| Tourists are among the least understood people, despite their ubiquitousness and still increasing number worldwide. Anthropological attention during recent years has been limited to merely a few of tourism's sociocultural implications in the developing countries. What is original about this study is its consideration of tourists as a unique collectivity--with their own culture, their own resources, their own territory, their own network, together as the tourism system.As a point of arrival, the study elucidates a new perspective and constructs a model of the tourism system to organize investigation of the Tourist culture as an institution in itself and tourism as an important field of study in its own right. The study is touristically constructed but anthropologically informed, utilizing some of the latter's concepts and methods to seek a better understanding of tourists as a people and their culture explained as nonordinary yet complementary when placed in and observed from the ordinary domain.As a point of departure, the two anthropological constructs of host and guest cultures presently in use are abandoned in favor of a paradigm of actually three distinct cultures: the Local, the Tourist, and the Residual. The newly defined Tourist culture is analytically isolated to argue that it takes its basic substance, structure, and function from play and nonordinary communitas, in both concept and action: how the Tourist culture is the center of tourism and why it, rather than any other component, is the key to the study of tourism. |
