Full text of DOI:10.1080/02614360110051631

Leisure Studies 20 (2001) 143–159
Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
STEPHEN WEARING and BETSY WEARING
University of Technology, Sydney, NSW Australia. E-mail: S.Wearing@uts.edu.au
7 Palm Close, Glenning Valley 2261, NSW Australia. E-mail: bets@ozemail.com.au
A profusion of touristic experiences of the last 20 years has generated a variety of
means of theorizing, analysing and marketing tourism. This paper has sought to
recentre the analysis on the ideas of a conceptualization of the self through the
tourism experience. Predominant current conceptualizations of tourism as commidit-
ized escapes have been re-examined and recontextualized in the light of feminised
post structural viewpoints to bring a richer understanding of tourist experience(s).
The potential for changes in self and identity through cross-cultural interactions is
discussed. The approach taken is person centred, rather than those focussed on
economics, marketing or management. Nevertheless we demonstrate the usefulness
of such a people orientated perspective for all aspects of the tourism industry. At the
same time the threads of an interactive, person centred approach are being woven
together to emphasise the importance of interactions – personal, communal and
cultural in the tourist enterprise and to position the selves and identities of tourists
and hosts at the ethical centre.
Introduction
Tourism is essentially a modern western phenomena the analysis of which has
evolved from pre-modernism through to post-modernism (Mathieson and
Wall, 1982; MacCannell, 1992; Weaver and Opperman, 2000;). It differs
signiŽcantly from non-western and historical forms of travel, being closely
related to the emergence of modernity with the concomitant emphasis on
economic viability. The growth of tourism as a social phenomenon and the
tourist industry as an economic enterprise has been dramatic during the last
half of the twentieth century (WTO, 1999; WTTC, 1999). Tourism has
become a major social and economic force in many countries and regions
throughout the world. The profusion of tourist experiences that has resulted
during the last 20 years has generated a variety of means of theorizing,
analysing and marketing tourism. Tourism theories and research have ranged
from micro-social psychological explanations (Crompton, 1979, 1981; Dann,
1981; Pearce, 1993) to macro-social explorations concerning the global-
ization of tourist venues, in part as a response to the increasing domination of
the market by multi-national corporations, and the increasing proliferation of
international travellers (Cohen, 1988; Bandy, 1996; Boissevain, 1996). This
has occurred in conjunction with increases in leisure time, disposable income
and mobility, technological improvements in communication and transporta-
tion, demographic changes and a shift in the axis of personal identity from
production to consumption (Lynch and Veal, 1996).
Leisure Studies ISSN 0261-4367 print/ISSN 1466-4496 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/02614360110051631

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The aim of this paper is to map the conceptual picture of the relationship
between tourist experience and self from a sociological perspective. The paper
draws on insights from interactionist, feminist, post-structuralist, post-
colonialist theories as well as cultural studies. This means that predominant
white, male western writing on tourism is re-examined and recontextualized
in the light of current sociological conceptualizations. The potential of
tourism for changes in self and identity through tourist experience of the
productive as well as the repressive aspects of power relations are explored in
the context of the tourist enterprise. The focus of the paper is on the selves
involved in the tourist enterprise, rather than on representation and dis-
courses. There is a deliberate attempt to construct a person-centred sociology
of tourism, rather than one focused on economics, marketing or management.
The threads of an interactive, person-centred approach are woven together to
emphasize the importance of interactions, personal, communal and cultural,
in the tourist enterprise and to position the selves of tourists and hosts at the
ethical centre.
The Žrst section of the paper traces the progression of a sociology of the
self from Mead’s (1972) concepts of a subjective, rational ‘I’ and a socially
constructed ‘me’ through post-structuralist and feminist deconstructions of
the ‘I/me’ dichotomy to the post-colonialist critique of the self/other
hierarchy. This section moves towards a reconceptualization of the self to
include insights from post-structuralism and post-colonialism. A discussion of
the emotional self and the embodied self is included. A process model of the
self is suggested in which the self is reexive and open to development
through fresh experiences such as travel. The second section examines
existing tourism literature for the ways in which conceptualizations of the self
have been incorporated. We also mark out the way that our reconceptualiza-
tion of the self may be applied to the selves of tourists and hosts. Finally we
draw on our reconceptualization of the selves of tourism to suggest some
implications for tourism marketing, management, service provision, research,
education and policy.
The sociology of self
Sociological theory concerning the self has moved in recent years away from
an internalized consistent and rational ‘I’ propagated along with the cer-
tainties of modernity towards a fragmented, decentred notion of many selves
constructed according to the changing discourses of post-modernity. It is
argued that it is possible to reconceptualize the self in the post-modern era by
modifying Mead’s interactionism to produce a process model of the self
which includes embodiment and emotionality as well as reexivity and
openness to development through fresh experiences such as travel.
The ideas of George Herbert Mead, the American pragmatist philosopher
(1863–1931) provided a conceptual foundation for sociological theories of
the self. In Mind, Self and Society (1972) he traced how social interaction,
language and role taking create the human mind and the ‘self’. He attempted
to explain how society gets into the individual, determines behaviour and

