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The Ethics of Sightseeing
Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? In this challenging book, Dean MacCannell identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through his unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, MacCannell ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: “picturesque” rural and natural landscapes, “hip” urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. He shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as “staged authenticity.” Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, the book shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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November 10, 2019
This is the second of this man’s books I’ve read now – and this is a stunning read. I can’t possibly cover everything in this book either, and that is, of course, the highest praise I can offer in any book review.
The other night I started talking to a friend about this book while we were eating in a restaurant before a play, ironically enough, at a restaurant with a picture-postcard view of Melbourne from Southbank. I mentioned the Disney ‘town’ called Celebration. She had never heard of it and so she googled it and that basically ended our conversation as she sat reading webpages on the topic, only occasionally popping up for air with ‘god, this is just crazy’ or ‘who would want to live there?’. Really, all I wanted to do was give her some background so I could show her the Piranesi’s views of Rome in the book and how he compared these to a photo of Disney ‘Toontown’ – which the author says is essentially a three-dimensional built form of a Piranesi drawing. But, admittedly, if you’ve never heard of Celebration before, it is pretty hard to a) believe the person telling you about it isn’t just making shit up and b) simply move on to the next bit of the conversation.
Yes, I do realise I might have made the same mistake twice now and have lost half of my readers here to Google…
So, why sightseeing? Well, in part it is because the author says there is a lot of rubbish said about tourism – not least that it is the world’s largest industry. The problem is that we don’t disaggregate what people travel for, and so the image of a ‘proper tourist’ may not really be anything like the average person filling this ‘largest industry’. You know, tourists as obnoxious Australians vomiting on Bali beaches or busloads of Japanese with cameras hanging around their necks, or Americans in Britain constantly being surprised by how many people they meet who can speak English. As the author points out, most travel is done to visit family, rather than to be a tourist per se – and so, it could be argued that ‘family’ is the world’s biggest industry. And a lot of tourism is also done ‘for work’. But even so, in all of these cases, sightseeing is something that you are likely to do even if you are going somewhere mostly to see your granny.
We are in a highly visual phase of human history and seeing sights remains a prime motivator for going to certain locations. I’ve been thinking of Marshall McLuhan lately on this idea. How until recently we were a culture dominated by the ear, where ‘reading’ is basically a function of the ear, even if it is done by the eyes – but that today magazines and television have shifted us increasingly to being a visual society. Sightseeing is an inevitable aspect of being modern and the visual nature of it is a large part of that ‘modernity’.
Seeing sights otherwise seems a very strange thing to do. He mentions some friends of his who went on a driving holiday to see the Grand Canyon. Except, because they weren’t on a tour they kept coming across ‘lesser’ canyons and not knowing if these were ‘the’ canyon. Were they seeing the real thing or not? It wasn’t that these lesser canyons where unimpressive – but our modern day desire is totally linked to the idea we need to be sure that we don’t peak too early with our gobsmacked, awe-filled gasps of wonder and so on that need to be reserved for the grand canyon, and not just an otherwise big canyon.
Which is something else he says about sights – they are often things we struggle to know how to behave in front of. We stand before them a bit uncomfortably. In a way the sight gets to act while we get to look a bit silly before ‘the sublime’. I can’t remember if he quotes Sontag, someone I read recently did, that tourists, when they are confused about what to do, generally reach for their cameras.
And, of course, there is a discussion here about the commodification of sites – and the ethics of that too. But this book comes at that idea from a direction I’d never really considered before – although, I really ought to have. You know when you have all of the bits, but then you get to see how someone else has put them together and you think, how could I have never seen that picture before? Well, that’s this book.
Aristotle says that the main aim of life is to be happy. He means a particular kind of happiness, of course, one that is ‘ethical happiness’. He was talking about how to live a good life – and that good life involves being happy, and that is what ‘ethics’ means. You see where we are getting to here? We go on holidays to be happy – holidays are generally meant to be some of the happiest times in our lives – but happiness, in Aristotle's terms, is also about living the ‘good’ life. That is, not just doing anything you like for short term pleasure, but where living an ethical life leads to the greatest happiness. What does that mean in terms of sightseeing? Particularly if sightseeing has been predefined as a key component of these ‘happiest’ moments in our lives.
