Löfgren takes us on a tour of the Western holiday world and shows how two centuries of "learning to be a tourist" have shaped our own ways of vacationing. We see how fashions in destinations have changed through the years, with popular images (written, drawn, painted, and later photographed) teaching the tourist what to look for and how to experience it. Travelers present and future will never see their cruises, treks, ecotours, round-the-world journeys, or trips to the vacation cottage or condo in quite the same way again. All our land-, sea-, and mindscapes will be the richer for Löfgren's insights.
Orvar Löfgren, Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden, has written a dozen books. His best-known work is also in English: Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life (with Jonas Frykman, 1987).
"A fun book to read, witty and emotionally evocative without ever being sentimental or superficial. It focuses on the common experiences of tourism familiar to readers from any class or culture, and really enters the tourist imagination—in stark contrast to most other books I've read about tourism, which act like the tourists are some sort of exotic livestock."—Richard Wilk, author of Economies and Cultures
"A pleasure to read. The author has accomplished the very difficult task of moving almost seamlessly from general observations to the specific, and from the observations of others through time to his personal experience."—Erve Chambers, editor of Tourism and Culture
"Löfgren takes us down countless paths that we didn't know were there. . . . His interests seem wonderfully idiosyncratic. The issues that he deals with are thoroughly familiar, but the angle of his light is very new."—Stephen M. Fjellman, author of Vinyl Leaves
334 pp.6 x 9Illus: 33 b/w photographs
9780520234642$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jul 2002