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526 semiotics
The complexity of communications involving more
than one kind of mind is the domain of contemporary
semiotic study. Thus, semiotics is well
adapted for the study of communication and
behaviour in tourism settings, where assumptions
of shared values, beliefs and language among hosts
and guests may be untenable.
Contributions to tourism research which have
made intensive use of semiotic methods include
Dean MacCannell's chapter on `The Semiotics of
Attraction' �1989), Bennetta Jules-Rosette's book
�1984), and several of the papers collected in the
special issue of the Annals of Tourism Research on `The
semiotics of tourism' �1989). Several of the papers
in the special issue of the Annals describe interactions
between Third World hosts and tourist guests
from Europe and North America. When these
tourist±host interactions are subject to close
semiotic description, it is evident that the tourists
and their hosts do not meet as representatives of
`modernity' and `tradition', respectively. Semiotic
analysis of the interactions reveals that the interactions
between Third World tourists and their
hosts are framed `as if ' the tourists are modernised
and the hosts are traditional or even `primitive,' but
this is mainly a superficial agreement or `definition
of the situation'. Closer examination dispels all
stereotypes. In several studies, `primitive' and
`peasant' people are revealed to be motivated
mainly by economic rationality, while the tourist
participants in the same exchanges appear to
inhabit a world shaped mainly by myth and
superstition. Similarly, Jules-Rosette discovered
Africans who carve `traditional figures' for the
tourist trade spend their spare time carving replicas
of such things as telephones and Western style
men's suits for their own amusement. MacCannell
argued that the global system of attractions, the Taj
Mahal, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Egyptian Sphinx,
the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramid of the Sun and so on,
constitutes a special class of signs intended to
communicate across every cultural and historic
boundary.
The American pragmatist philosopher, Charles
Sanders Peirce, determined there are three classes
of signs. Each class is based on differences in the
relationship between the signifier and the signified,
and each is relevant to the study of tourism
attractions and communication involving tourists.
First, iconic signs depend on a bond of resemblance
between the signifier and the signified. For
example, a photograph of a famous sight is iconic
to the extent that the sight can be recognised in the
photo. Much tourism imagery found in brochures
and guidebooks is of the iconic type. The
saturation of the media with iconic images is
necessary to the motivation to travel to specific
destinations. Tourists exchange iconic signs for a
view of the `real thing'. Second, indexical signs or
indices are produced by the direct action of that
which they represent. For examples, Friday's
footprint in the sand was Robinson's first sign that
he shared the island with another human being.
The presence of crowds of tourists is indexical of
the popularity of a given attraction or destination.
Third, symbolic signs or symbols are
arbitrary and conventional, and they require
community consensus on proper meanings. The
large statue of a woman standing in New York
harbour is, by convention, a symbol of Liberty. It is
an example of a symbol which has attained crosscultural
significance.
Any object or idea can be represented by each of
the three types of sign. For example, `liberty' can be
signified indexically by the broken bars of a cage,
or iconically by someone dancing naked on a
tropical beach. A problem with using semiotic
analysis for the study of tourism is that it tends to
produce ontological insecurity. Within semiotics,
everything is either a signifier or a signified. There
is no realm of `reality' which is separate from and
merely modelled by signs. Everything is signs or
parts of signs and everything stands for something
else. Nothing can simply stand for itself, not even
so-called `natural' things. Flowers signify passion,
rocks durability, and so on. Thus, living in a world
of signs imposes upon the human subject a
condition of being forever in flux, involved in
exchanges and transformations.
The restless, incessant searching of tourists
worldwide can be read as a symptomatic exposure
of the semiotic basis of human existence after the
erosion of older fictional grounding of the human
subject �gender, ethnicity, geographical roots, work
or profession and so on). Further, there is very good
reason to believe that once `the tourist' becomes a
kind of universal identity, it will not be possible to
return to older more grounded, specific versions of