The ethics of sightseeing
Is travel inherently beneficial to human character?Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? In this challenging book, Dean MacCannell identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through his unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, MacCannell ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: 'picturesque' rural and natural landscapes, 'hip' urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. He shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as 'staged authenticity'. Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, the book shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world
Print Book, English, ©2011
University of California Press, Berkeley, ©2011
xvi, 271 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780520257825, 9780520257832, 0520257820, 0520257839
665064481
The ubiquitous tourist and postmodern paranoia. Tourist/other and the unconscious
Staged authenticity today
Recent trends in research and the new moral tourism. Why sightseeing?
Toward an ethics of sightseeing
Trips and their reason
City and countryside as symbolic constructs. The tourist in the urban symbolic
Looking through the landscape
The imagination versus the imaginary. An imaginary symbolic: from Piranesi to Disney
The touristic attitude: acceding to the imaginary
The Bilbao effect: ethical symbolic representation
Painful memory
The intentional structure of tourist imagery
Tourist agency