Untitled

tourism reflects broader social and cultural changes so that consumption is
no longer only about buying goods and services that one has some kind of
direct need or use of. In addition, consumption has become a way to make
social distinctions and identity statements through the symbolic values of
commodities (Bourdieu 1984). Tourism itself has come to symbolise that
one is able to travel, to go vacationing and to do all those things that one
cannot do while working and staying in one’s home environment.
With the idea of commodification, what has become clear is that
these values that drive tourists to certain sights do not come out of the
blue. They are produced and reproduced through meanings that are
established in the interrelationship between the tourist and her or his
society. For MacCannell, writing in the mid 1970s, that was a modern
society characterised by processes of modernisation where old buildings,
values and practices were rapidly being destroyed, leading to a
fragmentation of daily life accompanied by disparate experiences where
“everything solid melted into air”, as Marx once famously argued (quoted
by Berman 1988). To this modern life, without a centre or coherence in
which to put the fragments back into a whole, modern tourism appeared as
a kind of solution. It promised in response to offer a reality in other
peoples real material lives and in other times, places and cultures. Tourism
became a kind of modern pilgrimage where tourists, driven by a quest of
authenticity, were travelling on the lookout for signs of roots, history,
heritage and perspectives on a world lost at home.
Tourism then reflects a larger social shift from an industrial society
to a consumer society in which commodities are consumed also for their
symbolic values and their ability to signify taste, fashion and other cultural
distinctions. Indeed, tourism has even become something of an icon of this
change. It also illustrates well a development, under the regime of
commodification, in which an ever greater realm of human life is being
mediated and regulated by economic rationality in accordance with the
ideologies of capitalism and neo-liberalism (Harvey 2005).
Summing up
In this chapter we began our conceptual travels with an investigation of
two central concepts in tourism: image and destination. Instead of
approaching them as isolated concepts we gradually tried to unfold them as
keys into broader issues of representation that lie at the core of any social
and culturally oriented tourism theory. We have thus also avoided the
27