This document is the bachelor's thesis submitted by Gilles Mertz to Karlsruhe University. The thesis investigates the conceptual blurriness of the "home tourist" and aims to specify tourism as a postmodern phenomenon. Mertz explores his cognitive interest in tourism studies that led him to this research topic. He outlines the structure of the thesis and argues that his analysis will help address a gap in understanding tourism's conceptual issues. The thesis may be of scientific and practical relevance to those studying tourism.

1. Bachelor’s thesis
Who is the tourist?
A postmodern search of an imaginary friend.
Course of study:
International Tourism Management
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Desmond Wee
Submitted by
Gilles Mertz
Registration number: H13204-001
Karlsruhe, 6th
April 2016

2. Bachelor’s thesis
Gilles Mertz
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A word of thanks
I would like to express my gratitude towards a bunch of
people who contributed indirectly to this Bachelor’s thesis
First of all, I would like to thank all my donators who
supported me financially during the 3 years of my Bachelor’s
degree. These people include Mrs Yvonne Stroesser, Mr Fernand
Dhur-Peters, Mrs Sonia Dhur-Peters, Mrs Solange Mertz-Thill as
well as Mr Julien Mertz.
Likewise, I would like to thank the Ministry of Education of the
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for the financial aids I they granted
me during the 3 years of study. I realised that studying without
having to worry about one’s financial situation is not self-evident
and that a lot of money has been invested in my education, for
which I am very grateful.
A special words of thanks then I send to Prof. Dr. Desmond
Wee who orientated me during all the years of my Bachelor’s
studies and guided me to find the topics I am really interested in.
Finally, I would like to thank Karlshochschule for everything I
have experienced here during the last 3 years. I am grateful for
every minute I have spent here as student and collaborator.

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Gilles Mertz
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Statutory Declaration
I herewith declare that I have authored the present thesis independently making use
only of the specified literature. Sentences or parts of sentences quoted literally are
marked as quotations; identification of other references with regard to the statement
and scope of the work is quoted. The thesis in this form or in any other form has not
been submitted to an examination body and has not been published.

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Gilles Mertz
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Abstract
This Bachelor’s thesis investigates the question why tourism, despites being a so
throughout acknowledged and recognizable phenomenon, still bears the notion of
blurriness. Henceforth, this thesis is based around the question what tourism is and who
those tourists are. The focus to do this will be laid on home tourism as an indeed special
form of tourism category to underline the conceptual blurriness present in tourism
studies.
By arguing that tourism cannot be defined if perceived in one concept with the tourist,
the author suggests to overcome tourism as a metaconcept and to strictly narrow the
action framework in order to reduce the tourism action framework as an access
generating activity inside a broader mobilities scheme. This access generation functions
through imaginaries which are in this context used to describe tourism from a
postmodern perspective.
By reducing tourism to a proper action framework, the tourist is revealed to be a
discretionary identity concept which needs to be treated with more distance in order to
not to blurry contexts theoretically. Correspondingly, the author argues to study the
tourist as a human being and not under the usage of such identity concepts. Advice is
given to avoid pre-conceptualisation of contexts and rather engage in an understanding
of the latter by taking into account multiple context setting variables.
KEY WORDS:
conceptual blurriness; home tourist; postmodernity; tourism specificity

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Gilles Mertz
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5
1.1. Structure .................................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.2. Cognitive interest ................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.3. Research gap ............................................................................................................................................................ 7
1.4. Relevance for science and industry ............................................................................................................... 8
2. Scientific discourse ..................................................................................................................... 9
2.1. Quo Vadis tourism? ............................................................................................................................................... 9
2.2. The metaconceptualisation of tourism ...................................................................................................... 11
2.3. The tourist: an empirical social fact or an imaginary friend? .......................................................... 14
2.4. The home tourist: a questionable construct ........................................................................................... 16
2.5. The tourist is a dead metaphor ..................................................................................................................... 18
2.6. Tourism as an imaginary access creating activity ................................................................................ 23
2.7. Imagining home tourism ................................................................................................................................. 27
2.8. Tourism & postmodernity .............................................................................................................................. 29
3. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 32
3.1. Main findings ........................................................................................................................................................ 32
3.2. Answerability towards research question ............................................................................................... 34
3.3. Critical review ...................................................................................................................................................... 34
3.4. Outlook: ................................................................................................................................................................... 36
Table of Figures
Figure 1: Be a tourist in your own hometown? Advertisement on Attraction Victoria
in the United States
p. 16
Figure 2: Myself spotting the tourists
p. 20
Figure 3: Students spotting the “tourists” (here a German couple)
p. 21
Figure 4: A brochure of Thomas Cook’s tours which translates into the creation of
an imaginary place.
p. 26
Figure 5: Be a tourist in your own bedroom? p. 28

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Gilles Mertz
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Bachelor’s thesis
1. Introduction
This Bachelor’s thesis’ scope is to answer the following research question:
What causes the conceptual blurriness of the “home tourist“ and
how can we specify tourism as a postmodern phenomenon?
1.1. Structure
To start, this thesis does not bear any empiric study and is focused only on a theoretical
discussion about the topic decorated by some empirical experience that bear no scientific
validity (i.e. experiences during my study abroad semester). Hence, the main elements to be
regarded are a literature review and my own inputs. As stated in the Statutory Declaration
abiding § 15 par. 8 SPO no other sources are being used than the ones indicated.
In the following section of this chapter, I will elucidate my cognitive interest that lead me to
the topic in question and to the creation of my research question. Next, I will explore the
research gap that shall be covered or filled by this thesis. Then, I will reveal the scientific and
practical relevance of the topic in order to define the audience to whom this paper might
appeal.
The main part of this paper, the plot so to say, is composed of eight sections. Each section
analyses a certain topic that is related to the research question which acts as the guiding
thread throughout the paper. The sections can be seen as a process which with every step
answer a part of the research question.
The final chapter consists of the conclusion highlighting the main findings that have been
made through the process. Each section will be resumed and a check will be made if the
present research question has been answered in a satisfactory way. As a wrap up, I will end
this thesis with a reflection of the findings and also give an outlook which may serve for
further research purposes.
1.2. Cognitive interest

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Gilles Mertz
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Of my last 5 semesters I have spent a lot of time on the question what tourism is about and
what the tourist is doing when he is a tourist. Seen the constancy in my field of interest, I did
not have to think a lot about an adequate topic for my Bachelor’s thesis. Tourism for me is
more than ever before an unknown and indefinable phenomenon and I doubt that even the
findings of this Bachelor’s thesis lead me to a clear or satisfying answer. So far, the more I do
research on tourism, the more I doubt its existence. However, this is exactly what motivates
me to strive into this direction.
In one of my first essays in this study program, I tried to analyse the difference between
tourists and inhabitants. At that time I compared and synthetized different perspectives like
Robinson’s “emotional tourist” (Robinson: 2012) to understand how tourism is related to
what people are doing with space. However, the issue that struck me most was tourism as a
“fuzzy concept” (Cohen: 1974). From that moment, this question has been my main field of
interest and I undertook some research about the conceptual issue of tourism. To me it
seems that more than ever this fuzziness is present inside tourism but also in the human
condition.
In the follow-up I wrote another paper about cocreation. I apprehended that the human
being while he is a tourist in the experience creation process cocreates his “Erlebnis” in the
given circumstances. This lead me to the intermediary conclusion that everything tourism
tries to describe is highly dependent on various factors and that there is no unilateral clarity
when a tourist begins to be a tourist. Again, the fuzziness described by Cohen was obvious
and disturbed my understanding of the tourist and tourism as a phenomenon.
My penultimate research topic treated the ontology of tourism. In that one, I mixed my
interest in philosophy with the question of who the tourist is. By integrating many of my
favourite philosophers as well as tourism researchers, especially Tribe (1997) I formed an
own definition of tourism which I, spuriously, misinterpreted to be an essence of tourism. To
quote myself: “Tourism can be seen as a phenomenon engaged in by human beings and the
necessary features that need to exist for it to be said to have occurred include the action of
movement (the movement being understood as perceptional as well as spatial change), the
interaction with space and the reflection on these two actions.“ (Mertz: unpublished, p. 22).
I called myself to attention that although I tried to overcome discretionary definitions, I
created my own one, which hence lead my argumentation about ontologies ad absurdum.
Furthermore, my definition is so vague and general that it could be applied to any action
that involves movement. However, some part of this definition still bears validity, especially
when it comes to the “perceptional” that can be translated into the “imaginary” which I will
investigate in this thesis.

