Ethics and Tourism: In dialogue with Dean MacCannell

José Luis López González

doi:10.6035/recerca.2018.23.11

Abstract

For several decades, tourism has mainly been identified as an activity that helps people escape their everyday routines, contributes to understanding between cultures, and promotes economic wellbeing. These assumptions have been questioned in both the public sphere and academic research, however. In this context, tourism research is increasingly drawing on ethical frameworks to support its criticism of tourism. Some of the most outstanding research on this issue is by Dean MacCannell, Emeritus Professor at the University of California at Davis and author of one of the seminal works of the social theory of tourism: The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). MacCannell examines the moral and ethical aspects of tourism in all his writing, but they are the focal point of his book The Ethics of Sightseeing (2011), in which he identifies the tourists’ responsibility to mediate between their understanding of their own pleasure and the ethical repercussions of the late modern imperative, “Enjoy!”. During the Touriscape congress in Malaga, Spain, in February 2018, MacCannell talked about ethics and tourism with José Luis López, who prepared this interview for Recerca.

Highlights

For several decades, tourism has mainly been identified as an activity that helps people escape their everyday routines, contributes to understanding between cultures, and promotes economic wellbeing
José Luis López: Academics have usually explored tourism ethics through pre-existing general frameworks such as marketing ethics, consumer ethics, ecological ethics, business ethics, and so on, as they might apply to tourism.The use of this disparate set of approaches sometimes seems to ignore the epistemological entanglement deriving from the difficulty of defining what tourism is.Against this background, you place the ethical focus of tourism on sightseeing because you believe it to be one of the keys, or privileged activities, at the heart of the tourist experience
Dean MacCannell: It is true that I have written and continue to believe that in secular society, tourism takes over many of the functions formerly performed by organized religions

Summary

Introduction

Tourism has mainly been identified as an activity that helps people escape their everyday routines, contributes to understanding between cultures, and promotes economic wellbeing. It is torture for us to keep trying to have as much fun as we are supposed to be having now.Yes, I argue that the late capitalist demand to enjoy, especially as expressed in its sub-sector of commercialized tourism, blocks tourist enjoyment and any good that might come from it.

Results

Conclusion