UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

Hybrid Presentation
In Person: Gifford Room, 221 Anthropology and Art Practice Bldg. University of California, Berkeley
On Zoom: [click here] *

Please join us for dinner and further conversation at the Great China Restaurant, Bancroft Avenue, Berkeley (6:15pm). RSVP required for dinner. Please e-mail graburn@berkeley.edu

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Abstract
The Tourist has been continuously in print for almost 50 years. This same half-century has brought a change from scattered and disconnected, highly local tourist goods and services to the point where ‘tourism’ is now called ‘the world’s largest industry.’ In this lecture I suggest that my book’s longevity may be because it continues to provide a base-line account of tourism in its pure state at the last moment before leisure became another industrial product. I further argue that highlighting the differences between The Tourist’s 1976, pure, “free-range, organic, sustainable tourism” and today’s “industrial tourism” can advance understanding of other currently fraught matters including over tourism, modern social angst and capitalism’s troubled relationship with democracy. “Alienated Leisure” will appear as an article in the next (December) issue of Theory, Culture and Society. Once again, I thank Nelson Graburn and TSWG for this opportunity to discuss my work in progress pre-publication.

Speaker Bio
Dean MacCannell is professor emeritus of Environmental Design and Geography at the University of California at Davis where he also served for more than three decades as Senior Research Rural Sociologist in the California Agricultural Experiment Station. His books include The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), The Time of the Sign—A Semiotic Interpretation of Modern Culture (1982 with Juliet Flower MacCannell) Empty Meeting Grounds (1992), The Ethics of Sightseeing (2012), and 18 & Out (2022).