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Gilles Mertz
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Being aware of my mistake, I undertook a critical analysis of my own epistemological
position. In the meantime, I glimpsed into Popper’s critics on Aristotelian essentialism
(Popper: 1980, pp. 70). After this reflection process, I realised that seeking essences or
ontological truths cannot be the key to describe tourism as a phenomenon. Gradually, I
shifted my epistemological position towards postmodernity since the idea began to call my
attention. I read Bauman’s concept of the fluid modernity (Bauman: 2000) in order to find
ways to overcome the fuzziness in tourism. This then lead me to concepts such as Eco’s
hyperreality (1990) or Baudrillard’s simulacrum (1988) which we also treated as part of a
critical tourism class at Karlshochschule. Nonetheless, the most inspiring source I glimpsed at
is from MacFarlene, who explains the basics of postmodernity in a 30 minutes long Youtube
video (MacFarlene: 2014). Macfarlene deducts that postmodernity is “different from all
previous changes which were from worldview A to worldview B. Its very essence was an
attack on the possibility of having a worldview or metanarrative, as it is often called. It’s the
realisation that the speed of change, especially in politics or communications, means that
there could not be any shared vision, either in the West, or the Rest.” (Minute 0:34 – 1:06).
This idea of hybridism was the starting point of interest for me to put into relation with the
fuzziness in tourism.
Altogether, two specific conceptions of interest should be held back when reading this
thesis. On one hand, the question of who the tourist is in the sense of the blurriness he
brings along. On the other hand, the idea of postmodernity which I see as one of the most
logical approaches to explain the tourism phenomenon in a contemporary perspective.
1.3. Research gap
The topic of the tourist identity or the question: “Who is a tourist?” (Cohen: 1974; McCabe:
2005, 2009) has already been treated in several ways. Hence, it does not really introduce
new topic inside tourism studies. McCabe for example argues that “the problem with all the
definitions is that they are not able to account for or encompass the multiplicity of
experiences often desired by travellers in their trips.” (McCabe: 2009, p. 32). Tribe (1997,
2006) analyses that tourism does not have one clear ontology, seen that the term has “more
than one standard meaning” (Tribe: 1997, p. 639). More explicitly, he claims that the “word
tourism is problematic, because it is used in common parlance. As such its use is often
permissive and imprecise, and thus it can encompass a variety of meanings. The term seems
to be a different kind of term from physics or philosophy or economics.” (Tribe: 1997, p.
639). In this regard, tourism is already largely embedded in the social language of the
everyday. This goes as far that people acquire tend to distinguish their activities from the
tourism ones because they connote negative aspects with the term (McCabe: 2005, p. 91). In
McCabe’s opinion “tourist studies have overlooked the importance of the wider social

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Gilles Mertz
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discourse of tourism in shaping and defining individuals’ versions of their experiences.”
(McCabe: 2005, p. 86). This leads to that the term tourism is used pejoratively, as McCabe
further claims: “the idea of a tourist has taken on a cross-cultural and cross-contextual
ideological significance as a pejorative term with implicit political and moral implications in
its use.” (McCabe: 2009, p. 40). While the wider social discourse conveys more and more
meanings to tourism research seems to be slightly hanging to make precisions what the
initial form of doing tourism means.
Inside this research gap I perceive another problem, which is the formulation of constructs
such as home tourism. In this, a person can be a tourist while being a local. Minca et al.
define this as one paradox present in tourism studies “in packaging place for travellers,
locals tend to acquire a kind of schizophrenic subjectivity, scrutinizing themselves and their
own homes from an outsider’s perspective. Locals often turn themselves into ambivalent
objects, and it is precisely this schizophrenia that strikes us peculiarly as modern and
paradoxical.” (Minca & Oakes: 2006, p. 8). This thesis takes this paradox as a point of
reference in order to find out more about the specificity of tourism.
I will particularly focus on the example of home tourism and relate the findings to tourism in
general. With this in mind, I seek to find a less blurry and more meaningful explanation for
the tourism phenomenon. In addition, I also try to find out who the tourists are then and
how they are related to the tourism action.
1.4. Relevance for science and industry
Tourism sciences have concentrated a lot on concepts such as motivation, authenticity and
the importance of place in tourism. With this topic, I would like to go a step back and
consider those topic with low importance. By doing so, I my aim is to find specificities in
tourism in order to know more about the action framework of the concept instead of taking
the concept for granted and analyse actions in a preconceptualised approach. The scientific
relevance of the topic can thus be resumed to broaden the conceptual perspective of
tourism while also thinking out of the box in order to gain critical insights on the
phenomenon.
Furthermore, tourism practitioners of the industry can also gain something out of this thesis.
In this sense, the same counts for the industry as for science. Knowledge is can result in
power. The more perspectives we are able to collect about tourism, the more we are able to
control the tourism instrument and gain power over it. At least, we should understand what
we have to deal with when talking about tourism. The tourism industry accounts for more
than 100 millions of direct jobs in our global economy, representing around 9% of our global

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Gilles Mertz
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gross domestic product (UNWTO Tourism Highlights: 2014). In 2015, the industry grew by
another 4% which lead to 1.2 billion people travelling in the past year (Rifai, Secretary
General of the UNWTO at the ITB Convention 2016). It becomes clear that if we want to
keep this business in good shape, we need to understand the dimensions outside economics
on which the business is built upon. We hence need to go beyond mere classifications made
for industrial purposes where tourism is a product and from the mind-set also treated like
one. This includes classifying tourism into different categories. Whereas it may be useful for
marketing purposes, in order to understand the human being behind the tourist. In this
aspect, an understanding of the tourist could help companies and especially marketing
departments to overcome challenges of “hybrid consumerism” (Leppänen & Grönroos:
2009).
Since I will investigate in a postmodern approach, this thesis might serve as a further source
of inspiration for marketing purposes. Salazar (2012) talks for example of the tourism
imaginary which can be linked to the subject of my Bachelor’s thesis: “the subject of tourism
imaginaries has so many practical implications that it offers unique opportunities to open up
a constructive dialogue between tourism academics and practitioners. The free
dissemination […] between tourism imaginaries and their broader context, for one, can also
help people working in tourism to be much better prepared to recognize, identify and
operationalize the imaginaries in which their business is so thoroughly embedded.” (Salazar:
2012, p. 878). In a nutshell, this thesis may help tourism professionals with a differentiated
analysis of their customers and help them to improve their services in order to serve the
well-being of the latters.
2. Scientific discourse
As the epistemological position between author and the study object have been cleared, I
will start the plot of my Bachelor’s thesis. Before continuing, the research question is
presented once again in order to keep up a goal oriented research process. It states:
What causes the conceptual fuzziness of the “home tourist“ and
how can we specify tourism as a postmodern phenomenon?
2.1. Quo Vadis tourism?
In order to understand where the conceptual blurriness of tourism comes from, let us start
with the following questions: “What is the essence of tourism? What is invariable? Which

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are the attributes that must exist for us to say that something is tourism?” (Netto: 2009, p.
56). In order to find the blurriness in tourism, let us start with an analysis of a common
tourism definition. I quote: “Tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which
entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for
personal or business/professional purposes. These people are called visitors (which may be
either tourists or excursionists; residents or non-residents) and tourism has to do with their
activities, some of which involve tourism expenditure.” (UNWTO: 2014, p. 1).
As stated in the definition, the tourist and tourism are differentiated as two action working
inside one system. Tourism is seen as the action and the tourist is seen as the person
forming part of that action. In other words, it means that tourism concerns what these
people are doing. However, no details are given on the activities needed or what has to be
done and in which framework it has to be done to be considered as a tourist. Moreover, the
definition describes the tourist as someone outside his/her usual environment, for any given
purpose. Henceforth, the tourist is defined as a person outside his natural habitat (wherever
that is), doing activities (whatever they are) as long as they include expenditure, which
indicates the economic dimension of this definition.
Genuinely, I do doubt the logic of this definition. I presumably chose it because it shows one
point that is commonly accepted in tourism studies, that is to see tourism and the tourist as
one coherent concept. I strongly assume that one logical point in this relationship between
tourism and the tourist cannot be right. For instance, first, it tourism is perceived as an
action which concretely bears not such a blurriness seen that the action is defined to the
movement of people. Then, the participants who access this movement are called “tourists”
which still is legitimate as long as those participants form part of that movement. But then,
third, it says that tourism has to do with the actions those participants are undertaking. Here
comes the tricky point: tourism as an action has already been accomplished yet exceeds to a
supplementary second action which translates into what the people who executed the first
action are doing next. This means that in a way, tourism bears the power of describing an
action while also absorbing further actions that are related to the latter. In other words,
tourism is defined as an action and as a descriptor of actions people are executing.
This logic, in my opinion, should be looked at closer since it might be the reason why a lot of
blurriness exists within tourism. The striking point is that the concept of tourism does not
take a clear position to its action-framework and overcomes this problem by reducing all its
actors to tourism derivatives that henceforward construct the previously non-existent action
framework. In other words, tourism is not specific enough and, in order to provide
specificity, the definition is outstripped to supplementary actions. The problem here thus is
amongst others located in who gives meaning to what tourism is: the action framework of
the concept itself or the one executing the actions? As the position of tourism is not cleared,

