Tourism as an ordering

Abstract

This article offers an entirely different way of understanding the origins, significance and relational materialism of tourism. Borrowing from the emergent sociology of ordering, which combines aspects of Foucault’s notion of governance with ‘post-ANT’ insistence on relational materialism, it shows how tourism came to be a heterogenous assemblage ‘at large’ in the world, remaking the world anew as a touristic world; a world to be seen, felt, interpellated and travelled. In doing so it underlines the paradoxical significance of nationalism as an ordering with clear implications for the emergence of the tourism ordering. It also, at last, invites research on the relationality of technologies and objects of tourism as well as key individuals whose dreams of tourism were essential to the history of the tourism ordering. Seen as an ordering this conception of tourism offers an alternative to structuralist accounts that have long influenced and inhibited tourist studies. It also explains why tourism was so hard to define, until now.