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
145
becomes part of ‘self’. The mind, for Mead, is a process through which
individuals adapt to their environment using language and symbols in
communication with others. Through language the individual takes on and
internalizes the attitudes of others towards both the environment and self.
The young child internalizes the attitudes of those who are important to
her/him such as mother and father (signiŽcant others). With maturity the
individual learns to relate to signiŽcant reference groups and to a generalized
other, that is, the community as a whole and its values conveyed through
group activity and the media et cetera.
In Mead’s terms, the individual need not and, in fact, cannot be totally
controlled by the internalized attitudes of others, that is, by the ‘me’ part of
the self. The individual is also an ‘I’, that is, someone who takes account of
the ‘me’, but is not necessarily determined by it. The ‘I’ may act upon,
inuence and modify the social process; it represents the self insofar as it is
free and has initiative, novelty and uniqueness. An individual’s various ‘me’s’,
constructed in different situations, are seen by her/him not only as discrete
objects but may also be perceived in a hierarchy according to which are most
favoured. This perception of the individual as a whole person, Mead called
the ‘I’ or self conception. Essentially for Mead, the ‘self’ is formulated socially
and varies with the situation, but it is the thinking person who does the
constructing and integrates society into the individual identity (Cuff and
Payne, 1984, pp. 118–121). In Mead’s thinking, too, the present experiences
as they relate to the self are ‘reality’; there is no question of their authenticity,
culturally, historically or otherwise (cf. Mead, 1959, p. 33).
In a move away from any essentialist notion of the self, post-structuralist
thinkers have questioned the ‘I’ as a stable, ongoing component of the self On
the one hand writers such as Gergen (1991) imbue the ‘I’ with the ability, in
the complexity of the post-modern world, to write her/his own script for self
deŽnition as the multiplicity of the ‘evershifting, ever-expanding and incoher-
ent network of relationships invites or permits’ (1991, p. 228). On the other
hand, feminist writers such as Butler (1990) deny the essential, rational ‘I’
constructed by male theorists and the binary opposition of the objective and
subjective concepts of the self. For her the self is a political construct and
there are many subjectivities, many ‘I’s. She maintains subjectivity is a process
of ‘becoming’ through repeated performative acts. She argues, for example,
that gender is not a cultural inscription written on sexed bodies but a process
through repeated performative acts which are culturally discursively con-
structed. In this strand of post-structuralist thought the subject is not a
rational whole but a changing contradictory site, thus making possible a new
politics of identity that can encompass gender, race, class and sexuality
without a hierarchy of causation or political action. Butler’s work remains
ambiguous concerning the extent to which individuals have the ability to
critique their own positions and thus differentiate positive from negative
change and so to move on from performative acts which are merely a
repetition of previous ones. We maintain that without a notion of some form
of individual agency, which we refer to as an ‘I’, it is difŽcult to see how
individuals can make positive changes to their conceptions of themselves.

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While Butler’s work holds out a hope for women and other inferiorized
groups to move beyond deŽnition of the self which has been discursively
constructed within dominant discourses, it remains somewhat deterministic
(see Benhabib et al., 1995 for a more detailed discussion of this issue).
Along with Kellner (1992), we question whether in post-modern conditions
we as individuals really dissolve into many droplets like oil on water. We
suggest that in challenging the notion of the Žxed and stable inner identity
prevalent in modernity, post-structuralists are in danger of going to the other
extreme, that is, deconstructing a sense of self, so that moment by moment it
changes as it comes into contact with conicting discourses. Thus, once again,
as in Marxist analysis it becomes the object of determination through
powerful social forces. Foucault’s idea (1983) of refusing what we are told we
are and reaching towards what we could be remains an attractive alternative
to an endless search for a ‘real me’ which in all probability has been
prescribed by the most powerful forces in society. But the question remains
‘Who does this refusing and reaching?’ In Gidden’s terms (1984; 1991)
human agency is based on the idea that an individual could always act
otherwise, thus suggesting an ‘I’ who acts rather than merely reacting to
societal inputs. Others who are grappling with the contradictions between the
decentred, fragmented, multiple selves and subjectivities of post-modernity
and interactionist and phenomenological notions of self and identity see, as
we do, the possibilities of placing Mead’s self in the context of post-
structuralism and post-modernism.
In their construction of a ‘post-modern interactionism’, for example,
Jagtenberg and McKie claim that the reexive self is able to move beyond
prior deŽnitions (1997, p. 149). Craib (1998, p. 9) argues that post-
structuralist sociological constructions of identity have emphasized the
discursive to the exclusion of individual experience. He claims that experience
contributes to an ‘I’ which organizes the various ‘me’s’ and which includes a
rational, thinking self, but also a ‘ow of feelings and unconscious processes’
(1998, p. 170). His ‘I’ has the ability to either close down the individual’s
psychic space or to enlarge it through thinking, feeling and experiencing. By
psychic space, Craib means an inner space in which a person can become
more self-aware and consequently more free in her/his dealings with the
world, thus enlarging this space. On the other hand, a person can avoid the
difŽculties implicit in complex and contradictory experiences of the self and
the world and thus close down this inner space (Craib, 1998, pp. 169–170).
We argue here that a conceptualization of the self that includes an
experiencing, dynamic, thinking, emotional ‘I’, has much to offer a sociology
of tourism. Such an organizing, subjective ‘I’ can use the tourist experience to
expand psychic space and personal space and consequently personal and
social identity. Alternatively, the tourist experience may serve to increase
personal barriers to the challenges of alternative ways of life. There is the
choice to close down psychic space and reinforce already constructed
concepts of self, including continuing notions of superiority and inferiority.
Nor do all post-structural feminists accept a purely discursively constructed
subjectivity, in line with Butler (1990). Weedon (1987, p. 106) claims that in