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we cannot know what a tourism action actually consists in. We first would have to know
what tourism is to know what we must be looking for.
This issue reminds of what Tribe writes: “tourism is going to be subject to confusion unless a
clear distinction is made among the various meanings of the term tourism. […] The problem
requiring resolution is that the concept of tourism is found to have more than one standard
meaning.” (Tribe: 1997, p. 639). The source of the problem of this multiplicity of meanings
seems to be that “doing tourism is being a tourist being a human being.” (Crouch: 2012, p.
35). Obviously, if every human action is to be distinguished from a tourism action, it
becomes extremely difficult to attribute meaning to what tourism is. Therefore, instead of
asking what tourism is I would like to interpose the question what doing tourism actually
means.
2.2. The metaconceptualisation of tourism
The verb “to do” in the meaning of an action can be replaced by any other action terms,
such as to eat, sleep, think, learn, contemplate, and so on and so forth. In this aspect, what
does it mean when somebody tells you that he is doing tourism with the emphasis put on
tourism? If we consider tourism as the enablement of people to access movement, how
could a person put this into an action? Surely, intentions have been made, amongst others
by Karagupta (2015) who writes about touring as the action undertaken by the touring
subject: “Touring, by definition assumes a subject of touring, who remains fixed even as ‘he’
[…] goes through different experiences or […] he might himself change and yet he would
retain something unchanged in his system to be the same subject of experience who
travels.” (Karagupta: 2015, pp. 106 – 107). In here, touring as a verb should however be
differed from doing tourism, provided that the first refers to an action of movement
whereas the second does actually not bear the same descriptive power. If doing tourism is
equal to touring, to do tourism would mean that the actor performs an action that has
already ended. One logical sequel of this is that the person in the present moment is
executing an accomplished action of the past. Respectively, the movement that takes places
after access has been provided does not belong to tourism anymore. This consequent
movement implies different actions mostly with precise terms defining them. We do not do
tourism, we do something else that somehow is linked to tourism (whatever tourism is). This
is a big difference to make since doing tourism would mean that the actor is strictly doing
tourism and we do not know what tourism exactly means. Thus, one critical point in here is
the metaconceptualisation of tourism which reduces other actions to its touristic
component.

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To make this very abstract idea clearer, let us have a closer look at the tourism industry.
Certainly, the reader is aware that there exist many forms of tourism and that “doing
tourism” can include a wide range of activities, i.e. cultural tourism, gastronomic tourism,
sports tourism, adventure tourism, spa tourism, luxury tourism and so on and so forth. In the
industry, but also in tourism studies, tourism is “pinned in ordered lattices through ever finer
subdivisions and more elaborate typologies as though these might eventually form a
classificatory grid in which tourism could be defined and regulated.” (Crang: 2006, p. 64). Of
course, doing so has not brought any concrete results on the question what doing tourism
means.
Let us take gastronomic tourism as an example. Imagine a restaurant setting. The question
would be: how could you differentiate the actions that people undertake between tourism
and non-tourism? In both settings, the actions include that people are sitting at their table,
consume their meals and experience the gastronomic context. Some would argue that
within tourism the experience is much more intense as well as new exciting whereas the
local may be used to his “local” food and not be able to enjoy his experience in the same
elation. The factor of authenticity may also play a role in here. Yet, I doubt that there exist
factors that may distinguish someone doing tourism from someone not doing tourism. For
instance, if it is the local’s first time in this same restaurant, is he then also a tourist there?
Apparently, to distinguish a tourism action of a non-tourism action is not an easy piece of
cake but indeed a very delicate undertaking. When talking about gastronomic tourism,
mentioning the tourism part appears to be unnecessary since the actions are not related to
tourism but to gastronomy. Remember Crouch’s words: “doing tourism is being a tourist
being a human being.” (Crouch: 2012, p. 35). Therefore, can you treat someone eating his
pasta as a tourist?
Let us move to another example, for instance cultural tourism. Here, the same applies: the
construct which combines tourism with cultural actions actually depends more on the latter
than on the first. This means that the main action (if not the only) undertaken concerns
cultural activities and tourism, like in the previous example, shows to be redundant in the
cultural tourism construct. Notwithstanding, I did not choose cultural tourism as a random
example. A little differently, Crouch (2012) also wrote about cultural tourism. I quote him:
“Essentially, there is no cultural tourism as defined in the character of doing tourism […].
There may be cultural tourism as a category needed by and for the industry to order its
services. There may be individuals who seek particular kinds and character in doing tourism
that comes under cultural labels […] but these are particular interests that emerge within a
deeper set […] of doing tourism of any kind. For the tourist as individual, human and cultural
being, it is self-evident that all doing tourism is cultural practice, including its
performativities” (Crouch: 2012, p. 28).

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The information provided until here is evidence enough for me to state that doing tourism
can be seen as a quasi-pleonasm since the construction “to do … tourism” does not add
much relevant information to the action. If I say for example “I am going to do ski-tourism.”,
I can as well shorten the sentence by saying “I am going to ski.”. Of course, one may argue
that tourism could give a hint about the location where the action is undertaken. In common
understanding, if one says to do ski-tourism it bears the connotation that the person is
travelling to another place to realise this action. However, Crouch states that “doing tourism
may occur a few dozen miles from home; and its performativity may be gentle, as labelled in
‘being lazy’; physical distances may or may not be incurred during tourism. Everyday life
brings its journeys. Everyday practices of living, negotiating, can yield surprise and the
unexpected, as familiar sites can suddenly appear anew, uncertain.” (Crouch: 2012, p. 26).
Accordingly, location and distances do not play a central role of where an action is
undertaken, hence do not bring much more clarification to an action so that one can again
leave out the term “tourism”. Likewise, the category of cultural tourism can be seen as a
pure pleonasm if we consider culture to be “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society” (Tylor: 1920, p. 1).
With these two examples, I want to show how tourism functions as a metaconcept and how
it conveys meaning it does not possess over to other action. All in all, the encompassing
nature of tourism should be seen with a critical eye since “doing tourism” does not present a
proper action undertaken by people in any ontological sense. What I wanted to demonstrate
are first the quasi-pleonastic dimension of tourism, second the power it can exercise as a
metaconcept. This is not new as Tribe (1997; 2006) already mentioned the issues that go
along with tourism at several times. “The word tourism is problematic, because it is used in
common parlance. As such its use is often permissive and imprecise, and thus it can
encompass a variety of meanings. The term seems to be a different kind of term from
physics or philosophy or economics. These academic disciplines describe particular ways of
analyzing the external world. However, tourism is the material of the external world of
events and so is the data to be examined rather than the method of examination.” (Tribe:
1997, p. 639). Therefore, tourism should be reviewed as a concept that has lastly been used
in a classification logic: “Tourism research carries with it a subtle power to define: to skew:
to objectify: to foreground some issues leaving others untouched: to legitimize some
methods casting others to the periphery: to privilege some groups while excluding others
and to tell stories in particularistic ways.” (Tribe: 2006, p. 375).
The worrying point however is that many tourism studies reduce other actions to tourism
which results in concepts being paired with it are considered as secondary actions, yet reveal
to be the primary ones. I therefore reject the idea of “doing tourism” as an action itself, seen
that with all the hybridity that we encounter in actions, it is not accurate to state that they

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all relate to tourism. To repete McCabe “It is simply not acceptable to talk about touristic
experiences in a resigned, bored or blasé manner.” (McCabe: 2002, p. 72). I suggest that we
reduce tourism to a clear action framework in order not to overpower the phenomenon
with more descriptions than it can bear.
2.3. The tourist: an empirical social fact or an imaginary friend?
"If you wake up at a different time, in a different place,
could you wake up as a different person?"
- Tylor Durdon, Fight Club
Henceforward, I will discard tourism in this section to focus the study on the tourist. The
tourist, as we have seen, is to be seen as the executer of the tourism action (whatsoever this
action is). Moreover, he conveys meaning to the tourism action framework as he works
overtime so that his action are to be considered as tourism. Authors like Picard argue that
the tourist is an “empirical social fact” (Picard: 2002, p. 122). and I assume that this
assumption is prone provided that we do not know what the tourist does (it should be clear
by now that doing tourism does not count as an action) nor who he is. Let us therefore
investigate the question of who the tourist is.
A common approach to analyse tourists has been by using the approach of metaphorisation
which is to set the tourist into relation with other concepts in order to explain similarities
between each other, broaden our vocabulary to explain phenomena and legitimate him/her
as something that is there. Dann (2002) indicates in this aspect that “of all the metaphors
used to capture the postmodern condition, none has perhaps been employed more
frequently than that of ‘the tourist’. […] From MacCannell (1989) and Urry (1990), the
tourist became a centre of attention, not simply because (s)he represented a constituent
element of the largest industry in the world, but rather because s(he) provided a sociological
understanding of that world.” (Dann: 2002, p. 6). Yet, much of the tourist metaphor is not
known and it is noteworthy that a lot of links are sought between the tourist and other
metaphors in order to understand the concept: “much of tourism theory to date has been
based on metaphor […]. The tourist has been considered as sightseer (Urry, 1990), as a
stranger (Cohen, 1979), as a pilgrim in search of the sacred (Graburn, 1989; MacCannell,
1989), as a performer (Bruner, 1994), and as a child (Dann, 1989, 1996).” (Dann: 2002, p. 7).
The use of metaphors allows to overcome conceptual issues of the tourist by seeking
similarities with other concepts in order to clarify the links between each other and
embedding the tourist into our cultural understanding. In this sense, the tourist can be seen
as a useful metaphor to describe a mobility phenomena through categorising the human

