Real Tourism

Book excerpt: Over the past decade tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting edge scholarship. There is a need for the field to come to terms theoretically with the contemporary and future realities of tourism as a truly global phenomenon. This significant volume seeks to set the theoretical agenda, engaging directly with what tourism does in practice and in place and demonstrate the need for a theoretical intervention that moves tourism scholarship beyond the province of Anglophone thinking. The volume achieves this by explicitly bridging 'western' and 'non-western' scholarship on tourism; reframing theoretical discussions around 'real practices' instead of abstract typologies; and radically delinking tourism theory from the grand narratives of modernity and assumptions about authenticity, identity, tradition, and development.