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
147
the battle for subjectivity and the supremacy of particular versions of
meaning of which it is part, the individual is not merely the passive site
of discursive struggle: ‘The individual who has a memory and an already
discursively constructed sense of identity may resist particular interpellations
of or produce new versions of meaning from the conicts and contradictions
between existing discourses’. Smith (1988) argues for women to be con-
ceptualized as active creative subjects rather than as the passive recipients of
either structural forces or constraining discourses. In her argument for the
inclusion of an emotional and an embodied self in contemporary sociological
theorization of the self, Lupton is also critical of ‘discourse determinism’:
I acknowledge that discourse plays a vital part in constructing and shaping
emotional experience, but assert that it is important not to slip into ‘discourse
determinism’. The extra-discursive, or the interaction of sensual embodiment with
socio-cultural processes and the inuence of the unconscious in emotional
experience, also require incorporation into an ontology of the emotional self.
(Lupton, 1998, p. 38)
Current sociological analyses of the self demand, as has Lupton, the inclusion
of considerations of both embodiment (or the way we live in and interpret
our bodies) and emotions. The shift in social relations from the sphere of
material industrial production to that of consumption and leisure, in which
the body and emotions play a predominant part, has been recognized in social
theory by a corresponding shift in emphasis. This shift, together with feminist
and masculinist critiques of the male domination of social theory in which
rationality and the mind were polarized and prioritized over emotions and the
body, (see Grosz, 1987; Seidler, 1994) has made possible a new sociology of
the body and emotions. It is in the post-modern, post-industrial era that post-
structuralist sociological theories have resurrected the body as ‘a seat of desire
and irrationality, emotionality and sexual passion . . . a symbol of protest
against capitalist rationality and bureaucratic regulation’ (Turner, 1991,
p. 17). In particular, as feminists such as Grosz (1994), Gatens (1996), Bordo
(1995) suggest, living in a female body in cultures in which the male body has
been valorized, profoundly affects women’s subjectivity from an early age.
Living in a male body, in such cultures, also has profound implications for
constructions of the self and masculinity (Hearn, 1994; Kimmel, 1996).
In the same way that post-structural feminist theory has challenged the
mind/body dichotomy of male-stream theory which valorized the mind and
relegated the body to the sphere of the natural, it has also attempted to
deconstruct the rational/emotional dichotomy. In this dichotomy ‘male’
rationality has been all and ‘female’ emotionality to be avoided at all costs,
especially in intellectual activity such as theory building. Feminist challenges
have allowed the emergence in recent years of a sociology of emotions which
acknowledges the part that emotions play in everyday spheres of social and
private life. Seidler (1994) claims that post-structuralist feminist theorizing
has made obvious the male dominance of theory, which, along with the
masculine presence in the public sphere, has served to deny men’s existence as
bodily, emotional and spiritual selves. He pursues, then, men’s emotionality

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and the part it plays in men’s construction of subjectivity. Lupton (1998),
through empirical study and sociological analysis makes a strong case for The
Emotional Self, for both men and women.
The arguments of these post-modern writers point then, to a cumulative ‘I’,
not necessarily one that is rational, but one that reects some spontaneity,
originality and creativity. In any case, in order for individuals to grow and
change, some sense of agency seems necessary. The ‘I’ that we retain from
symbolic interactionism is a growing and changing one, a part of the self that
maintains some sense of agency, without being Žxed. The present ‘I’ is a
cumulative synthesis of past and present ‘selves’ which are being constructed
in the context of past and current discourses, past and present experiences of
life, including emotions and embodiment. Such an ‘I’ has a reexive ability to
move in new directions, as it interacts with new input from signiŽcant others,
signiŽcant reference groups and the generalized other of cultural discourses.
Thus in the interaction with people in a variety of places, spaces, cultures and
contexts, as in tourist experiences there are possibilities for an enlargement of
an individual’s psychic space.
Nevertheless, in this excursion into the progress of sociological notions of
the self, from modernity to post-modernity, there remains a fundamental
assumption that self and other are separate entities and self is at all times
prioritized over ‘other’. This has meant, in the tourism literature, for
example, that the potential for the expansion of the individual self of the
western tourist has been emphasized even at the expense of the selves of the
host people, particularly when these people inhabit a developing society with
an alternative culture. It has taken the advent of post-colonialist theory to
shake some of these entrenched assumptions.
The concept of ‘other’ which is basic in post-colonial theory was developed
by Bhabha (1983). Bhabha claims that colonial discourses propagated by the
powerful colonizer produce stereotypes of the colonized as Žxed, other to and
inferior to the colonizer. Once this stereotype is in place, it becomes a regime
of truth which is already known yet anxiously repeated in order to justify
conquest, surveillance and control. Yet it is an ambivalent production, for the
object of colonial discourse, he says, constitutes ‘that “otherness” which is at
once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained
within the fantasy of origin and identity’ (1983, p. 19). Due to this very
ambivalence which contains both a derogated object and a subjective
otherness, it is possible, from the space of that otherness, to identify and
transgress the limits or boundaries of colonial discourse. The concept of
‘otherness’ thus enables post-colonial theorists to attribute subjectivity and a
valid view of colonisation to the ‘other’, a view which has the potential to
destabilize and transform dominant knowledges concerning ‘degenerate types
on the basis of racial origin’ (1983, p. 23).
Post-colonial feminist theorists such as hooks (1989), Spivak (1988a;
1988b), Collins (1990) are critical of western, white, middle-class, academic
feminists’ appropriation of feminist theory in order to get a better deal for
women who are already privileged in many ways. Little consideration has
been given to the voices and worldviews of ‘other’ women. The continual

