2017-2018 Colloquium Series


The Tourism Studies Working Group is pleased to announce
 
THE MORAL ECONOMY OF TOURISM

Dean MacCannell
Professor Emeritus, Environmental Design and Landscape Architecture, UC Davis

Friday, Sept. 1, 5:00pm
Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall
University of California, Berkeley

 
Abstract:
This lecture was given once before at the INFER Pan European Conference of Economists in Athens, Greece, July 2016. It is not yet published. I was asked to give the closing keynote address to the INFER Conference because of “growing recognition on the part of economists that we need to know more about the social bases of tourism and tourist motivation.” As always, I tried to give them more than they asked for. I link tourism to democracy, and the subjectivity of modern tourists to post-enlightenment democracy. My main point is that tourism could never grow to become “the world’s largest industry” if there were any economic motives at its base. Its structural motivation is the collective construction of an inclusive humanity as symbolized by the global system of attractions. Economic relations may encroach upon but cannot determine the tourist attraction. My lecture closely argues this point.

Speaker Bio:
Dean MacCannell is professor emeritus of Environmental Design and Landscape Architecture at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of more than 100 articles and books on new social and cultural formations in highly modernized societies. His book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class has been continuously in print for 41 years and is translated into more than a dozen languages. He has been an active member of TSWG since 2008 and enjoys returning to Kroeber Hall, the site of his undergraduate education in the fields of art and anthropology, especially now that he no longer has to take mid-term and final exams there.

 
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