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being into portions of (more or less) measurable identities. This surely bears some
advantages, especially in postmodernity, as Dann states: “under a postmodern ethos, there
was rapid expansion in the amount and type of metaphor, as people tried to come to terms
with a fast, flickering and fleeting world over which they appeared to have little control.”
(Dann: 2002, p. 5).
However, the other side of the medal is that putting of the human being into metaphors
does not necessarily result in a more elaborated understanding of the human condition.
Surely it allows to understand certain facets of being-in-the-world, but the immediate result
of metaphorisation equals what is being done with tourism categorisation. The result is that
our understanding of the mobile human being becomes more fragmented into static liminal
concepts connected between each other instead of delivering a more holistic view. “This is
the problem of metaphors in general in that they are based upon a limited number of points
of comparison but that such connections or similarities may not bear further analysis.” (Knox
et al.: 2014, p. 266). For this reason, it is important to note that “tourism and more
importantly travel is increasingly seen as a process that has become integral to social life. […]
every thing seems to be in perpetual movement throughout the world. […] Tourism, leisure,
transport, business, travel, migration and communication are thus all blurred and need to be
analysed together in their fluid interdependence rather than discretely […].” (Hannan: 2009,
p. 107). The point is that when talking about the tourist, we discretely put an identity on a
person and isolate the framework of his actions in which we are interested. Let me quote
Tribe to conclude this idea: “Tourism research carries with it a subtle power to define: to
skew: to objectify: to foreground some issues leaving others untouched: to legitimize some
methods casting others to the periphery: to privilege some groups while excluding others
and to tell stories in particularistic ways. This is not to say that lies are being told about
tourism, nor is it sought to denigrate positivist or applied research: Both make significant
contributions to the developing canon of knowledge. Rather it is concluded that research
has the generative power to construct and to frame tourism.” (Tribe: 2006, p. 375).
The argument to see tourism as an empirical social fact appears to be weak seen that
tourists do not exist a priori but are constructed by the means of metaphors. These
metaphors act as attributions of identities. However, when we analyse a context or a field,
we need to ask ourselves who is the human being we are facing behind these identities? On
this matter, I want to quote Robinson, who writes: “In the context of tourism studies […]
much emphasis has been given to the tourist as a somehow separate and disconnected
category. […] In reality it is problematic to separate the ‘being-ness’ of a tourist to the being-
ness of everyday life. There is inevitable overlap between our normative experience of social
life and our experience as a tourist providing […] also an ontological critique regarding where
the being a tourist and the doing of tourism beings and ends.” (Robinson: 2012, p. 23).
Therefore, I want to go against Picard’s assumption that the tourist is an empirical social fact

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and rather say that the tourist is a discretionarily created identity-concept, something like
the imaginary friend we all had during our childhood.
2.4. The home tourist: a questionable construct
In order to demonstrate the conceptual lacuna of the tourist, let us apply the notion of
home tourism onto it. The construct of home tourism on a first glance seems to contain a
paradox seen that tourism is traditionally defined and understood as a movement that starts
from an usual environment, very often called home, to another place which is not home.
Applied on the tourist, the very notion of the “home tourist” destroys the idyllic idea of
separated spheres and makes the description of the phenomenon more complicated than
before. How can one be a tourist in the place he lives at? Wee describes this state of being in
his field research in Singapore: “Performing as a tourist by dangling a camera and taking
pictures, being a Singaporean ‘rediscovering Singapore’ and being researcher reflexive of the
self doing tourism were difficult juxtapositions.” (Wee: 2012, p. 85).
When using identity as a descriptor of human beings, we are subsequently creating the
problem of multiple identities which in cases like Wee’s lead to an identities paradox. Minca
and Oakes (2006) explain in how far this paradox bothers the modern individual: “in
packaging place for travellers, locals tend to acquire a kind of schizophrenic subjectivity,
scrutinizing themselves and their own homes from an outsider’s perspective. Locals often
turn themselves into ambivalent objects, and it is precisely this schizophrenia that strikes us
peculiarly as modern and paradoxical. […] Turning her [Veijola: 1994] place into a viewable
object for others renders it impossible to experience as home. She becomes and inside
outsider and an outside-insider, a paradox.” (Minca & Oakes: 2006, p. 8).
Figure 1: Be a tourist in your own hometown? Advertisement on Attraction Victoria in the United States
(Source: http://attractionsvictoria.com/be-a-tourist/)

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Consequently, the notion of home tourism destabilizes the common definition of tourism as
something that happens outside of home. It also questions the character of what home
actually constitutes and what it is. As for McCabe, he notices that “a ‘tourist’ can be
characterised by the following factors: through the act of travelling, or making a journey that
starts and finishes in the same place. I refrain from stating that the journey must start and
end at ‘home’ because people can be ‘tourists’ within or as part of a different type of travel
experience.” (McCabe: 2009, p. 32). Following this definition, home tourism is not so much
about visiting home but about the location where one has departed from. This leaves
tourism to be understood in a geographical epistemology with its main characteristic being
physical movement in a circular structure. In this logic, tourism is not necessarily different
from home but can be part of the circle. However I doubt that the correctness of this idea
since every movement has a departure and going to the baker to get my bread does not
necessarily make me a tourist on my way. Movement is not restricted to the realm of
tourism but is an existential condition of human life. Miller (1969, pp. 144 - 146) explains this
existential condition by making the comparison between a tree and a human being. He
argues that even if the tree would have the same senses as humans do, it would not be able
to enjoy them because one primary condition of our existence is mobility. This allows us to
perceive our world in a three-dimensional spectrum while for the tree, it could never make a
difference between size and distance since it is always enrooted at the same spot. It
becomes evident that understanding tourism as a physical movement is not the key to our
problem.
Gradually, Mavric and Urry (2012) escape the notion of tourism as movement and go into
the direction of submitting it into the studies of mobilities. “No longer is it the study of
exotic places visited by people for very distinct and special periods of time. Rather, tourism
should be seen as more continuous with other mobilities – overlapping and interdependent.
More generally we have seen how places are dynamic, moving around and not necessarely
[sic] staying in one ‘location’. Places travel within networks of human and nonhuman agents,
of photographs, sand, cameras, cars, souvenirs, paintings, surfboards, and so on. These
objects extend what humans are able to do, what performances of place are possible.”
(Mavric & Urry: 2012, p. 655). Urry’s logical response to the tourism dilemma is that
“everybody is a tourist” (Sheller & Urry: 2006). In this logic, it does not matter if the tourist is
at home or not, since tourism is to be comprehended as a practice undertaken in a mobile
world, as Hannan explains: “tourism no longer exists per se, but […] needs to be understood
as a specific process within a wider ontological context, namely that of mobility or
mobilities.” (Hannan: 2009, p. 111). In this sense, one can overcome the paradox present in
home tourism by stating that everybody can be tourist and the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry: 2011)
can be applied anywhere at any time. Kargupta (2015) points into the same direction when
she revises: “In Urry’s inaugural study, it is clear that what postmodernism has blurred is not

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merely the importance, but also the very understanding and meaning of the practice of
touring, and the kind of experience it produces. […] Does ‘touring’ necessarily involve
physical travel, can the activities of browsing the television or surfing the internet qualify as
‘touring’?“ (Kargupta: 2015, p. 106).
Definitely, tourism as part of a broader mobility and being present everywhere morphs the
logic of dualisms thus reducing tourism into a more holistic picture. Nevertheless, Crouch
disputes this suggestion: “To think that ‘People are tourists most of the time’, suggestive
tourism’s being somehow superficial, hugely mobile, fleeting of experience, is surely
eccentric (Lash and Urry 1994: 259). Non-relationally considered conceptualizations of life
slices pursue their category-driven isolations and lacunae. […] But the complexity and
diversity is greater than this. As Cohen and Taylor (1993) adroitly expressed, escape can be
anywhere, anytime. Our being ‘all tourists now’ makes the wrong point: we all have open to
us possibilities of being performative and becoming in a multiple holding on and going
further anywhere, anytime and anyhow in our living. […] The simplistic character rendered
to doing tourism misunderstands the complex and critical cultural work it can entail.”
(Crouch: 2012, pp. 30–31). By stating that everybody is a tourist most of the times, Urry (and
many others) try to defend and manifest tourism and the tourist both as one interrelated
concept. It sounds great if tourism is to be understood as part of mobilities studies, but then,
why are we still sticking to the idea of tourism and do not move beyond and study
mobilities?
I share Crouch’s point that we cannot be tourists most of the time. However, I also share
Urry’s idea that tourism is to be understood as a part of a greater mobility concept and not
as a metaconcept on its own. This brings me back to the starting point of my proposition
thesis in which I will split the tourist from tourism in order to stabilise the debate. With this
section, my message was to demonstrate that sticking to the idea that the tourist and
tourism are interrelated conceptually in one system may be misguiding. Tourism as I already
announced is not to be granted the status of a metaconcept. In addition to this, tourism is
not to be understood as a physical movement between preconceptualised places such as
home. In order to overcome the conceptual blurriness of tourism, we need to move beyond
seeing tourism being related to what the tourists do. One way to realise this is to abandon
the tourist as an identity concept. This I will do in the next section.
2.5. The tourist is a dead metaphor
I have tried to show that if we do not split the tourist as being part from tourism, both
concepts are able to reinforce each other with the consequence that tourism becomes a
metaconcept exceeding to an action framework that surpasses its initial action. On this

