Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to use a select collection of imagery associated with tourism promotion to argue that tourists are (generically) interested, amongst other things, in the nature of the self and its relation to the social collectivities of which it is a part.

Paper long abstract:

The paper offers a reading of imagery contained in tourist brochures and follows a line of previous work on the subject by several authors (noteably Dann). The aim is to make a contribution to our understanding of how the deepening of the global market economy into the realms of social and cultural relations in the tourism sphere is manifest at the level of the imagination of self. Having discussed the general senses in which the tourist is surrounded by images that have to do with the definition of self, the paper argues that there are three particularly dominant and interweaving sets of images that appear. These combine references to the body, nation, and the market itself.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed