In this classic analysis of travel and sightseeing, author Dean MacCannell brings social scientific understandings to bear on tourism in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class has acquired leisure time for international travel.



In The Tourist—now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis—the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.

Dean MacCannell is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Empty Meeting Grounds (1992) and The Time of the Sign (1982).

"MacCannell attempts to create something Levi-Strauss said is impossible: an ethnography of modernity, a detailed anthropological analysis of modern culture. . . . By following the tourist, he believes, we may arrive at a better understanding of ourselves."—John Coyne, Washington Post Book World

"In the demythologizing tradition of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, MacCannell presents the first full-scale sociological examination of modern tourism and sightseeing."—Publishers Weekly

"The Tourist is one of those books that can be best enjoyed for its heuristic value, for the questions it raises as much as for the answers it offers."—Anatole Broyard, New York Times

"More than a perceptive, entertaining discussion of tourists and tourism [The Tourist] is also a skillful blend of structuralist thought. . . . Both MacCannell's literary style and theoretical sophistication are genuine contributions to sociological scholarship."—Susanne Wedow, Contemporary Sociology

"Nothing short of brilliant."—Lewis Coser