This makes ‘ethical tourism’ particularly interesting in a lot of ways. It’s not just about paying extra for air travel so as to ensure ‘carbon off-sets’ – or even avoiding having sex with children while you are in third world nations. It’s not just a matter of what your own tourist activities are doing to those in the places you are visiting, but also what your actions in those places are doing to you too. So, not just how are my actions impacting on those I’m visiting, but what do my actions mean for me too?
Which then begs the question of what is an ‘authentic’ tourist experience? Or even if such an experience could be possible. One of the things I love about this book is how much time is spent discussing one of my favourite theorists, Erving Goffman. Goffman said that much of what we do in life revolves around that line from Shakespeare about all the world being a stage. That is, that people act out their roles in life, but that acting increasingly becomes a strain and so people need a ‘back stage’ area where they can let their hair down, otherwise they would go nuts. The author says that he became particularly aware of this idea when he was sitting in a restaurant and watching a chef cooking. That is, watching what would otherwise be a ‘back stage activity’ – or what the author beautifully refers to as ‘staged authenticity’. How can this be, given Goffman’s need for back stage retreats for people to escape to, or rather, what is it that we are really seeing in these staged authentic spaces? The author gives many, many examples of these staged authentic events – in fact, a lot of tourism today depends on us being supposedly taken into back stage spaces so as to see the 'real' workings of these places. But we also know that what we are seeing, at best, is a sanitised version of these spaces.
I noticed this when I spent about a month in England a few years ago. Although I really only went to a couple of cities, I felt I left knowing almost nothing at all about life there after I left. London, Manchester, Edinburgh – they were all quite different from each other, but I really couldn’t say I came away truly ‘knowing’ any of these places.
And I kept thinking about what you might know of a place if you’ve gone there for a day or so on a package tour across Europe. My eldest daughter turns 30 soon and she made sure she had been to 30 countries by going to Spain and Portugal before her 30th birthday. She is infinitely more ‘travelled’ than I am. But the same problem stands – what is it that we ‘learn’ when we visit countries for relatively short times? We say that travel broadens the mind – that it is a cure for racism. That it is an important part of our ‘education’ – that it is how we become ‘interculturally aware’. The problem is that too often travel doesn’t really broaden the mind, but rather reinforces our prejudices, not least since we don’t really get to see behind the façade that is created for us as tourists.
Since many ‘cities’ have become so unsafe, since the ‘urban’ areas of cities are inhabited by the poor and the dispossessed, tourism often creates bubbles where tourists can go and be safe – and yet still believe they are getting to see the ‘real’ city. These spaces are often centred around ‘sights’ – sites you need to see to be able to say you have been to the location: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge, Red Square, the Sydney Opera House. And these sights/sites also exist as symbols – the meaning being often only available to you once you know something of what it is you are looking at. Perhaps less so in the cases I’ve listed, than in say the zebra crossing at Abbey Road, or, in the pilgrimage I made to 84 Charing Cross Road.
As the author says, often these authorised sights are less remembered than say, a Madeleine you found in a coffee shop when you were lost in Paris. Actually, my memory of London will always be strongly associated with a fabulous French bakery that made the best almond croissants I’ve ever eaten and that became my breakfast every day for a week while I was there – something utterly different from the big English breakfast I had on my first day at the place next door and that I can hardly remember other than it being far too much to eat and coming with endless white bread toast.
One of the bits of this book I particularly liked was his discussion of ‘the syndromes’ – the Paris, Stendhal and Jerusalem syndromes. I’d heard of the Paris Syndrome before – Japanese tourists are susceptible to it, becoming overcome by visiting a nation similarly ‘advanced’ like they are, but also totally different from their own. Stendhal is much the same, but not limited to Japanese tourists, and involves becoming overwhelmed by excesses of art. And Jerusalem syndrome involves religious people thinking they are some sort of Biblical prophet upon visiting the holy lands. A large part of this book I am not going to really review here involves psychological discussions on the nature of tourism – these three syndromes make interesting comments on those psychological issue, I think.