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account, I would like to make a definitive split between tourism as an action and the tourist
as a lay identity concept. Doing so, I want to overcome the idea of identity and rather
suggest a focus on context analysis instead of concept analysis. Theoretically as well as
practically, the tourist identity concept has been brought to many of its limits. While efforts
have been made to connect the tourist concept to other metaphors (Bauman: 1996, Dann:
2002), or by undertaking anthropological analysis of tourists, no big point has been scored
yet to establish the tourist as an empirical social fact (Picard: 2002).
Hitherto, I have tried to demonstrate that a tourist cannot be seen as an entity with clear
borders of being. A tourist is an identity concept that works inside a flow. It depends upon
the observer where in that flow he wants to see the tourist. However, seen the
schizophrenia problem that goes along with identity concepts nowadays, this identity flow is
not one-dimensional but constituted of multiple layers so that each one exists in parallel
with the other. Also, these identity layers are created and co-created. Since everything is in
flow and in constant change, the idea of something bearing an identity in the sense that
identity equals state of being appears debateable. For Bauman it is clear that “the real
problem is not how to build identity, but how to preserve it […].” (Bauman: 1996, p. 22) and
this knowledge of knowing that one cannot know oneself holistically might be disturbing.
Bauman expresses that: “living amidst apparently infinite chances […] offers the sweet taste
of 'freedom to become anybody'. This sweetness has a bitter after-taste, though, since while
the 'becoming' bit suggests that nothing is over yet and everything lies ahead, the condition
of 'being somebody' which that becoming is meant to secure, portends the empire's final,
end-of-game whistle: 'you are no more free when the end has been reached; you are not
yourself when you have become somebody.' The state of unfinishedness incompleteness
and underdetermination is full of risk and anxiety; but its opposite brings no unadultered
pleasure either, since it forecloses what freedom needs to stay open.” (Bauman: 2000, p.
62). Accordingly, the formation of identity is “composed of silences, differences,
discontinuities, breaks, and forgetting as well, not only of clearly articulated itineraries in
time and place.” (Veijola: 2006, p. 79). Contemporarily, identities possess a discretionary
character seen there exists an uncountable number of them.
I can personally relate to this phenomenon as I happened to have a very akin experience. In
order to illustrate the discretionary character of identities, I will use it as an example. The
experience took place during of my semester abroad in Lima in October 2015. At the
beginning of my investigation, I planned to analyse the tourist identity in this city where I
was a foreigner first. I undertook a trip to the centre of Lima where I began to observe
mainly tourists taking pictures of the main square in Lima. I was not aware in the beginning
that what I was doing was attributing identities to those people. I took it for granted to see
myself as the observer while they for me were the tourists, which I identified by interpreting
their behaviour as “touristic” or by seeing their cameras dangling around their neck.

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Equipped with my iPad, I started to take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the
environment when, suddenly, a group of high school students came to me and dared to ask
me if I was a tourist.
Figure 2 :Myself spotting the tourists (own source)
The momentum shocked me since I would not have expected it (furthermore I was aware of
the high rate of criminality in Lima and aware that walking outside with my iPad may not
have been one of my most brilliant ideas). But after a moment of hesitation I engaged with
these interesting people and we talked. To unknot the situation, they explained me that they
were high school students who were ordered by their English teacher to look for tourists
around the place to practice their English skills with “tourists”, so their words. I got to talk to
their English teacher who told me the exact same thing. The question that wakened my
interest was this little fun fact that I had been living in Lima for some months, yet those local
kids would still consider me as a tourist in (or maybe because of?) the crowds of tourists. In
the same way, I found myself taking photographs of people that I assumed to be tourists.
For the kids I must certainly have looked like a tourist taking picture.
Yet, the more interesting question here was our understanding of the tourist concept in this
context. For me, the tourist was a person I chose to study because I wanted to look for
specific tourist behaviour, something that makes him as concept different from all other
concepts. For the teenagers, the tourist was a possibility to improve their English skills. They
used the wording tourist in order to identify strangers with whom they could start an

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interaction in order to benefit from his/her knowledge. The tourists that we chose to analyse
were probably not thinking about being tourists at that moment. All they focused on was the
sightseeing and photographing of the place as if it was a piece of art to contemplate. Their
activity was not tourism but contemplating, photographing or enjoying the atmosphere.
How then dared I term them as tourists, labelling them as if they were some kind of alien
race that has to be analysed and dissected?
Figure 3: Students spotting the “tourists” (here a German couple) (own source)
What stroke me in that moment was that I considered other people as tourists while for
myself, I saw myself as “more local” since I had been living in Lima for a few months and
knew the place quite well. Yet, even with this background, I was the tourist for some other
people. My identity was at play in this context and I presumably played my part, not alone
by the fact of being there. I perceived that at places like that one, I was able attribute
identities as I wished. This discretionary attribution, but also co-creation of identities at a
place reveals the importance of embodied activity. As actors in this contexts, everyone
contributes to the context setting and everyone decides upon who the other is. For this, all
that is needed is interaction, a gaze to the nice looking lady, taking a picture of the man
taking a picture or engaging in a talk with students. And every interaction changes the
identity we live with.
One can say that within this moment of being at this place, I happened to have a moment
“in which we redefine our lives – when a meaning or belief is put at a risk or we find

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ourselves reliving a memorable event. And in these moments we are disrupted,
transformed.” (Watson and Waterton.: 2012, p. 5). It was in that moment that I realised the
hybrid and hyperreal character of identities. Many identities could have been used to
describe my being-at-the-place back then, but none would have been able to describe the
context in one adequate and describing way. The way how I perceived myself and how I
performed my identity was not how others perceived my identity. Seen this gap that exists
within the identity concept, how can we assume that applying concept-identities like the
tourist can bring us a more related apprehension of contexts like mine? I argue that we have
to get away from concept-identities like the tourist and rather arrive at the state to analyse
contexts in which we place identities to the second-tier. Veijola similarly claims that “Indeed,
one could replace an idea of a stable state of identity with the notion of belonging […] to
mark modern identity formation.” (Probyn: 1996, p. 19 recited by Veijola: 2006, p. 79). In
this regard, “Tourism is thus understood as a process of expanded social interaction
whereby self-identity has the potential for enlargement and growth through the
engagement of the tourist with other environments, peoples, societies and cultures.”
(Wearing et al.: 2009, p. 36).
In relation to Bauman’s (1996) idea that building identity is to be seen as project without an
end I assume that we cannot understand flows of being by taking conceptual snapshots. In
other words, our being in the world as one consequent shape-shifting realm cannot be
explained by static ideas such as identity. Living is a dynamic affair not reducible to concepts
and the big disadvantage we are dealing with when pre-segmenting our target groups as
tourist is that we stigmatise them into a lay identity-category. Accordingly, Crouch states:
“What may be called the tourism moment can conceal the variety and diversity of things
that individuals do when they are tourists. The moment is not bounded, holistically distinct,
separate, or of different processes, performativities or feelings from others in living. Delight,
boredom, wonder across the interstices of living; and much that tourists do is mundane.
Being a tourist or ‘doing tourism’ involves a multitude of part-related activities.” This
differentiation of tourism practices (which I have argued are absurd) from mundane
practices result in a “false divide, and tourism moments merge almost seamlessly with other
practices and their performativities.” (Crouch: 2012, pp. 33–34). It might be more useful for
this reason to explore identities inside a context instead of conceptualising research
contexts. This would mean to frame the context very carefully in myriad aspects and to
analyse actions descriptively without classifying people first. The goal of such an analysis
would be to understand the situational context, not the concepts that transcend it.
Until here, I have evaluated the tourist to be a concept, a metaphor and an identity. Yet, no
convincing evidence has been brought up that would establish the tourist as an “empirical
social fact” (Picard: 2002, p. 122). In this regard, statements like “[…] the tourist is on the
move. […] he is everywhere he goes in, but nowhere of the places he is in.” (Bauman: 1996

