H42.1041 Lec 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Albert #70608
Mondays 12:30pm – 3:15pm
721 Broadway, 6th Fl, Rm 613
A booming multinational industry, tourism is a powerful medium of transnational encounter. There is hardly a place on earth not part of the recreational geography of tourism. An engine for moving people from one place to another, tourism produces itself with ever greater complexity. This course will undertake a performance analysis of tourist productions, including tourist discourse, settings, events, experiences, and artifacts from an ethnographic perspective. An exemplary case of cultural invention and commodification, tourism is implicated in the histories of pilgrimage, travel, colonialism, and ethnography, retracing their itineraries and replicating their discourse. As a result, tourism offers some of the richest material for exploring the semiosis of cultural production on a global scale. We will pay special attention to the political economy of tourism as seen through a close analysis of actual sites.