Ultimately, this book is about learning (and being prepared) to position one’s self as a tourist so as to be open to learning about and from the places and people we visit. But even so it points to the impossibility of the task we set ourselves as tourists. This means we often turn to attractions and sights as a way to allow these to mediate our learning of cultures. The Statue of Liberty MEANS something that is important to understand if we are to understand New York or the US. But does visiting that sight alone really give access to that knowledge? It’s hard to say. But even though sights/sites are a contrived and constructed ‘experience’, to visit such sites, perhaps gives us access to something we, as visitors, can’t get in any other way. That in itself makes them worthwhile, because they are the only access we can otherwise have.
At one point in this he mentions his children being annoyed while being driven from the airport in Spain because they weren't experiencing enough culture shock - I've had the same experience in Singapore and Germany. Perhaps that is one of the functions of sights - that they are guaranteed to provide culture shock.
And so, without trying to go all Baudrillard on you, perhaps Celebration is an important site for tourists to see, not because it is the ‘real’ America – but rather because it is a conscious representation of what Disney believes America would want to be seen as, even if the ‘reality’ of living there ends up being a nightmare. That is, sights show us how cultures what to be shown – and there is value in seeing them as that – not so much as real, but as representations.
The other night I started talking to a friend about this book while we were eating in a restaurant before a play, ironically enough, at a restaurant with a picture-postcard view of Melbourne from Southbank. I mentioned the Disney ‘town’ called Celebration. She had never heard of it and so she googled it and that basically ended our conversation as she sat reading webpages on the topic, only occasionally popping up for air with ‘god, this is just crazy’ or ‘who would want to live there?’. Really, all I wanted to do was give her some background so I could show her the Piranesi’s views of Rome in the book and how he compared these to a photo of Disney ‘Toontown’ – which the author says is essentially a three-dimensional built form of a Piranesi drawing. But, admittedly, if you’ve never heard of Celebration before, it is pretty hard to a) believe the person telling you about it isn’t just making shit up and b) simply move on to the next bit of the conversation.
Yes, I do realise I might have made the same mistake twice now and have lost half of my readers here to Google…
So, why sightseeing? Well, in part it is because the author says there is a lot of rubbish said about tourism – not least that it is the world’s largest industry. The problem is that we don’t disaggregate what people travel for, and so the image of a ‘proper tourist’ may not really be anything like the average person filling this ‘largest industry’. You know, tourists as obnoxious Australians vomiting on Bali beaches or busloads of Japanese with cameras hanging around their necks, or Americans in Britain constantly being surprised by how many people they meet who can speak English. As the author points out, most travel is done to visit family, rather than to be a tourist per se – and so, it could be argued that ‘family’ is the world’s biggest industry. And a lot of tourism is also done ‘for work’. But even so, in all of these cases, sightseeing is something that you are likely to do even if you are going somewhere mostly to see your granny.
We are in a highly visual phase of human history and seeing sights remains a prime motivator for going to certain locations. I’ve been thinking of Marshall McLuhan lately on this idea. How until recently we were a culture dominated by the ear, where ‘reading’ is basically a function of the ear, even if it is done by the eyes – but that today magazines and television have shifted us increasingly to being a visual society. Sightseeing is an inevitable aspect of being modern and the visual nature of it is a large part of that ‘modernity’.
Seeing sights otherwise seems a very strange thing to do. He mentions some friends of his who went on a driving holiday to see the Grand Canyon. Except, because they weren’t on a tour they kept coming across ‘lesser’ canyons and not knowing if these were ‘the’ canyon. Were they seeing the real thing or not? It wasn’t that these lesser canyons where unimpressive – but our modern day desire is totally linked to the idea we need to be sure that we don’t peak too early with our gobsmacked, awe-filled gasps of wonder and so on that need to be reserved for the grand canyon, and not just an otherwise big canyon.
Which is something else he says about sights – they are often things we struggle to know how to behave in front of. We stand before them a bit uncomfortably. In a way the sight gets to act while we get to look a bit silly before ‘the sublime’. I can’t remember if he quotes Sontag, someone I read recently did, that tourists, when they are confused about what to do, generally reach for their cameras.
