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materiality. Yet, you are able to relate also to that material surrounding in
ways that take you beyond your pure physical engagement through bodily
sensory perception, perhaps by signifying what you see as something
astonishing. This illustrates that:
The material world itself does not convey meaning; it is language
systems that express meaning to members of particular social groups by
representing concepts in certain terms (Hunter 2008, p. 356).
There are obviously many different ways of naming things-andrelations
and depending upon a whole set of factors, ranging from
individual to collective, we may assign meanings in both similar and
different ways. According to semiotics this is inevitably so, because the
relationship between signifier and signified is not fixed or given in
language, but instead arbitrary and held together and apart by social
convention. Indeed, it is through social convention that sites and places are
provided with touristic meaning, and, we may add, also the phenomena of
tourism as such. Though bodily movements and travelling have existed for
long, tourism, as we have come to know it, is a recent social convention.
This leads us back to MacCannell, because what he eventually
managed to achieve was symmetry between tourist attractions and a
semiotic definition of the sign, which, in his own words, was “a source of
great personal pleasure (MacCannell 1976/1999, p. 110):
SIGN = (a) represents + (b) something + (c) to someone
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(TOURIST) ATTRACTION = (a) marker + (b) sight + (c) tourist
Image 2.6: Sign and (tourist) attraction. 16
A (tourist) attraction is then like a sign, in that it too represents
something to someone. The sign of a tourist attraction is a sight
16 Adopted from MacCannell (1976/1999, p. 110).
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