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
149
presentation of the middle-class, white woman’s experience as universal has
had the effect of silencing the voices of other women. Construction of poor
women, black women and ethnic women as ‘other to’ with implications of
lesser importance is severely criticized in this literature. Post-colonial
feminism urges that the voices of these ‘other’ women be heard. When this is
done, the family, for example, is not seen as oppressive but rather as a source
of support and solidarity for its many female heads. Nor is paid work in
conict with caring for the family, but part of the caring responsibility. The
idealized version of femininity is not one of female fragility, but of physical
and emotional strength, that of active women who head families and instigate
community action. Self-care for these women almost always involves other-
care. It would be inconceivable for them to consider tourism as a purely self-
focussed activity, other and self are inextricably intertwined.
There is a move in this literature to break down the self/other dichotomy,
where the self involves the subjectivity and superiority of the white, western
woman and other refers to subaltern women as objects. The extreme
emphasis on the expression and development of the individual self in western
culture is also critiqued in the deconstruction of this dichotomy. The
boundary between the self and other for women in traditional cultures is
extremely permeable. For example, Collins points out that in the African-
American community self is not deŽned in opposition to others, rather, ‘the
connectedness among individuals provides black women deeper, more
meaningful deŽnitions’ (1990, p. 106). For them enlargement of the self could
not take place in isolation from others in their community. In terms of the
sociology of the self these latterly introduced ideas need not negate a
subjective, thinking, emotionally charged, embodied and reexive ‘I’, but
must make the boundaries between the self and others permeable. These ideas
lead on to a critique of the self-care/other-care dichotomy which also
pervades western thinking. Probyrt (1993) suggests that by listening to the
voices of women whose cultural position is different from one’s own, it is
possible to cross the ‘I’/‘she’ divide and to imagine and construct other ways
of being women. Probyrt then argues that care of self is more than a personal
endeavour ‘it must be constituted somewhere between my self and hers: it
must be able to reach beyond “me”, beyond who or what “I” am’ (1993, p. 4).
When post-structuralist theory is applied to leisure and the self/other
binary opposition is deconstructed it becomes clear that concern for others,
understanding of others and care of others can impinge on the self in a
positive way. Interactionist theory has long recognized the interplay of the self
with its emphasis on the contribution that signiŽcant others and signiŽcant
reference groups make to one’s sense of self. Yet in interactionist thought
itself is prioritized over the other and there is a clear demarcation between the
two, self being seen as the subject and the other as the object. If, through
post-colonialist theory the binary opposition of self and other is decon-
structed, so that self is no longer prioritized over other, then travel can move
to a circumstance where the commodiŽed, individualized and self-centred
focus is moved on. This allows the other to take on a different meaning