And, of course, there is a discussion here about the commodification of sites – and the ethics of that too. But this book comes at that idea from a direction I’d never really considered before – although, I really ought to have. You know when you have all of the bits, but then you get to see how someone else has put them together and you think, how could I have never seen that picture before? Well, that’s this book.
Aristotle says that the main aim of life is to be happy. He means a particular kind of happiness, of course, one that is ‘ethical happiness’. He was talking about how to live a good life – and that good life involves being happy, and that is what ‘ethics’ means. You see where we are getting to here? We go on holidays to be happy – holidays are generally meant to be some of the happiest times in our lives – but happiness, in Aristotle's terms, is also about living the ‘good’ life. That is, not just doing anything you like for short term pleasure, but where living an ethical life leads to the greatest happiness. What does that mean in terms of sightseeing? Particularly if sightseeing has been predefined as a key component of these ‘happiest’ moments in our lives.
This makes ‘ethical tourism’ particularly interesting in a lot of ways. It’s not just about paying extra for air travel so as to ensure ‘carbon off-sets’ – or even avoiding having sex with children while you are in third world nations. It’s not just a matter of what your own tourist activities are doing to those in the places you are visiting, but also what your actions in those places are doing to you too. So, not just how are my actions impacting on those I’m visiting, but what do my actions mean for me too?
Which then begs the question of what is an ‘authentic’ tourist experience? Or even if such an experience could be possible. One of the things I love about this book is how much time is spent discussing one of my favourite theorists, Erving Goffman. Goffman said that much of what we do in life revolves around that line from Shakespeare about all the world being a stage. That is, that people act out their roles in life, but that acting increasingly becomes a strain and so people need a ‘back stage’ area where they can let their hair down, otherwise they would go nuts. The author says that he became particularly aware of this idea when he was sitting in a restaurant and watching a chef cooking. That is, watching what would otherwise be a ‘back stage activity’ – or what the author beautifully refers to as ‘staged authenticity’. How can this be, given Goffman’s need for back stage retreats for people to escape to, or rather, what is it that we are really seeing in these staged authentic spaces? The author gives many, many examples of these staged authentic events – in fact, a lot of tourism today depends on us being supposedly taken into back stage spaces so as to see the 'real' workings of these places. But we also know that what we are seeing, at best, is a sanitised version of these spaces.
I noticed this when I spent about a month in England a few years ago. Although I really only went to a couple of cities, I felt I left knowing almost nothing at all about life there after I left. London, Manchester, Edinburgh – they were all quite different from each other, but I really couldn’t say I came away truly ‘knowing’ any of these places.
And I kept thinking about what you might know of a place if you’ve gone there for a day or so on a package tour across Europe. My eldest daughter turns 30 soon and she made sure she had been to 30 countries by going to Spain and Portugal before her 30th birthday. She is infinitely more ‘travelled’ than I am. But the same problem stands – what is it that we ‘learn’ when we visit countries for relatively short times? We say that travel broadens the mind – that it is a cure for racism. That it is an important part of our ‘education’ – that it is how we become ‘interculturally aware’. The problem is that too often travel doesn’t really broaden the mind, but rather reinforces our prejudices, not least since we don’t really get to see behind the façade that is created for us as tourists.
Since many ‘cities’ have become so unsafe, since the ‘urban’ areas of cities are inhabited by the poor and the dispossessed, tourism often creates bubbles where tourists can go and be safe – and yet still believe they are getting to see the ‘real’ city. These spaces are often centred around ‘sights’ – sites you need to see to be able to say you have been to the location: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge, Red Square, the Sydney Opera House. And these sights/sites also exist as symbols – the meaning being often only available to you once you know something of what it is you are looking at. Perhaps less so in the cases I’ve listed, than in say the zebra crossing at Abbey Road, or, in the pilgrimage I made to 84 Charing Cross Road.
As the author says, often these authorised sights are less remembered than say, a Madeleine you found in a coffee shop when you were lost in Paris. Actually, my memory of London will always be strongly associated with a fabulous French bakery that made the best almond croissants I’ve ever eaten and that became my breakfast every day for a week while I was there – something utterly different from the big English breakfast I had on my first day at the place next door and that I can hardly remember other than it being far too much to eat and coming with endless white bread toast.
