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Tourist was in fact that “we are all tourists” (MacCannell 1976/1999, p.
191). In spite of the title of the book, and its influence in tourism studies, it
was in actuality not quite about tourists per se, but rather about life in
modern society under conditions of modernity. Later, others continued
very much in the same path, for example Urry when claiming that the
“tourist gaze” is:
increasingly bound up with, and is partly indistinguishable from, all
sorts of other social and cultural practices. This has the effect, as
“tourism” per se declines in specificity, of universalising the tourist gaze
– people are much of the time “tourists” whether they like it or not (Urry
1990/2002, p.74).
As the heading of this section points out, the themes of “we are all
tourists now” and “the end of tourism”, are very much different sides of
the same coin. The more we push the tourist into the midst of the social
world, the more she or he seems to become indistinguishable. Yet, on the
verge of disappearing underneath the layers of “other social and cultural
practices”, the tourist Phoenix arises anew from the ashes. The tourist then
returns in mutated form as a grand metaphor, if not an icon, of consumer
life in a contemporary society that itself has become like a postmodern
palimpsest of “touristified socio-cultural space”.
Image 4.1: We are all tourists now. 29
One of the most distinguishing features of contemporary tourism is
then that it is intrinsically embedded in a surrounding social milieu, even
to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from it. In this reading
today’s tourism stands out as “everything and nothing at the same time“.
For us this forms a fundamental “paradox of tourism” and, like other
paradoxes, it cannot really be solved. Instead, tourism research and theory
29 www.pacificworlds.com/.../images/tourists.jpg (retrieved 2009-10-25)
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