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in which involvement with the other is a part of travel and not separate
from it.
In the leisure and tourism literature, self and self-care have been prioritized
over other and other-care. By deconstructing these hierarchized dichotomies it
is possible to expand the construction to the self to include care for others, for
their selves, their values and their community. The question then arises, ‘Can
selves be enlarged if it means the diminution of others in the identiŽed
community?’.
Our approach in this paper, initially, is to articulate a post-modern theory
of the self which is cognisant of both the subjectivity and agency of the self as
well as the constraints and opportunities presented by societal input in the
forms of powerful discourses, signiŽcant others, signiŽcant reference groups
and cultural prescriptions. A rational, emotional, embodied, cumulative and
changing, non-essentialist ‘I’, in our view, interprets, organizes and gives
meaning to the various ‘me’s’ which are socially constructed. It is possible
then, to talk about the selves of the tourist and the selves of the hosts without
falling into the trap of discourse determinism in which many selves compete
with each other moment by moment and reexivity, emotionality, rationality,
embodiment, in fact, individual agency of any kind, is denied. The power
relationships of the wider society will, of course, have a signiŽcant impact on
how a person’s ‘me’s’ are constructed and we do not suggest that all are equal
in their capacity to move within or beyond their present self-deŽnitions.
While accepting the primacy of individual sense experience and uniqueness
this can in no way imprison us in subjectivism. This uniqueness of the self is
precisely that condition in which societal others form a personalized social
space. As we travel with ourselves we see the other as a world we are
travelling though but at some stage that other becomes a part of ourselves.
This paper is then about that dialogue, interpersonality, boundaries, travel
and self.
Selves in tourist experience
Much of the initial sociological and social psychological work on tourism was
concerned with the individual tourist and the part that holidays play in
establishing identity and a sense of self. This self was predominantly posited
as a universal and tourism, like leisure, was seen in a dialectical relationship
with the workaday world (de Grazia, 1962; Parker, 1983; Clark and Critcher,
1985; Deem, 1986; Brook, 1993). Cohen and Taylor (1976), for example,
drew on Goffman’s concern with the presentation of self in everyday life to
argue that holidays are culturally sanctioned escape routes for western
travellers. One of the problems for the modern traveller, in this view, is to
establish identity and a sense of personal individuality in the face of the
anomic forces of a technological world. Tourism serves to provide a free area,
a mental and physical escape from the immediacy of the multiplicity of
impinging pressures in technological society and, as such, holiday experiences
provide a scope for the nurturance and cultivation of human identity. As
Cohen and Taylor argue, overseas holidays are structurally similar to leisure

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
151
because one of their functions is identity establishment and the cultivation of
one’s self-consciousness. The tourist, they claim, uses all aspects of the
holiday for the manipulation of well being.
However, in the tourist literature, these arguments became diverted into a
debate about the authenticity or otherwise of this experience (cf. MacCannell,
1976; Krippendorf, 1984; Cohen, 1988), serving to focus attention on the
attractions of the tourist destination. Such a shift objectiŽed the destination as
place, a speciŽc geographical site which was presented to tourists for their
gaze (Urry, 1990). Thus the manner of presentation became all important and
its authenticity or otherwise the focus of analysis. Objects of the gaze were
categorized in terms of romantic/collective, historical/modern, and authentic/
unauthentic (Urry, 1990, p. 135). The tourist became synonymous with the
‘aneur’: ‘the strolling aneur was a forerunner of the twentieth century
tourist’ (Urry, 1990, p. 138) who travelled as a passive observer and this
aneur was generally perceived as escaping from the workaday world for
an ‘ephemeral’, ‘fugitive’ and ‘contingent’ leisure experience (cf. Rojek, 1993,
p. 216).
In such an analysis, tourism essentially becomes a mass phenomenon,
predicated on ontological universal categories with sharply dichotomous
conceptions such as authentic/inauthentic utilized to account for the dynamic
processes, interrelations and the inherent divergences, of tourism experiences.
However, as Cohen acknowledges, authenticity does not have an objective
quality, but is attributed by modems to the world out there, and thus is
a socially constructed concept with a connotation that is not given but
negotiable (Cohen, 1988).
The theorization of tourism therefore, like that of leisure, needs to not only
to recognize the interrelation of the site and the activities provided for at the
tourist destination, but requires a fundamental focus on subjective experience
itself. While not being divorced from its sociological contextualization, the
involving experience allows for the elaboration upon the role of individual
tourists themselves in the active construction of the tourist experience. By
adopting this view we are acknowledging the relational complex of the
individual, the individual’s social groups, travel experiences and the inter-
relating elements that sustain the experience and are incorporated into the
selves that the tourist carries abroad and home again.
Tourism as experience, involving complex and often subtle interactions
between the tourist, the site and the host community, problematizes analyses
predicated on the conceptualization of the tourist as ‘wanderer’, ‘gazer’ and
‘escaper’ as is common in the tourism literature (cf. Cohen and Taylor, 1976;
Pearce, 1984; Urry, 1990; Brown, 1992; Rojek, 1993; 1997). As the tour
group, the host community and the natural environment, to varying degrees,
are interdependent components of any tourist experience, there is a need to
move beyond simplistic typologies towards a more analytically exible
conceptualisation that allows for the exploration of the assumptions implicit
in the ‘tourist gaze’, the tourist ‘destination’, the marketing ‘image’, the ‘visit’,
in suggesting other modes of analysis that may better account for the
signiŽcant range and diversity of tourist experiences. We suggest here that

