Dmitri Shalin Interview with Dean MacCannell about Erving Goffman entitled Some of Goffman’s Guardedness and Verbal Toughness Was Simply a Way of Giving Himself the Space and Time That He Needed to Do the Work That He Really Loved

This conversation with Dean MacCannell, Professor of Environmental Design at the University of California Davis, was recorded over the phone on July 7, 2009. The initial exchange lasting a minute or so is reconstructed from memory. Breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information and additional materials inserted during the editing process appear in square brackets. Undecipherable words and unclear passages are identified in the text as “[?]”

Conspicuous consumption of the elite: Social and self-congruity in tourism choices

This paper relies on social and economic psychology to explore how the travel choices of Portuguese citizens, with different status levels in their daily lives, perceive and adopt different conspicuous travel patterns because of public exposure. To account for the moderated role of public exposure on conspicuous travel patterns, 36 Portuguese citizens were interviewed. Q-methods were applied to explore the varying senses of conspicuous travel choices among citizens with different levels of public exposure, both individually and relative to each other. Complementary qualitative methods were applied, in order to explore how the interviewees construct tourism conspicuous meanings that match their social or self-representations. The results suggest that social contexts moderate the ways in which individuals perceive and experience conspicuous travel. Further, the results show that public groups with higher exposure tend to prefer subtle signals of conspicuousness, in order to differentiate themselves from the mainstream

Power and rights in the community: paralegals as leaders in women's legal empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence

"Looking all lost towards a Cook's guide for beauty”: the art of literature and the lessons of the guidebook in modernist writing

This article explores the impact of the guidebook, especially the Baedeker series, on modernist literary culture. It argues that the guidebook is a literary phenomenon in its own right and that, as such, it attracts special attention from those engaged in defending and/or extending the category of literature as part of a modernist agenda. In particular, modernist writers are concerned as to whether the guidebook counts as a form of literature and, if so, what this means for the more familiar forms seen in their own essays, fiction and travelogues. What might the invention of the star system to rank scenes and monuments mean for the future of art criticism? How might the guidebook help or hinder the traveller in his/her pursuit of the beautiful or the picturesque? What does recourse to the guidebook reveal about the taste and education of the traveller? And, more pointedly still, what kind and quality of writing is the guidebook itself? This article surveys the extent of modernism's interest in the guidebook, both as a noteworthy new form and as a form modernist writers adapted for use in their own books, before turning in detail to commentary on the guidebook by E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, H.D. and Virginia Woolf. In conclusion, it finds that the guidebook in modernism is very rarely just that. Instead, the guidebook finds unexpected affinities with modernism in its attempt to “modernise” literature – to make it more rational, more totalising and, in the eyes of its critics, less able to discriminate.This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Studies in Travel Writing on 4th March 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13645145.2014.994924

Unpopular Culture: Ecological Dissonance and Sustainable Futures in Media-Induced Tourism

The article deconstructs media-induced tourist development’s relationship with “sustainability,” “ecology” and the “popular”. I highlight the interconnected, but often competing interpretations of “ecology” as interactions among technics (representational regimes), technological regimes and institutions (media, tourism), social agents (media/tourism experts, fan tourists and their hosts), and the natural and built environment in which these take place. Constitutive of contemporary economic and sociocultural complexities in which media-induced “popular cultures” are produced and consumed, these ecological landscapes are increasingly in conflict between and within themselves. Such conflicts destabilize “popular culture” as ritualized behavior or experiential domain, enmeshing it into populist reactions against tourists/guests/strangers

The Time of the Sign

A sociologist-anthropologist and a literary critic bring their complementary perspectives to bear on a critique of modern culture. They point to the academy's domination by a rationalist, liberal tradition as the locus of its decline in the post-modern era. A holistic, semiotic approach is offered as a vital and positive alternative. The book builds and expands on the authors' modified Saussurian model for the analysis of culture presented in the opening section. Part Two explores the implications of the general model for the social sciences and includes a discussion of Marx and Freud after semiotics; Part Three addresses literary and cultural criticism. The penultimate chapter, "On the Discriminations of Signs," reviews the recent historical evolution of intellectual schools of thought, from phenomenology through existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics. It regards this evolution from the standpoint of the successive transformations of our understanding of "the sign." The book concludes with a critique of counterrevolutionary tendencies that have recently surfaced within semiotics. The Time of the Sign is an invigorating and probing work, with many acute insights into the development and analysis of cultural forms

Way off the Beaten Path Or How I Became a Tourism Researcher

Pour juger d’un homme, il faut suivre longuement et curieusement sa trace[‘to judge a man one must follow his tracks for a long time and with curiosity’] Michael de Montaigne, Essais V. 1Juliet Flower MacCannell, trans. The locution “Off the Beaten Track” It is as old as writing by and about tourists. It signals an intent to experience more than, or other than, the herds of tourists who came before and who will come after. The metaphor of a track or a path always implies a morality. Fundament..

Comment j’ai écrit : The Tourist

L’auteur revient sur le contexte historique et les fondements intellectuels et institutionnels de son étude (1976) intitulée The tourist : a New Theory of the Leisure Class, en particulier sur ses liens avec la théorie sociale et critique classique et son adéquation avec le post-structuralisme et le déconstructivisme. Il aborde les influences qui l’ont marqué comme celle de Marx, Durkheim, C.S. Peirce, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Goffman et Derrida. Il décrit la méthode qu’il a appliqué à The Tourist comme ayant consité à observer les touristes à la recherche d’indices peremettant de comprendre les formes et la direction que prennait la société contemporaine. Cette approche est décrite comme étant antithétique à la fragmentation par domaine telle qu’elle est pratiquée à l’université, où la connaissance de la société est éparpillée et distribuée dans divers domaines déconnectés les uns des autres tels que les études féministes, les études ethniques, les études culturelles, les études en communication, etc. À mesure que les touristes traversent tous ces domaines, ils ouvrent de nouvelles voies vers une compréhension holistique des dispositifs sociétaux émergents. La dernière section de cet article traite des erreurs de lecture qui se sont produites sur les concepts de “ loisir aliéné » et “ d’authenticité mise en scène » que l’auteur a développés