Abstract

This book asks the question; why is it that tourism matters? It looks at how it is we do tourism and learn to be tourists when we are on holiday. Tourism is a dynamic way of being that may facilitate or hinder intercultural exchange. The ways in which we do tourism and the places in which we are tourists raise practical, material and emotional questions about tourist life. This book draws on both empirical work and a range of theoretical frameworks, arguing that tourism matters precisely because of the lessons it can teach us about living everyday life with others.

Gavin Jack is Lecturer in Critical Marketing at the University of Leicester Management Centre, UK.

Alison Phipps is senior lecturer and Director of the Graduate School for Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches anthropology and languages. Her books include Acting Identities (2000), and Contemporary German Cultural Studies (2002). She is associate editor of the journal Tourism and Cultural Change.

With brilliant theoretical acuity, rich ethnographic data and critical insight, Gavin Jack and Alison Phipps illuminate the dynamics of the material and affective dimensions of tourist experience and how they play out in intercultural encounters. Their work not only synthesizes and critiques the current perspectives in tourism research but goes significantly beyond to help us think outside the box. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex nature of tourism and how it is inextricably linked to intercultural communication.

Tourism and Intercultural Exchange: Why Tourism Matters is a fascinating and highly original approach to the understanding contemporary tourism and the carrying out of tourism research. Written in clear, intelligible prose, Tourism and Intercultural Exchange moves effortlessly between theoretical insight and empirical research and grounds a new understanding of the intercultural life of the tourist in the daily rituals, conventions and practices of tourism. It goes beyond the jaded binaries of tourism criticism (tourism good/tourism bad) to take a close look at what tourists actually do and to suggest that there is a positive and transformative intercultural potential in tourism which is often overlooked in more pessimistic accounts driven by conventional theorising. Gavin Jack and Alison Phipps have carefully unpacked for us the full complexity of the tourist encounter and Tourism and Intercultural Exchange should be an indispensable item in the baggage of any serious student or scholar of tourism studies and indeed of anyone who is concerned about culture, society and tourism in the contemporary world.