Tara Good responds
Utilizing the phenomenon “Tourism” Dean MacCannell sketches a historical typography of Western socialization. MacCannell facilely jumps from mundane to extraordinary examples of travel and sightseeing, and by grounding them in social theory, holds up a reflecting glass to the post-industrial age. As a historically minded reader, I loved the historical trajectory he considered in his analysis. The work relies a great deal on theories exposed by Marx and Durkeim, but in framing tourism as a socially performative act through the work of Goffman and Levi-Strauss, he breaths new life into the works of foundational sociology.
In class this week one of my professors described Performativity as a self-creating, self-referential act. MacCannell underlined the implications of that statement on a massive scale when he described the function of tourism in society as “…a simultaneous development of industrial social structure and modern self-consciousness so the industrial structure are realized as attractions even as they are first coming into existence.”(187)
One theoretical area which MacCannell did not dabble into is Victor Turner’s definition of liminality. The differentiation of work vs. leisure is primary to Turner’s identification of liminal vs. liminoid spaces in society. MacCannell’s conception of tourist attractions as symbols of cultural continuousness which contributes to constructing and/or perpetuating cultural identity, parallel’s Turner’s work. The ritualization surrounding social enactment, as described by Turner as liminal behavior, is also described by MacCannell as a mode of differentiating society in the form of sightseeing. I think that a consideration of the performative intersection between these two authors would prove to be immensely informative in considering current manifestations of the phenomenon of tourism.