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p. 29) make the wrong point and do not help in answering who the tourist is. The only
answer I have found on this question until here is that the tourist is a human being.
Altogether, the main message I want to proliferate is that within analysing the tourist we are
working with a dead metaphor. The tourist and his look-alikes I consider as concepts that
mislead the analysis of the human condition. This being said, I propose to get rid of the
tourist and his kind and analyse the human being in empirical unpreconceptualised contexts.
This would concretely mean that research does not focus on the tourists anymore, but on
places within which the goal should be to describe and then analyse the context. Metaphors
should not be excluded but kept away from empirical research as long as possible. Last but
not least, I would put the question of “Who is the tourist?” ad acta and reconduct the
analysis on tourism. Whenever we attribute identities to someone it implicates a restriction
of the reality we alternatively could have explored. As Salazar would have it “Tourism
overlaps with pilgrimage, but also with business, migration and other phenomena (Salazar
2010b; Salazar and Zhang 2013).” (Salazar: 2014, p. 263). As we have seen, identities involve
the problem of schizophrenia when colliding as well as specificity since they now are existing
in parallel with other identities, are created co-creatively and hyperreal. Selasi brings this to
the point in analysing herself with the identity concept of nation: “I'm not multinational. I'm
not a national at all. How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a
concept?” (Selasi: 2014, Min. 1:38 – 1:50). This said, I want to elucidate that I oppose
identity constructs that label the human being into slices of being and rather argue like
Selasi that “all identity is experience” (Selasi: 2014, Min. 4:52 – 4: 56) or, in Baudrillardian
terms (Baudrillard: 1988), that every identity is a simulacrum.
2.6. Tourism as an imaginary access creating activity
For tourism bears some perceivable facts that I cannot tackle (at least not in this Bachelor’s
thesis) I will now concentrate on elucidating these facts and how tourism can be granted a
certain stability as a phenomenon. To recap Netto’s questions: “What is the essence of
tourism? What is invariable? Which are the attributes that must exist for us to say that
something is tourism?” (Netto: 2009, p. 56).
I previously have criticized the pleonastic character of tourism classifications like
gastronomic tourism. Now, I have to revise a part of that assertion. In fact, I must admit that
tourism does contain the notion of action. However, a difference has to be made between
tourism as an action and metaconceptualising this action. Furthermore, I would suggest to
split the idea of tourism and the tourist into two separate concepts and analyse tourism
outside of the tourist action sphere. If we want to understand tourism as an action instead
of it a metaconcept, we must assume tourism to be an action that does not overextend a

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certain action framework. Perceived from this angle, tourism bears much less conceptual
fuzziness and one can explain some “essentials” that underlie tourism and from which
tourism can be logically derived.
Thereupon, after everything I considered until here, I argue that tourism in its core is formed
by the action of generating access to people. This access can be generated in various ways:
by opening up new paths to already existing places or by creating new places. In this regard,
home tourism (or virtual tourism) can be surpassed as paradoxes when we consider space
not only as a physical parameter. Space can indeed be cognitively constructed and on that
account, we can say that if tourism is about creating places, it can happen everywhere and
all the time. This makes home tourism as a form of creating places and generating access to
that place, to oneself or to others. Urry accordingly writes: “Also hugely important in
mobility practices is ‘imaginative travel’ to place. We ‘travel’ forward in time to places only
known through visual images, experiencing in one’s imagination in advance what we imagine
the atmosphere of place to be. And we travel backward in time to places that possess
haunting memories.” (Urry: 2006, p. x). This makes that the human beings, either at home or
not, “are creative actors who play a key role in making and remaking the meanings of […]
places.” (Light: 2012, p. 60). Tourism in this regard is an access generating activity to space.
The access generation is produced by bringing forward new places by using what many
authors call the “imaginary” (Amirou: 2012; Gaonkar: 2002; Salazar: 2012, 2014). Gaonkar as
one godfather of the social imaginary, explains it as follows: “What is crucial here is not that
human beings always eat, raise children, tinker with the established ways, and tell stories
but that they do so in such a variety of ways. Therein lies the hold of the social imaginary.
Our response to material needs, however technically impoverished, is always semiotically
excessive. We lean on nature but are steered by the social imaginary.” (Gaonkar: 2002, p. 7).
This imaginary is a creation as well as a way how we understand and think our environment.
In a next volley, we have to understand that tourism as an access generating activity, either
physically or imaginarily, did not fall out of the blue but can be tracked back to be an
“ordering towards the world” like Franklin (2004) terms it. To quote him: "we should begin
to view modern tourism not as merely the welling up of a deep-rooted structural element of
the human condition, […] but as something that had to be made to happen, that belongs to
a story of becoming; […] that once formed and unleashed on the world it took on a life of its
own as an ordering, a way of making the world different, a way of ordering the objects of
the world in a new way – and not just human objects.” (Franklin: 2004, pp. 2 – 3).
Concretely, Franklin explains how the need for tourism did arise and how the likes of
Thomas Cook snatched the exact moment to make a business out of tourism. Indeed,
Franklin states that: “the significance of Cook was not only in the organization of travel. In
equal measures it was also in the creation of this desire, the articulation of interpellation: he
himself, and later his company were in the business of persuasion; opening up the world,

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place making through interpretation, translation, producing guides and information; creating
spaces of tourism in and through technologies not primarily developed for it, in towns and
regions ill prepared for it, and even hostile to it and across barriers hitherto existing to
prevent it.” (Franklin: 2004, p. 17). Franklin thus interlines the importance of the imaginary
in the creation of the tourism industry by saying that Cook was in the business of persuasion
and creating desires.
Moreover, he attributes tourism to be opening up the world which again translates into the
action of providing access to certain paths and places. As Hannan (2009, p. 111) would have
it, tourism must be understood as a part of a broader mobility. Tourism in its original sense
was seen as providing access to places and Cook perceived that this need has not been filled
by a concrete measure yet. He concretely undertook a measure and perceived that he could
fill the existing lacuna by doing so. This action can be said to stand for what tourism
represents not only as an industry but as an action. In a concomitant step it was possible to
use this lacuna in terms of economics which is why Cook formed a business generating
profits in monetary terms. Baerenholdt accordingly mentions that “If places did not exist the
tourism industry would have to invent them. Or if places did not exist the tourists would
have had to invent them. […] Without places to which to go tourism would seem
meaningless.” (Baerenholdt: 2004, p. 1). Tribe makes a similar statement by saying that: “For
tourism has become a significant creator of forms in the contemporary world. At a micro
level, tourism creates souvenirs and representations. It affects dress. It generates signage
and interpretative clutter. It causes buildings (restaurants, terminals, accommodation,
galleries) to rise into being with their exterior architecture and interior design. At a macro
level, it scapes parts of the world into seasides, ski resorts and whole tourism cities such as
Las Vegas.“ (Tribe: 2009, p. 3). Pretes (1995) for example writes about how Lapland was
transformed into Santa Claus land and how the whole place has been commoditised for
Christmas (Pretes: 1995, p. 14). What can be deducted of this example is how tourism
provides access by creating imaginaries and how this imaginary can also leads to a physical
reshaping of a place, as Tribe says. In the case of Pretes, the imaginary of Santa Claus
transformed the whole place (physically as well as imaginarily) into Christmas land. Hence,
the possibilities of imaginaries are only limited by one’s fantasy.

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Figure 4: A brochure of Thomas Cook’s tours through Europe. The beginning of intentional access generation to
a broad public, launching the beginning (?) of tourism.
(Source: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/03/06/article-2288930-1879E90F000005DC-234_306x483.jpg)
Evidently, the desire to go places has already been a phenomenon in pre-industrial eras, like
with the Grand Tour during the times of the Renaissance (Holden: 2005) or, if we go back
further, with the nomads or pilgrims. Similarly, in those times of pre-industrial travel the
question how to access a place also prevailed. If it was not by oneself that the traveling
person could travel, he related to the person that provided the access to the place he
wanted to go. In this sense, the act of providing access to space precedes the industrial
notion of tourism. Could we then claim that tourism has always been there in human
history? This is indeed difficult to say. I would go so far to assume that the act to provide
access to space has existed before Cook perceived the lacuna of offer. Still, it is difficult to
find an answer to the question if in pre-industrial times people undertook tourism. For some
like Franklin argue that tourism only arose with the development of the railways and
nationalism leading to a greater desire of belonging. To quote him: “Nationalism and
modernism undermined not reinforced the contrast between the world of the everyday and
a world beyond.” (Franklin: 2004, p. 13). Like Franklin already said, Cook created physical
access through technologies not primarily developed for it. But that is not all. With his
storytelling, he intentionally inserted an imaginary place into the physical place. Therein lies
what can be seen as the aforementioned core characteristic of tourism (at least in the
industrial era and until now) which is the creation of access by social imaginaries. Wearing et
al. describe that “Central to the Western tourism enterprise is the cultural power to
construct the tourist space while ensuring that there is enough of the local culture present
(in a sanitized form) to excite and titillate. In this way hegemony is maintained while the
exotic (Other) culture is package and sold as a viable and valuable commodity.” (Wearing et

