Real Tourism: Representation, Practice and the Material in Contemporary Travel Culture

Over the past decade, tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting edge scholarship. The field has emerged as central to ongoing debates in social theory concerning such diverse topics as postcolonialism, mobility, and postmodernism, to name just a few. While there has been a diverse body of empirical research on this transformation the theoretical discussions in tourism studies remain largely attached to theories of modernity and Anglo-centric assumptions about tourism. There is a need for the field to come to terms theoretically with the contemporary and future realities of tourism as a truly global phenomenon.

Real Tourism is a significant volume which sets this new theoretical agenda, engaging directly with what tourism does in practice and in place and demonstrates the need for a theoretical intervention that moves tourism scholarship beyond the province of Anglophone thinking. The volume achieves this by explicitly bridging ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ scholarship on tourism; reframing theoretical discussions around ‘real practices’ instead of abstract typologies; and radically delinking tourism theory from the grand narratives of modernity and assumptions about authenticity, identity, tradition, and development. The book brings together leading academics in the field and provides provocative multidisciplinary and multi-contextual reflection on the future of tourism.

This original, timely and compelling volume puts forward new post modernist ideas and arguments about tourism today and in the future. It is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism.

Claudio Minca is Head and Professor of the Cultural Geography Department at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Research Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, the University of London, UK. 

Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.