Abstract
In Ego and Soul John Carroll describes tourism as the greatest and most successful lie of western, consumerist culture.’ It is not meant as a compliment. Tourists wander the world in search of the adventure and glamour promised by purveyors of holidays. They believe they are set for authentic encounters with other places and peoples and see their trip as their major exercise of freedom in the year — freedom of choice, freedom from home, freedom from familiar responsibilities.
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Notes
John Carroll Ego and Soul (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1998).
Cf. Alain de Botton The Art of Travel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), p. 20: ‘A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.’
Jonathan Margolis ‘Leisure’, in A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 191.
‘Hospitality as commerce…the founding principle of a sea-side resort’, Maggie Lane Jane Austen and Food (London: Hambledon, 1995), p. 139.
See the response to the Pope by Libby Purves, The Times, Tuesday July 10, 2001, p. 14. She describes how the fact that tourists were visiting Croatia meant that someone knew what was happening to the city of Dubrovnik during the recent war.
The range of topics covered in perhaps the first large-scale academic work on tourism makes clear how irrelevant the travel/tourism distinction generally is today. See Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt Holiday Business: tourism in Australia since 1870 (Sydney: Miegunyah, 2000).
‘And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone — we will recollect what we have seen…Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers’, Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (London: Dent, 1958), p. 135.
Josef Pieper In Tune with the World: a theory of festivity (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1965), p. 3.
See, for example, May Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 47–53.
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© 2005 Hayden Ramsay
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Ramsay, H. (2005). Playing Abroad. In: Reclaiming Leisure. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512825_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512825_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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