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this particular notion of a purified social that exists on its own has been
critiqued. Various attempts to formulate and develop alternatives have also
been made. The core of this alternative argumentation is that there is,
strictly speaking, no such thing as a social sui generis. Instead, the social
ought to be theorised as more or less always involving also various nonsocial
phenomena, for example; technology, material artefacts, or even that
which has traditionally been conceived of as the other of the social, namely
so called “nature”.
In a similar vein, it can now be argued that there is no such thing as
tourism sui generis either. Everywhere we go we will find that tourism and
tourists are neither purely social nor separately existing phenomena. They
are always surrounded by various non-humans, be it aeroplanes, tickets,
restaurants, museums, roads, or beverages. In principle, then, everything
we might distinguish as tourism or touristic may well be equally regarded
as belonging to something else.
Yet, in spite of this parasitic nature of tourism, as earlier discussed,
the task of tourism theory is also to bring forth a common theoretical
ground by drilling down its own conceptual pillars. In the next section we
will outline some essential requirements tourism theory needs to cover in
principle.
An essential tourism trinity with a geographical twist
As we conceive it, any tourism theory that aims to understand and explain
tourism and tourists would at least have to include the three interrelated
essential factors of ability, mobility and motivation. These factors are
certainly not exhaustive and do not cover every aspect and realm of what
tourism theory can and needs to address. They do, however, articulate a
minimum ontological skeleton of tourism onto which other factors may be
added, depending on particular research needs and theoretical preferences.
Breaking the ability, mobility and motivation triad into its
component parts we see that in order for tourism to occur, people first have
to have an ability to move from here to there, be it near or far. In tourism
theory this has traditionally been understood and explained with reference
to time and money as those basic factors enabling or constraining the
ability to travel. According to historical accounts of the development of
tourism most people (the rich and the privileged excluded) did not have,
prior to the age of modern mass tourism of the 20 th century, enough free
leisure time available to spend on going somewhere outside their home
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