Dean MacCANNELL

Several conventions of common tourist imagery (travel posters, tourist snap shots, and advertising brochures) are analyzed as anchor points of the tourist imaginary. Borrowing ideas from Sartre's L'imaginaire and Barthes' Mythologies, I question current efforts to oppose visual imagery to the other senses in tourism research. Limit and lack in the tourist imaginary will be examined as an opening for a new tourist imagination. The ground between the tourist imaginary and the imagination is proffered as an ethical field.

Bernard DEBARBIEUX

Bernard Debarbieux is professor of cultural and political geography at the University of Geneva. He joined the University staff in 2001. Before that, he taught in Grenoble (France), New York, Montreal and Paris. He is presently visiting scholar at Vassar college (NY). As a researcher, he specializes in the production of geographical knowledge and imagination, and political and collective territorialities. His main objects of research are the mountains at national, regional and global levels.

Noel B. SALAZAR

Noel B. Salazar obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently Founding Director of Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University (UK). He is the author of Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the anthropology of tourism and heritage. Dr. Salazar is on the editorial boards of Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, AIBR - Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, Mondes du Tourisme, and the European Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research. In addition, he is on UNESCO's and UNWTO's official roster of consultants and an expert panel member of the National Geographic Society's Center for Sustainable Destinations.