Contact Admin. In this issue of Bidoun , we take on shifting notions of tourism, the tourist, and travel in general as starting points for a larger discussion about the intersection of experience, representation, desire, and voyeurism.
The cynical view of tourism is that the carefree days of being lost in another place, space, and time are long gone. Those with enough money are the recipients of carefully controlled experiences edited for easy consumption. Visitors are told to look here, stand there, photograph this, and stand solemn before that. Some skirt traditional tourism by participating in alternative tourist economies-eco β tourism, ethno-tourism, and helper tourism among them.
Others obsess over accessing the newest, often most bizarre attractions β traveling halfway around the world to ski in Dubai in August , to check into the latest boutique hotel in Micronesia, or, alternatively, to gaze down into the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. Nevertheless, crowds still flock to the typical destinations: Caribbean shores, European monuments, and the sites of antiquities in the Middle East.
They go through the motions, making mini-pilgrimages in pursuit of pleasure or History usually filtered through the lens of a digi-cam , leaving lots of money behind in the process. You may find that at times we gloss over the actual destinations, instead looking at the people and economies servicing them and the ideas that inspire trips loosely defined in the first place.
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