourist” seeks the authentic and real life of others without trying to appropriate it. One could relate this to our obsession with reality TV and content-generated internet such as blogs, youtubes, and myspaces. It is a sort of balance between knowledge-seeking and voyeurism, but without emotional involvement. Adler in Origins of Sightseeing explains how the study of tourism evolved between the 17 and 18th from personal narratives of amateur travelers to a discipline led by scholars and specialists. It seems that in our era we have gone back to seeking personal narratives and the internet and globalization are creating that need and/or facilitating that possibility.
I was also very interested in the relationship between travel and art, where it could be argued that the process of traveling is akin to the process of producing art. In addition to the aesthetic comparisons that are made by Adler in Travel as Performed Art, she points out that in the 17th and 18th centuries, travelers required financial sponsorship from elite families, which is akin to funders of the arts today, and that those who could not afford to pay for their travel would travel as tutors- this made me think of the need for so many artists to teach to make ends meet. She discusses the increased commercialization of tourist experiences which is so true of much art-making today.
Also, Erik Cohen describes the “recreational” mode of tourism as “refreshing modern man so he is able to return to the wear and tear of “serious” living”, which is similar to the role of arts when understood solely as entertainment. Could we draw deeper meaning from comparing tourism and the arts in the sense of social phenomena as opposed to recreational activities and discrete parts of society? According to Franklin and Craig, tourism may be far more rooted in the culture of the everyday than acknowledged. They argue that developing tourism can mean more access to knowledge about a place for the locals. How can the arts, which are omnipresent in a city like New York, enable us to understand our city better? What role can this play in our collective consciousness?