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a conceptualization of the selves of tourists and hosts predicated on a
subjective, cumulative, non-essentialist, but embodied and emotional, ‘I’
which constructs and reconstructs the tourist experience in interaction with
signiŽcant others, signiŽcant reference groups and the generalized other in the
form of cultural values may go some way to exploring the complexity of
tourist experiences for both tourists and hosts. Our focus is centred on the
people involved in tourism interactions and the meanings they construct
concerning their sense of self from these interactions, rather than on the
broader concepts of discourses (cf. Dann, 1996) or cultures (cf. Rojek and
Urry, 1997).
The beginnings of such an examination of tourism which recognizes over-
all power relationships, as well as individual constructions of interactive
experiences has been made by writers such as MacCannell (1992) and Crick
(1996). MacCannell, for example, sees the movement of peoples both to and
from the western world, through tourism, as an opportunity to form hybrid
cultures which will be a precondition for inventiveness in creating sub-
jectivities which resist cultural constraints. He claims that the neo-nomads of
tourism in the post-modern era cross cultural boundaries, not as invaders, but
as imaginative travellers who beneŽt from displaced self-understanding and
the freedom to go beyond the limits that frontiers present. The ‘true heroes’
of tourism, he claims, are those who know that ‘their future will be made of
dialogue with their fellow travellers and those they meet along the way’
(1992, p. 4). On the other hand he debunks the traveller who seeks escape
through tourism while demanding the comforts of home, at an exaggerated
and luxurious level. ‘This’, he says ‘is an overturned nomadic consciousness
in which the ultimate goal of travel is to set up sedentary housekeeping in the
entire world, to displace the local peoples, or at least to subordinate them in
the enterprise, to make them the “household” staff of global capitalists’
(MacCannell, 1992, p. 5). This form of ingesting the ‘other’ into the self and
subsequently eliminating it, he terms contemporary cannibalism where the
tourist consumes and destroys the culture of the host peoples in developing
countries. Far from enlarging the self he sees this form of tourism as
supplying the energy for ‘autoeroticism, narcissism, economic conservatism,
egoism, and absolute group unity or fascism’ (1992, p. 66). The tourist self,
in this view, remains rigid or static and turned in on her/himself – shrinking,
rather than expanding, or in Craib’s terms (1998) closing down psychic
space. In this process, the self of the host person is devalued and diminished
and the culture which the tourist has come to see is eventually destroyed,
along with tourism itself.
In many senses viewing the ‘other’ has always been a part of the leisure and
tourism activities of dominant cultures. The ‘other’ has been seen as a source
of difference and excitement with possibilities for exotic pleasure. For
example, writing of an exhibition on Orientalism, at the Art Gallery of New
South Wales the art critic John McDonald had this to say:
It is generally agreed that Orientalism is not simply the study of the East, but of
the many ways how the West has viewed the East . . . In a familiar set of

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
153
stereotypes the West is seen as progressive and enlightened, the East as barbaric
and superstitious; the West is active, the East passive and fatalistic. In almost all
respects, the West has used the East as the deŽnitive Other against which it has
deŽned its own identity . . . There was a vicarious pleasure to be had in savouring
the exotic prospect of the Near East, while feeling reassured about how far one
had risen above these benighted neighbours. (McDonald, 1997, p. 12)
While dominant cultures have been entranced by other cultures such as
those of the East they have also reinforced their own sense of superiority
through viewing the ‘other’, in travel as well as in art. At the same time they
have excluded the views and voices of the ‘other’ from theoretical analyses.
Post-colonial theorists are critical of this stance and argue for the voices of the
‘other’ to be heard, in social theory as well as in cultural practices. Post-
colonial feminists such as hooks and Spivak have sought to clear a space both
theoretically and practically so that the voices of women who have been
marginalized through race, colour, ethnicity, class or disability may be heard.
Crick suggests that unless the various voices of the tourist hosts concerning
their own culture and the tourist enterprise be heard, tourism may actually be
an activity by means of which stereotypes are perpetuated and reinforced,
rather than broken down, in fact, a means of shrinking the mind rather than
broadening it (1996, p. 34). This he suggests can be so for both tourist and
host. The more the tourist commoditizes and inferiorizes the hosts’ culture,
the more the hosts regard the tourist with hostility, categorizing them as
strangers, legitimate targets for cheating, a resource and a nuisance, rather
than people.
Others, such as Cohen, argue that the difference between the impact of
tourist experience on the selves of the tourist depends on whether they adhere
to the ‘spiritual centre’ of their own culture, prefer its life-ways and thought
patterns (recreational and diversionary modes) or to an experiential, experi-
mental or existential mode, where they seek a centre beyond their own culture
(1996, p. 108). For Cohen the difference remains in the motivation of the
tourist and changes in the self through tourist experience hinge on the tourist
being able to break through the staged tourist space and observe other
people’s life as it really is (1996, p. 105). We argue, on the other hand, that
the actual experience that the tourist has is authentic for her/him and will
impact on the self in a number of ways including both an expansion and a re-
afŽrmation of encultured selves. While acknowledging the large part that
initial motivation has for individual tourists, we place emphasis on each
individual’s construction and reconstruction of the self in the light of the
actual experiences of interaction with signiŽcant others, signiŽcant reference
groups and the generalized other of cultural values, symbols and language in
the tourist space. Tourist marketeers, service providers and host communities,
as well as the tourists themselves can have signiŽcant input into these
experiences. We refer in the conclusion of the paper to some implications for
them which follow from our conceptualization of the selves of tourism.
One author who has been able to tap into the impact on the identity
construction of individuals in developing countries in the light of post-
colonialist views is Stuart Hall (1997). Using the example of the Caribbean

