Product Description: Drawing from ethnographic work in five continents, this book demonstrates how different regimes of value in tourism can coexist, collide, and compete across a varied geographic terrain. Much theory in tourism economics defines ‘value’ as a measure of monetary worth, a concept governing commodity exchange, and a gauge for tourist satisfaction...read more

Product Description: This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life...read more

Product Description: Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption...read more

Product Description: Photographs create visual narratives of experiences, places, peoples and objects that collectively and individually comprise the tourist gaze. Photography is acknowledged as having an important role in the determining of places and spaces, the construction and re-construction of identities, and the invention and re-invention of histories...read more

This book explores the links between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, festivals are examined as ways of responding to various forms of crisis - social, political, economic - and as a way of re-making and re-animating spaces and social life. Importantly, this book locates festivals in the constantly changing, socio-economic and political contexts that they always operate in and respond to - contexts that are both historical and modern at the same time. Tourism is bound closely together with such contexts; feeding and challenging festivals with audiences that are increasingly transient and transnational. Tourism interrogates notions of ritual and tradition, shapes new spaces and creates, and renews, relationships between participants and observers. No longer can we dismiss tourists simply as value neutral and crass consumers of spectacle, nor tourism as some inevitable commercial force. Tourism is increasingly complicit in the festival processes of re-invention, and in forming new patterns of social existence.