I thoroughly enjoyed these readings on tourism. They essentially were commentary on tourism as culture that's been stripped, repackaged, branded, tagged with a price tag, then handed to the tourist. I guess this ties in with cannibalism as well as colonialism (if you consider them to be separate). Cannibalism in the sense that a population will cannibalize its culture in order to bring foreign revenue into their country. Colonialism in the sense that one people will exploit the culture of another people for profit. Maybe tourism is a neo-neocolonialism.
But in a world with increasingly blurring boundaries between peoples, isn't this system of tourism inevitable? To keep a culture as purely "authentic" would be to completely reject any new language, foreign monies, or foreign culture. The catering to and accommodating of visitors is a required system in order to survive both economically as the host country and sociologically as neighboring inhabitants of a planet. Zygmont Bauman claims that one would receive more culture as a tourist from interacting with a neighbor in Bauman's hometown than if he were to visit that neighbor's home country (or at least I think that's what he said). But that's just another "inauthentic" experience. But I guess any tourist experience is to some degree inauthentic-- and all are on their way to be McDisneyized.
(I think McDisneyficiation would have been a better term than McDisneyization. It rolls off the tongue better.)
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