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1. Introduction
Believe me: an image is more than it appears to be.
- Ovid 1
In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion,
whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
- Robert Runcie 2
Anyone who enters these lands travels on a tourist visa, the specialized
expert no exception.
- Gunnar Olsson 3
Any tourism researcher has to simultaneously pay attention to how tourism
can be understood and explained and how tourism on the ground works
and develops. Consequently, this report is an engagement with the field of
tourism studies, with a particular focus on tourism theory in relation to
social and geographical aspects of contemporary tourism.
By exploring, mapping and problematizing some of these issues we
hope to prepare the ground for what is our first objective: to identify some
relevant and important future areas of research on tourism and tourists.
Our investigation will of course not cover all fields of tourism research and
aspects of tourism theory, and the emphasis is on certain contemporary
matters which we place in a geographical frame of understanding. Yet, we
hope that the report will provide a point of departure for subsequent
discussions and outlines of more specific research initiatives in the context
of both the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre and Icelandic tourism.
It should then be noted that although we will frequently use and
refer to tourism in the context of Iceland for illustrative and pedagogic
purposes, we are not reporting research on Iceland as a tourist destination.
Yet, we believe that the invoked Icelandic references will benefit
discussions and considerations about future tourism research in Iceland –
albeit tourism is a global phenomenon, it is always geographically situated.
Now, this could well have been our only objective with the report.
Yet, the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre should not only promote
1 Ovid 1955, no pagination.
2 Source unknown.
3 Olsson 2007, p. xi.
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