Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? In this challenging book, Dean MacCannell identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through his unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, MacCannell ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: picturesque rural and natural landscapes, hip urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. He shows how strategies intended...

In this classic analysis of travel and sightseeing, author Dean MacCannell brings social scientific understandings to bear on tourism in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class has acquired leisure time for international travel.

In The Tourist--now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis--the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.