Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Tourism is now the largest industry in the world, and as such, it has increasingly become of interest to scholars in a number of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, →  semiotics , communication and →  marketing. It is also the subject of analyses using interdisciplinary approaches, such as leisure studies, feminist studies (→  Feminist and Gender Studies ), and →  cultural studies. Tourism studies have moved from being a relatively marginal aspect of the academy to one of considerable importance, and there are now departments devoted to studying tourism and many scholarly journals devoted to the subject. Tourism scholars pay a great deal of attention to marketing and to different kinds of tourists and what they are seeking when they travel. The tendency is to focus on sociological topics involving tourism demographics and statistical portraits of tourists. There is also an anthropological approach to tourism that considers it as a cultural phenomenon. In recent years, a broader approach, involving a number of disciplines, has become important and one finds now, for example, psychoanalytic–semiotic studies of tourism being made. A good example of the semiotic analysis of a “foreign” culture is →  Roland Barthes's Empire of signs (1982). Several years ago, more than 800 million people made trips out of their home country to another country, and ... log in or subscribe to read full text