Tourism and the Social Production of Culture and Place: Critical Conceptualizations on the Projection of Location

Abstract

In 2001 Meethan produced a short but dense examination of tourism as a global phenomenon, investigating the political economy of tourism per medium of the so-called problem of cultural commodification. This article now attempts to distill Meethan's much-needed commentary on the complexities of the production of place, culture, and consumption, and critiques his argument that—at the turn of the century, when he was writing—Tourism Studies was (and still is?) a severely undertheorized field in terms of the function that tourism plays in the dynamics of change and transformation of space and place under the contemporary conditions of globalization. Thereafter, this article (and a companion review article in the next issue) seeks to amplify Meethan's outlook on the cultural economy of tourism by showing how tourism is potentially—if not already—a lead vehicle in the valuation/revaluation of local places and, indeed, in the valuation/revaluation of held inheritances, cultures, and cosmologies. To that end, the two articles in tandem introduce the concept of “worldmaking” to describe the creative and collaborative essentializing/normalizing/naturalizing imperatives that ordinarily and routinely run through the representational repertoire of tourism in each place. In this light, an attempt is made to showing how Meethan's thinking on the social production of “locality,” “space,” and “culture” variously supports or advances the recent insights of Buck, Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, Fjellman, Thomas, and others, on the inventive, corrective, and highly powerful role tourism plays in such everyday worldmaking activities, where many of these commentators on the power and authority of tourism tend to offer their observations from research positions roosted in “other fields” beyond what is commonly taken to be Tourism Studies. While this and the companion (next issue) review article collectively offer general support for Meethan's judgment on the adolescence of conceptuality in Tourism Studies on matters of cultural production, they do point out that there are indeed a number of generally lone-wolf investigators within the domain of Tourism Studies (such as Crang, Crouch, Jamal, Jennings, Morgan, Pritchard, and Tribe) who are, in their different ways, indeed scrutinizing the making, demaking, and remaking of our local/global iconographies and identifications of place and culture. That is, the point is registered in the two artciles that while the field of Tourism Studies indeed continues to be dominated by its managerialist and noncritical prescriptivisms, it does already have its pioneering and protean individual “critical explorers” of the ways in which the world is imagined and made through the agency and authority of tourism. The articles therefore collectively endeavor to provide a clearer breakdown of what these day-by-day, place-by-place, and sometimes confirmatory/sometimes corrective/sometimes freshly inventive worldmaking projections of local lived reality in fact consist of. They thus seeks to collectively advance the ripening of such worldmaking cognitions in many more fertile “conceptual communities” of within-field ruminators in tandem with beyond-the-field researchers across the globe.