Tourist sights as semiotic signs: A Critical Commentary

Abstract

Urry (2002) argues that ‘the organizing sense within the typical tourist experience is visual’, and the tourist ‘gaze is constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs’ (pp 3, 146). Urry cites the linguist Culler (1981), who argues ‘All over the world, tourists are engaged in semiotic projects, reading cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems’ (p 128). Thus, for both authors, sights constituting signs appear to be a fairly common phenomenon. Their sight-as-sign idea actually derives from MacCannell (1976). Contemporary tourism studies owe many debts to MacCannell, including his concepts of sights as signs, authenticity and tourism as pilgrimage. Whereas the last two concepts are linked in MacCannell’s analysis, he does not link them to the first concept; in fact, sights as signs and authenticity seem incompatible since the former is apparently an anti-essentialist concept, the latter an essentialist one. We argue that MacCannell’s sight-as-sign concept is valuable but his formulation of it is faulty; once this is corrected, it becomes linked to the concept of tourism as pilgrimage; and thus linked, it is complementary to instead of incompatible with the concept of authenticity. The sight-as-sign cases examined by MacCannell are special (all possessing pilgrimage value), hence we conclude that, contra Urry and Culler, whether or not other sights constitute signs can be established only with careful substantiation. First, a terminological note: semiotics refers to philosopher Charles Peirce’s theory which stipulates a triadic relationship between sign, designatum and interpretant. On the other hand, linguist Ferdinand Saussure coined the term semiology for his theory which specifies a dyadic relationship between signifier and signified. Despite some commonalities, the two theories are different, for example, Saussure, but not Peirce, methodologically abstracts from extra-linguistic referents (see Noth 1990 on Peirce’s and