154
S. Wearing and B. Wearing
and his own cultural identity he argues that cultural identity is a positioning,
not an essence and so is open to change and transformation grounded in
interpersonal interactions and experience. On the one hand these experiences
can reinforce a sense of difference and inferiorized colonial identity. On the
other, there is an ambiguity which allows for a place from which to speak for
these ‘others’ and so can act as a subversive force and open ways for change
and transformation in one’s sense of self.
This ‘look’, from – so to speak – the place of the Other, Žxes us, not only in its
violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. This brings
us face to face, not simply with the domineering European presence as the site or
‘scene’ of integration where those other presences which it had actively dis-
aggregated were recompensed – reframed, put together in a new way; but what
Hhomi Bhabha has called ‘the ambivalent identiŽcations of the racist world . . .
the “otherness” of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpset of colonial identity’
(Bhabha, in Fanan, 1986, xv). (Hall, 1997, p. 56)
Tourists who do act as mere anuers and who consistently look at the host as
an objectiŽed and inferiorized other, will cause an interaction in which there
is a rejection of the strangers or invaders and, if aggression, hostility and
violence persist, a rejection of the tourist enterprise itself. There is also the
potential for negotiation and change in identity for both parties. With some
shifts in the relationships of power between hosts and tourists, tourism could
enlarge a sense of self for both parties, in which case one could conjecture
that tourism may be more likely to ourish.
Hollinshead (1998), drawing heavily on the post-colonial insights of
Bhabha concerning selfhood/otherness, culture, hybridization and ambiguity,
comes closest to our own attempt to move the conceptualization of the selves
of tourism beyond rigidly deŽned cultural constraints for both tourists and
hosts, while recognizing the importance of both material and symbolic power
in the equation. This notion of tourism allows for ambiguity of cultural
deŽnition for tourists and hosts and the possibilities of hybridity of cultural
discourses through cross-fertilization in tourist interaction. He is concerned
with lived, rather than learned culture for the aggregating individuals who
make up such cultures. He critiques the concentration of past investigators in
tourism/leisure on the macro-level character of racism, ethnicity, and selfhood
and on broad historical or grand socio-economic inuences (1998, p. 130).
Hollinshead suggests that it is time that tourism theory and research also
considered the everyday performative deeds and discourses that happen in
tourist sites. Through notions of cultural ambiguity and hybridity, there is
here the possibility, he claims, for previously subordinated groups ‘to
articulate a new future-as-open world order through their own restless energy
and via their own skillful and revisionary enunciation’ (1998, p. 131).
Yet Hollinshead’s laudable attempt to push the sociology of tourism
beyond stereotypical reactionary boundaries of the self, by including both the
ambiguities of one’s own culture, as well as those of the ‘other’, remains
within a masculinized theoretical stance where the binary opposition of
self/other retains prominence. In addition the focus remains on how the

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
155
individual conforms, goes beyond or hybridizes cultural images and stereo-
types. The concern is with aggregated groups who make up hybridized and
ambiguous cultures. The examination of tourist and host is from the outside,
cultural perspective (as is Rojek’s 1997 exploration of dragging, Žling and
indexing in tourist experience). While there is a recognition in these works of
the agency of the individual within the constraints of powerful discourses and
representations, there is little attempt in these male oriented theorizations to
actually get inside the heads and hearts of the tourists themselves to ask the
questions which seem to us to be of the utmost importance in moving tourism
to a more person centred phenomenon. These questions would revolve
around issues of how individual tourists and hosts construct and reconstruct
their sense of self or selves through speciŽc interactions with others in the
tourist context. Nor is there any attempt to include in the conceptualization
of the tourist, any notion of self/other care. In spite of the author’s desire to
deconstruct binary cultural oppositions and to recognize a complexity of
cultural imaginings and identity construction, conceptualizations of the selves
of tourist and host remain within a framework of the binary opposition of
self/other where self is prioritized over the other. For tourism managers,
educators and researchers who do read Hollinshead’s scholarly and percep-
tive adaptation of Bhabha’s work to tourism theory there will be a movement
of thinking beyond cultural stereotypes and rigid cultural self-deŽnitions.
Nevertheless, we would like to move the thinking further towards a more
feminized, person centred approach, in which the self/other dichotomy is
itself questioned and embodiment and emotionality are included along with
the rational, mind oriented self. The social and personal space of tourism, like
leisure (cf. Wearing, 1998), opens up new possibilities for self-deŽnition, but
to conŽne such possibilities to ideas centred on the presentation and
performance of the selves of cultural groups, leaves out possibilities that care
for the other as well as care for the self may be a part of the tourist
enterprise.
When feminists such as the Finnish women, Jokinen and Veijola (1997)
begin to unravel the masculinized assumptions implicit in male stream tourist
literature, light begins to dawn that there may be other, more feminized
conceptualizations of the selves of the tourist. Their concern is with the
epistemology of tourism, which as Rojek rightly points out (1997, p. 71) has
been neglected by most commentators in the Želd. Jokinen and Veijola are
critical of the predominant metaphors for the tourist of paparazzi/anuer and
sex tourist/stranger/adventurer as being heavily imbued with masculinized
worldviews. Although embodiment itself is ignored in this male oriented
literature and tourists appear as disembodied minds, they claim, the morphol-
ogy of the male body forms the basis for these metaphors. Drawing on post-
structuralist feminist writings such as those of Braidotti (1994), Irigaray
(1993) and Kristeva (1986), Whitford (1991), they suggest that such
imaginings exclude ‘the maternal-feminine, maternal geneology, women as
subjects and the female body’ (Jokinen and Veijola, 1997, p. 46). Their
alternatives, the nomad and the au pair address these issues, as well as
making ethics a category of central concern. The nomad is Braidotti’s, that is,