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al.: 2009, p. 55). As can be seen in figure 4, this commoditisation of space is what Cook tried
to achieve with his social imaginaries. Through the imaginary, he wanted to manifest
abstract space as something to touch, feel and have.
Obviously, social imaginaries occur in other events than tourism, another great example is to
be found sports like football. Yet, tourism uses the social imaginary to cover one specific
desire which Franklin describes as “the extension of belonging, the prospect of taking up a
place in the new national cultures that beckoned them [the people].” (Franklin: 2004, p. 22).
The action of access creation is undertaken primarily as an end and not as a mean. Certainly,
in an economic setting, the end is to make profits and therefore, in this case, tourism as an
action is to be seen as a mean. But the action framework of tourism, let us say the essential
of tourism, is to create access by bringing forward new places constantly. Cook created
tourism in the form that he intentionally created a social imaginary to cover this desire of
belonging. In this regard, tourism does have a legitimate standing as an industrial as well as
post-industrial practice because it intentionally provides imaginary access to space. These
space or spaces are, as Wearing et al. state, ”spaces of movement, destination, experience,
memory and representation. They are also spaces of desire, fantasy, creativity, liminality,
reordering and enchantment. Increasingly, too, tourism is about the spaces of the virtual
and the imaginary. By conceptualizing tourism and the tourism experience through a
theoretical lens that situates the interactive and enveloping spaces of tourism at the centre
of the analysis, it soon becomes evident that there are important and intangible dimensions
to space and the spatial structuring of tourism.” (Wearing et al.: 2009, p. 10).
2.7. Imagining home tourism
What is more to the social imaginary in tourism is that everybody can engage in this action.
In other words, everybody is able to wrap a story around a place and present it to others. By
doing so, the author of that story creates a proper access to the social imaginary which
enables his audience to shift perspectives and access the physical world with a different
imaginary. This shift in perspective will change the whole experience setting of the human
being at the place. This makes the tourism action, at least on a first instance, a very
democratic tool. Adams (2005) explains how the power relationships between imaginaries
function in his focus study on Alor. I quote: “the genesis of touristic images does not simply
entail the projection and amplification of authoritative outsiders’ visions, but rather
illustrates how images of place are negotiated, sculpted and re-sculpted in a complex
dialogue between local aspiring entrepreneurs, anthropologists, national tourism
bureaucrats, and intrepid travelers.” (Adams: 2005, p.126). “From the Alor case, one might
deduce that touristic images emerge and evolve as hybrid forms, fusions of historical, local,
and visitor imagery.” (Adams: 2005, p. 129)”. Of course, we have to take into account that in

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practice, democracy is mostly the best case scenario and that in many cases, authorities or
industries can use their power positions to enforce and maintain their imaginary.
Having said that, home tourism must not necessarily be perceived as a paradox since
tourism is not about a person living at a place. Home tourism rather concerns that the
person in charge invents a new imaginary and consequently accesses the place he qualifies
as his home in a different approach. In practice, this could happen whenever a friend alien to
the place would visit this person. Consequently, if one person offers to give another person
access to his imaginary, we could talk about tourism. If this person does so in order to gain a
profit, we can talk about the tourism industry. Accordingly, talking about home or not
becomes redundant since the local when creating an imaginary escapes his sphere of the
local and becomes an “outside-insider” as Minca & Oakes (2006, p. 8) would have it. When
analysing home tourism, I would therefore not go so far to look for identity concepts such as
tourist or local but rather start from taking into account that the concerned mobile persons
have generated and shared their access to that space through a tourism imaginary. It is
worth analysing the context as such without restrictions in order to gather as many
information as possible instead of predetermining the research on a concept.
Figure 5: Be a tourist in your own bedroom?
(Source: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/509243/Student-convinced-family-trip-
around-Asia-despite-never-leaving-bedroom)
For this reason, I would suggest to see tourism, amongst many other perspectives, as an
action which concerns the invention of imaginary places and provides access to that same
place to oneself and/or others. This invention of places fits inside the mobility paradigm of
Mavric and Urry and it validates their idea that “tourism should be seen as more continuous
with other mobilities – overlapping and interdependent. More generally we have seen how

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places are dynamic, moving around and not necessarily staying in one ‘location’. Places
travel within networks of human and nonhuman agents, of photographs, sand, cameras,
cars, souvenirs, paintings, surfboards, and so on. These objects extend what humans are
able to do, what performances of place are possible.” (Mavric & Urry: 2012, p. 655). This
performances of place are not only possible in the physical world, but can take place even
more in the imaginary, as to be seen in the case of the girl who never left her bedroom
(Figure 5). In this case, Bauman is to be quoted accordingly as he explains that “Power can
move with the speed of the electronic signal - and so the time required for the movement of
its essential -ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity. For all practical purposes, power
has become truly exterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of
space.” (Bauman: 2000, pp.10). This indeed postmodern approach means that mobility is not
related to physical parameters, but extends to happen as a cognitive construct made by the
human being. The extension of power by an interconnected world shows how strong
imaginaries can become without needing to provoke much physical movement.
Consequently, Gehmann might be stated: “All this presupposes mobility, either in a direct
way of physically moving consumers to those (former) sites or in an indirect way, in that
those sites are moving to me, the consumer, achieved via media devices.” (Gehmann: 2015,
p. 77). Even if the girl never managed to leave her bedroom, by creating an imaginary an
generating access to it, she convinced her relatives that she was backpacking through South-
East-Asia. She created her imaginary place and generated access to it via the internet.
2.8. Tourism & postmodernity
So far, I have shown that tourism is the action that generates forwards spaces imaginarily
and physically and provides access to the aforementioned places. With the notion of the
social imaginary, I have tried to demonstrate the creative dimension involved in tourism and
how people like Thomas Cook have identified the potential of this action and initiated one of
the greatest industries of our planet. To further establish the idea of the imaginary, I am
going to draw a link to postmodern consumption since tourism as a consumption of physical
but even more of the imaginary fits perfectly into the logic of postmodernity.
According to Amirou (2012, p. 333) everything can be transformed into a consumable
nowadays. Tourism products, he states, are marketing products like any others, which is why
we talk about the tourism industry. For him (p. 348), it is clear that the postmodern society
transforms the recreational service into representations to be merchandised and consumed.
This transformation of objects into consumables is made feasible as in postmodernity “we
find an emphasis upon the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life, the
collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture, a general stylistic
promiscuity and playful mixing of codes.” (Featherstone: 2007, p. 64). Amirou (p. 337)

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similarly argues that tourism morphs reality and fantasy. We can translate this onto tourism,
because what is being done in here is instilling places with an imaginary that renders the
physical place consumable. Appropriately, imaginaries are cognitive constructs that are
created in order to instil meaning to the physical world.
If tourism is about place creation, the opposite side is about place consumption. This
consumption of place according to Featherstone’s understanding of postmodern
consumption “must not be understood as the consumption of use-values, a material utility,
but primarily as the consumption of signs.” (Featherstone: 2007, p. 83). Indeed, we consume
not only the physical place but the social imaginary underlying it. Obviously, physical and
imaginary space are interdependent and need to be seen contextually. Nevertheless,
through the imaginary it becomes possible for a person to absorb the story being told. This
absorption process can likewise be understood as shopping as Bauman interprets:“ If
'shopping' means scanning the assortment of possibilities, examining, touching, feeling,
handling the goods on display, comparing their costs with the contents of the wallet or the
remaining credit limit of credit cards, putting some of them in the trolley and others back on
the shelf - then we shop outside shops as much as inside; we shop in the street and at home,
at work and at leisure, awake and in dreams.” (Bauman: 2000, p. 73). According to
Aramberri, this “shopping” has taken over the logic in tourism. For him, as he sees
accommodation as part of tourism (which it is because it provides access to place), he
criticizes that “The theoretical study of tourism cannot advance by ignoring that millions of
humans see mass consumption as part of their pursuit of happiness.” (Aramberri: 2001, p.
757). For Hall, “The fundamental question is not why we want to engage in leisure and
travel. The question is why have so many people increasingly come to believe that
consuming such mobility will somehow make them happier and improve their life?” (Hall:
2012, p. 68). Wang could give an answer to that question, as he sees tourism as “a de-
routinization of consumption. De-routinization is a necessery experience of peak
consumption. Peak consumption is unusual consumption. […] Tourism is, in essence,
characterized by a break of routine and everyday life.” (Wang: 2002, p. 290). Postmodernity
has thus transformed us all into consumers who shop all the time, like Bauman says. For
tourism, it becomes clear that it is a phenomenon that falls under the practice of
consumption. This consumption of imaginaries is to be understood as postmodern since we
are dealing with imaginaries that are immaterial, change all the time and are replaced by
one another, like in Baudrillard’s (1988) vision of the simulacra. After Featherstone “The
triumph of signifying culture leads to a simulational world in which the proliferation of signs
and images has effaced the distinction between the real and the imaginary. […] Consumer
culture for Baudrillard is effectively a postmodern culture, a depthless culture in which all
values have become transvalued and art has triumphed over reality.” (Featherstone: 2007,
p. 83). With this morphing of art of reality, people now “move between the real and the
imagined world with educated ease, and the power of the imagination cuts through the

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material to the extent that we can neither rely on the merely observable, nor the discrete.”
(Robinson: 2012, p. 23).
To synthetize, tourism abides to postmodernity because it instils physical places with
imaginaries, which equals the idea of commodification of sites that is so common in
postmodernity. Those imaginaries are consumed by human being. Going further, one can
synthetize the creation and consumption of imaginaries and talk about a prosumption (or
cocreation) process taking place here. Indeed, inside every context the human being
contributes to the creation of the imaginary as he installs in it his ideas. Since prosumption is
a very broad topic on its own and not the matter of this thesis, I can unfortunately not dive
further into the topic. What should be retained from this section is that tourism bears the
power of creating imaginaries by injecting signs and symbols into places and that
postmodern consumers also bring forward imaginaries that they create out of the tourism
imaginary and themselves. Tourism besides working inside mobilities thus also works within
hyperreality (Eco: 1990) since imaginaries are never absolute, but always appearing, shifting
and vanishing. Wang accordingly mentions the term “hyperconsumption” to describe this
state since “the limits of what is not accessible and consumable in technological or in
cultural terms must be forever transcended in order to satisfy the urge for new and changing
experiences.” (Wang: 2002, p. 290). Hence, the imaginaries can be seen as a “masterpiece of
bricolage” (Eco: 1990, p. 12) as every co-created imaginary is assembled out of different
simulacra. This notion of bricolage indicates the same creative artistic dimension that goes in
hand with postmodernity, as Amirou and Featherstone already pointed out.

