The Making of The Tourist1

Abstract

The author reflects on the historical context and intellectual and institutional foundations for his (1976) study The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, especially its connections to classic social and critical theory, and its fit with post structuralism and deconstruction. The influence of Marx, Durkheim, C.S. Peirce, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Goffman and Derrida are discussed. The method of The Tourist is to follow tourists looking for clues about the shape and direction of human society today. Its approach is antithetical to the domain fragmentation occurring in the university whereby knowledge of society is broken up and distributed across disconnected fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, communication studies, et cetera. As tourists cross all these domains they open new pathways toward holistic understanding of emergent societal arrangements. The final section addresses misreadings of the author’s concepts of “alienated leisure” and “staged authenticity.”