156
S. Wearing and B. Wearing
a nomad by choice, a subject in transit, yet sufŽciently anchored to a
historical position to accept responsibility and therefore to make oneself
accountable for it (1994, p. 10). For her nomadic becoming involves
emphatic proximity and intensive interconnectedness. Thus, say Jokinen and
Veijola, there is a real life counterpart in the au pair who takes care of a
foreign baby, in a foreign place, in non-linear time (i.e., ‘monumental
temporality, without cleavage or escape’), in a foreign language, in a space
which requires commitment, and love for another, involving attentiveness,
gentleness, forgetting oneself (1997, p. 44).
Jokinen and Veijola then set out the differences between the sexed subjects
of the predominant metaphors in tourist literature and their own au pair/
nomad/pilgrim metaphor. Such metaphors would surely move the thinking in
tourism into a new space which includes, rather than excludes feminized
versions of the tourist. The questions remain to be asked, how might such
metaphors be incorporated into notions of the selves of tourists and hosts,
managers, marketers, service providers and local communities? What kinds of
interactions would be salient? And what of the tourist dollar, in such an
altruistic framework?
In this paper we have explored the sociology of the self and of tourism in
order to present a person centred conceptualization of tourism which comes
to grips with the ‘reality of the present’ and its interactions (Mead, 1959,
p. 33), in the construction of the selves of tourist experience. We have
suggested that the self/other of tourist and host interact with each other with
possibilities for enlarging individual psychic space as well as the social and
symbolic space of communities and cultures. However for this to happen the
voice of the other must be heard in situations of some respect, rather than
mere sightseeing, curiosity, objectiŽcation, inferiorization and exploitation.
Some shifts in power, beginning at the personal level and eddying out to the
providers of tourist services, are needed for this to be possible. In the
concluding section of the paper we suggest that placing such a person centred
perspective at the ethical and practical pivot of the tourist enterprise will
beneŽt not only the selves of tourists and hosts, but those of all involved, and
ultimately, the enterprise itself.
Conclusions
How then would tourism look if concern for people, both tourist and host,
were to become the ethical and practice centre of the industry? This you say
cannot happen while the industry is controlled by powerful multinational
marketeers where the tourist dollar is the linchpin of practice. However, if
people were the genuine centre, the industry must surely ourish.
In many senses viewing the ‘other’ has always been a part of the leisure
activity of dominant cultures. For example, to further illustrate with John
McDonald’s earlier quote, the centrepiece of that particular exhibition was
Edward Poynter’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890).
The painting well illustrates McDonald’s words. In it we see in exquisite
detail the whole exotic theatre of the East as ‘other’ to the West. Here is pomp

Conceptualizing the selves of tourism
157
and splendour and sumptuous living, the relaxation of western inhibitions,
the music, food, drink, sexual women and powerful men (and even one
powerful and exotic woman) waited on by slaves who are there for their
pleasure and comfort. This is the antidote to Victorian puritanism, the
ultimate in fantasized leisure and tourism experience, yet somehow con-
structed as barbaric and inferior to Western civilized leisure pastimes. It is the
view of the privileged. One wonders what the picture would be like if seen
through the eyes of the male or the female slave left front. Their position is
inferior, they are juxtaposed with a monkey waving a fan.
While dominant cultures have been entranced by other cultures such as
those of the East they have also reinforced their own sense of superiority
through viewing the ‘other’. At the same time they have excluded the views
and voices of the ‘other’ from theoretical analyses. Post-colonial theorists are
critical of this stance and argue for the voices of the ‘other’ to be heard, in
social theory as well as in cultural practices. In this paper we have argued that
unless the voice of the other be heard in tourist interactions, the more
powerful western culture may overpower and eliminate the culture of the
other, and thus eliminate one of the most signiŽcant aspects of tourism, that
is the desire for experience of the other. Although hybridization may even out
some, hopefully the more repressive aspects of particular cultures, it is not
envisaged that it will eliminate the less powerful culture. Rather each
individual will construct his/her own hybridization and thus enlarge social
space, rather than closing it down.
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Betsy Wearing has now retired from academic life and this will be the last published article by her.
She would like to thank the past editorial boards, reviewers and publisher for the opportunities
provided by Leisure Studies over the past 15 years.

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