The Ethics of Sightseeing / Edition 1

by Dean MacCannell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520257832
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/19/2011
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Dean MacCannell is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of The Tourist (UC Press).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Prologue: I Was a Tourist at Freud House, London

Part One. The Ubiquitous Tourist and Postmodern Paranoia
1 Tourist/Other and the Unconscious
2 Staged Authenticity Today

Part Two. Recent Trends in Research and the New Moral Tourism
3 Why Sightseeing?
4 Toward an Ethics of Sightseeing
5 Trips and Their Reason

Part Three. City and Countryside as Symbolic Constructs
6 The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic
7 Looking Through the Landscape

Part Four. The Imagination Versus the Imaginary
8 An Imaginary Symbolic: From Piranesi to Disney
9 The Touristic Attitude: Acceding to the Imaginary
10 The Bilbao Effect: Ethical Symbolic Representation
11 Painful Memory
12 The Intentional Structure of Tourist Imagery
13 Tourist Agency

Appendix: Tourism as a Moral Field
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Provocatively illustrated and supported by excellent references. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice

"MacCannell acts as an erudite and entertaining companion throughout this discursive and profound text."—Metapsychology Online Review

"Intellectually stimulating, the product of a prodigious intellect, the book is provided with illuminating sidebars, brilliant notes to chapters, as well as a comprehensive index and bibliography."—Annals of Tourism Research

Editorial Reviews

Intellectually stimulating, the product of a prodigious intellect, the book is provided with illuminating sidebars, brilliant notes to chapters, as well as a comprehensive index and bibliography.

Annals Of Tourism Research - Nilak Datta

Provocatively illustrated and supported by excellent references. . . . Highly recommended.

Choice - B. Osborne

"Provocatively illustrated and supported by excellent references. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

"MacCannell acts as an erudite and entertaining companion throughout this discursive and profound text."--Metapsychology Online Review

"Intellectually stimulating, the product of a prodigious intellect, the book is provided with illuminating sidebars, brilliant notes to chapters, as well as a comprehensive index and bibliography."--Annals of Tourism Research

From the Publisher

"The Ethics of Sightseeing is challenging, insightful, and frustrating all at the same time. . . . All readers of this provocative study will be drawn into the fascinating conversation."

David M. Wrobeln Studies Journal

MacCannell acts as an erudite and entertaining companion throughout this discursive and profound text.

Metapsychology Online Review - Chris Vaughan

"The Ethics of Sightseeing is challenging, insightful, and frustrating all at the same time. . . . All readers of this provocative study will be drawn into the fascinating conversation."

American Studies Journal - David M. Wrobel