Alienation

Alienation became a salient sociological concept when Karl Marx (1978) used it to identify the ills of the relations of capitalist production. According to him, it operates in several forms: the separation of laborers from their products, their act of production, themselves, and fellow workers. The debate on alienation reached its climax between the 1960s and the 1970s when the Frankfurt School, existentialists, and American social psychologists contributed to reinterpretations and empirical measurements of alienation. It was around the same period that MacCannell (1976), in his seminal book, borrowed this concept and made it relevant to tourism studies.

From a Marxist production perspective, the development of modern tourism, especially movements from the core into the periphery through mass tourism, assists the spread of capitalism, which results in the loss of means of production for local residents. For instance, land alienation associated with tourism development is prevalent in...