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3. Conclusion
In order to conclude this thesis, let me first reiterate my research question in order to recap
what this all has been about. It stated:
What causes the conceptual blurriness of the “home tourist“ and
how can we specify tourism as a postmodern phenomenon?
The conclusion is structured in the following way. To start, I will briefly review what findings
have been made by this thesis. Next, I will check if these findings match the research
question and have answered the latter comprehensively. What will follow is a critical review
of my findings and my procedure. Finally, there will be an outlook treating further topics of
interest related to this thesis.
3.1. Main findings
I started this thesis with the analysis of a common tourism definition to reveal where the
fuzziness of the concept comes from. With this in mind, I found out that tourism as an action
bears the problem in that it transcends to the actions of what people do in a further step.
The striking point thus is that the concept of tourism does not take a clear position to its
action-framework and overcomes this problem by reducing all its actors to tourism
derivatives. I quoted Tribe (1997) who accordingly wrote that tourism as a term bears
various meanings. Hence, it is difficult to define what tourism is.
Next, I investigated what doing tourism actually means. By doing so I deducted that tourism
functions as a metaconcept, which means that it exceeds its action framework to what
people do while in reality, people are not undertaking the action of tourism. I showed with
the examples of gastronomic and cultural tourism that tourism classifications are redundant
since the action framework concerns barely tourism but is related to other actions.
Nevertheless, people are considered to be tourists instead of “gastronomists” which is why I
continued to analyse the existence of the tourist. I opposed Picard’s (2002) idea that the
tourist is an empirical social fact and analysed the usage of metaphors in identity attribution.
Seen the existence of numerous identities, I deducted that putting metaphors on human
beings ends up in fragmenting our perception on our being-in-the-world. I revealed how
research uses metaphors to preconceptualise research contexts which lead me to the
conclusion that Picard’s assumption of the tourist being an empirical social fact cannot be

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right. Consequently, the concern has been declared on how a human being can be a
concept? (Selasi: 2014).
This question I tried to analyse with the construct of the home tourist which I found to be an
odd one. I demonstrated that applying identities onto human beings goes along with the
paradox mentioned by Minca and Oakes (2006) that happens when a local becomes an
inside-outsider when being a tourist. This notion of schizophrenia is to be related to applying
static identities onto dynamic being-in-the-world. Consequently, I integrated tourism into
the mobility paradigm by Macric and Urry (2012) and Hannan (2009) by concomitantly
reducing the argument that everybody is a tourist (Crouch: 2012). On this account, I set a
definitive split between the tourist as an identity concept and tourism as an action to be
seen inside a broader mobility concept.
As a result of this question, I analysed the concept of identity to understand how the tourist
as an identity concept is attributed onto people. I found out that identity nowadays is to be
seen as an unfinished project (Bauman: 1996) and that identities are static constructs
applied onto dynamic being-in-the-world. Furthermore, identities turned out to be
discretionary as well as depending upon the eye of the observer, which I tried to
demonstrate with my experience in Lima. Thereupon, I concluded that the tourist is to be
seen as a dead metaphor and that we should concentrate on keeping context analysis
unpreconceptualised if we seek to understand the human condition. As stated by Robinson
(2012) it is difficult to perceive where being a tourist begins and where being a human ends.
I have reiteratively this message by quoting Crouch (2012, p. 35) who mentioned that “doing
tourism is being a tourist being a human being.”
This being said, I explained home tourism as an action which concerns the invention of
imaginary places while providing access to that same place to oneself and/or to others. From
this perspective, a person who attributes the concept of home to his place can present his
place by creating an imaginary of it and transmit this imaginary so that he or other may
access it. This results in that the inside-outsider of Minca and Oakes (2006) is not a paradox
but is made a paradox if we consider the imaginaries to be so. With the example of the girl
traveling through Asia from her bedroom I tried to demonstrate how nowadays we are able
to empower these paradox imaginaries.
Lastly, I wanted to turn my attention to the links between tourism and postmodernity. I tried
to describe how the imaginary is to be seen as a simulacrum functioning in hyperreality.
With this logic, I wanted to show how imaginaries are produced and consumed and how this
phenomenon can be seen as a morphing inside postmodern prosumption. Reality and art
are mixed and imaginaries are commoditised to be consumed. Imaginaries are in that
perspectives seen as an intangible cognitively constructed device we developed within our

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existence as human race. Evidently, I do not argue that these statements are exhaustive. In
fact, I would have written much more about postmodernity and why our contemporary
generations are postmodern. Yet, I did not due to the limited scope of this thesis.
3.2. Answerability towards research question
What causes the conceptual blurriness of home tourism?
Principally, there is one main factor causing the blurriness, which is to see tourism and the
tourist as one concept, a metaconcept so to say. If tourism is seen in what people do
anywhere at any time, then it becomes difficult to understand tourism as a clear action.
Unless tourism is conceptually split into the tourist and tourism, it will be difficult to define
tourism as a phenomenon due to the simple fact that the tourist as an identity concept
always adds immeasurable complexity to the whole discussion. It is incredibly difficult to
analyse the human being by reducing him as a concept. Therefore, the discussion about
what tourism is about and what a “touristic action” is becomes incredibly absurd.
How can tourism be specified as a postmodern phenomenon?
Tourism is postmodern in so far that its action can be delimited to opening up doors to
imaginaries. This process of access generation is intangible and to be accessed mainly by
cognitive construction. The imaginaries themselves are seen to function in hyperreality due
to the fact that they function operatively where one imaginary is replaced by another. This
means that there is no original imaginary. Every imaginary, every time one generates access
to a place, the person or people in charge open a new imaginary: a new simulacrum.
Tourism can as such be understood as working inside hyperreality, thus to postmodernity.
3.3. Critical review
Like in the postmodern mind-set, I oppose the concept of truths. In my opinion, our whole
world is constituted of perspectives. They are written down, filmed, memorised or saved in
any other form. Each one bears its point of validity while each one is always determined by
the perspective which analyses them. On this account, I would like to switch perspectives in
this critical review and reflect the contexts of my writing. After all, the findings of this thesis
are in no point meant to be seen as truth bit as a perspective.

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I have to admit that adapting a postmodern perspective, I dug myself a whole which was
quite difficult to escape. Postmodernity bears an enormous complexity and can be seen as a
worldview whose main aim is to mess up any perspective and leave nothing in its structures.
I agree with that point on account of that I myself wanted to deconstruct the structures of
tourism as I oppose the common understanding of it. This may have resulted in that I
deconstructed too much and lead some of my argumentation itself into blurriness. Although,
this has initially been the problem I attempted to resolve. As MacFarlene says “It is of the
nature of postmodernity that it is full of hybrids, ironies, quirky, contradictory, inconsistent,
multidisciplinary, multifocal, multilevel, multicultural. (MacFarlene: 2014, Minute 20:56 –
21:16). I appears that a lot of these character match with what has been written in this
thesis.
Moreover, I recognised that many authors, amongst others Bruner (2005) and Edensor
(2006, 2012), oppose the postmodern idea. Edensor for examples opposes the idea that
signs are free floating and can be extracted of their cultural to circulate freely amongst many
cultures (Edensor: 2012, p. 555). However, how then explain that buildings like the Eiffel
Tower are constructed all around the planet, for example reproduced in Las Vegas? Bruner
(2005, p. 5) rejects the idea of postmodernity stating that “There is no simulacrum because
there is no original. Performances for tourists arise, of course, from within the local cultural
matrix, but all performances are “new” in that the context, the audience, and the times are
continually changing (E. Bruner 1984b; 1986a). To put it another way, performance is
constitutive.” (Bruner: 2005, p. 5). He is right to some extent, especially in a modern
worldview. Postmodern concepts like hyperreality and the simulacrum can be avoided in this
sense, if we consider performances to be happening in unique situations on a timeline. To
make long things short: we do not have to integrate the postmodern worldview if we
describe our being-in-the-world as what is happening in our consciousness. The ideas of the
simulacrum can easily be replaced with the idea of autopoeisis (Maturana: 1992), creative
destruction (Schumpeter: 2005) or just by accepting change as an axiom of our existence.
Nevertheless, I have to state that the postmodern worldview is a helpful perspective. It
helps to explain and to undergo so many static concepts that in modernity are still
prevailing, i.e. identity formation and truth. In this regard, we are at least theoretically able
to criticize identity.
Notwithstanding, we should all beware of that postmodernity is only a movement. As Brann
rightly states: “All there is, is people believing things about their temporal location and
persuading others. The question proposed, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, runs the danger of
positing as a being what is only a movement - and movements are to the human intellect
what inertia is to material bodies, a relative motion without an innate force.” (Brann: 1992,
p. 7). And I assume that we can use this movement to be aware of our position inside the