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544 sociology
ensues on account of perceived status differences
and the resultant need to respectively talk down or
up to each other. As other researchers have shown,
tour guides, also represent another instance of
sociolinguistic patterns of superordination and
subordination when, from a position of privileged
knowledge, they attempt to `secularise' a sight for
visitors. Indeed, so ubiquitous are linguistic encounters
in tourism that they may be considered as
extensive as the phenomenon of tourism itself.
Hence the need for sociolinguistic analyses.
References
Cohen, E. and Cooper, R. �1986) `Language and
tourism', Annals of Tourism Research 13: 533±63.
Dann, G. �1996) The Language of Tourism:A
Sociolinguistics Perspective, Wallingford: CAB International.
Hollinshead, K. �1993) `The truth about Texas',
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A & M
University.
Trudgill, P. �1983) Sociolinguistics:An Introduction to
Language and Society, London: Penguin Books.
sociology
GRAHAM M.S. DANN, UK
The sociology of tourism is a target field or
specialty of sociology. It applies approaches,
theories and methodologies to the study of
touristic phenomena, and of their wider social
significance and consequences. The sociology of
tourism concerns itself specifically with the motivations,
roles and social relations of tourists, the
structure and dynamics of the tourist system and of
touristic institutions, the nature of attractions and
their representations, and the impact of tourism
on destinations and host societies. Some researchers
�MacCannell 1976; Urry 1990) also see in
tourism an avenue through which the wider
problems of modern �and postmodern) society
could be examined. The field has a relatively brief
history; although some German sociologists analysed
tourism in the 1930s, the first publications in
English appeared only in the 1960s. Nevertheless,
the intellectual perspective and theoretical ap-
proach to tourism underwent significant transformations
over this short period. The early work in
the field has been reviewed in Cohen �1984); the
main theoretical approaches have been examined
in Dann and Cohen �1991).
The principal intellectual issue in the field is the
relationship between Western tourism and modernity
�or postmodernity). In comparison, the
transformational impact of tourism on host settings
± though of considerable practical importance ±
has rarely become a focus of much intellectual
concern �Bruner 1991). The controversy regarding
the nature of modern tourism was initiated by a
biting critique of tourism by an American social
historian, Boorstin �1964). Within a broader
critique of contemporary America, he contrasted
the traveller of the past with the modern tourist,
claiming that the former submitted to the tribulations
of travel to achieve authentic experiences,
while the latter thrives on easily attainable,
inauthentic `pseudo-events', contrived by locals
for touristic consumption. Boorstin thus sees in
tourism just another domain in which the superficiality
and inauthenticity of modern life is
manifested.
The first sociological paradigm for the study of
tourism, which informed the discourse of the
topic throughout the 1970s and 1980s, was
proposed by MacCannell �1973, 1976). In studied
opposition to Boorstin's conception of the tourist,
he sought to formulate a distinctly sociological
approach to tourism, disengaged from and contrasting
with its common sense image.
MacCannell conceived of the tourist as an
alienated modern, who ± in contrast to Boorstin's
view ± engages in a serious quest for authentic
experiences, in remote, non-modern places and
pre-modern times. Rather than a superficial
consumer of pseudo-events, the tourist is construed
as a secular pilgrim, whose quest for
authenticity is analogous to the quest for the
sacred in simpler, pre-modern societies. MacCannell,
however, stresses that in contrast to the latter,
the `sacred' of modernity �in the Durkheimian
sense of symbols of `society') is split up, manifesting
itself in a multiplicity of attractions. The
secular tourist's visit to the attractions is analogous
to the religious pilgrim's homage to sacred
sites. However, as tourists proliferate at a