One of the bits of this book I particularly liked was his discussion of ‘the syndromes’ – the Paris, Stendhal and Jerusalem syndromes. I’d heard of the Paris Syndrome before – Japanese tourists are susceptible to it, becoming overcome by visiting a nation similarly ‘advanced’ like they are, but also totally different from their own. Stendhal is much the same, but not limited to Japanese tourists, and involves becoming overwhelmed by excesses of art. And Jerusalem syndrome involves religious people thinking they are some sort of Biblical prophet upon visiting the holy lands. A large part of this book I am not going to really review here involves psychological discussions on the nature of tourism – these three syndromes make interesting comments on those psychological issue, I think.
Ultimately, this book is about learning (and being prepared) to position one’s self as a tourist so as to be open to learning about and from the places and people we visit. But even so it points to the impossibility of the task we set ourselves as tourists. This means we often turn to attractions and sights as a way to allow these to mediate our learning of cultures. The Statue of Liberty MEANS something that is important to understand if we are to understand New York or the US. But does visiting that sight alone really give access to that knowledge? It’s hard to say. But even though sights/sites are a contrived and constructed ‘experience’, to visit such sites, perhaps gives us access to something we, as visitors, can’t get in any other way. That in itself makes them worthwhile, because they are the only access we can otherwise have.
At one point in this he mentions his children being annoyed while being driven from the airport in Spain because they weren't experiencing enough culture shock - I've had the same experience in Singapore and Germany. Perhaps that is one of the functions of sights - that they are guaranteed to provide culture shock.
And so, without trying to go all Baudrillard on you, perhaps Celebration is an important site for tourists to see, not because it is the ‘real’ America – but rather because it is a conscious representation of what Disney believes America would want to be seen as, even if the ‘reality’ of living there ends up being a nightmare. That is, sights show us how cultures what to be shown – and there is value in seeing them as that – not so much as real, but as representations.
February 4, 2025
The book was honestly uninspired until the appendix
February 12, 2018
I should have just picked up Swamplandia but settled on this for my recent vacation. Boy this ruined that in a hurry.
The pseudo-openness of tourism enables repressive government. Tourist attractions re-enforce our worst human values. There are no natural dichotomies, only constructions, everywhere, for everything. Nothing is real. Everything is symbolic. Escaping our own consciousness is next to impossible. Existential dread everywhere. Capitalist exploitation for the win.
Even if you don't buy into all the critical theory, and I am not sure I do, you're left with this niggling feeling that it very well could all be spot on. And that's a very unsettling feeling, even lying on the beach.
The author notes in the preface that his editors suggested moving the last chapter to the front and I agree with their assessment. Read that first. I also skipped all the petty scholarly in-fighting. Nobody got time for that.
The pseudo-openness of tourism enables repressive government. Tourist attractions re-enforce our worst human values. There are no natural dichotomies, only constructions, everywhere, for everything. Nothing is real. Everything is symbolic. Escaping our own consciousness is next to impossible. Existential dread everywhere. Capitalist exploitation for the win.
Even if you don't buy into all the critical theory, and I am not sure I do, you're left with this niggling feeling that it very well could all be spot on. And that's a very unsettling feeling, even lying on the beach.
The author notes in the preface that his editors suggested moving the last chapter to the front and I agree with their assessment. Read that first. I also skipped all the petty scholarly in-fighting. Nobody got time for that.
October 18, 2023
In The Ethics of Sightseeing Dean MacCannell, a leading figure in tourism studies, collects essays and talks published and given over the years to offer a more-or-less up-to-date account of his scholarly views of a field he helped to found. MacCannell made a splash with his article "Staged Authenticity. Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings," American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973) 589-603, followed by his declaration of principles in The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). Since then he has been at the center of controversies about tourism, attacked and defended.
The Ethics of Sightseeing is an attempt to explicate what we as tourists owe to the objects of our tourism: the sites, the landscapes, and the people. He rejects the common claim that tourism is about pleasure--what is the pleasure in visiting a tourist site like Hiroshima or Auschwitz?--which is touted endlessly in tourist guides. Rather, he focuses on the experiences of the tourist in the face of the object of the tourist gaze, and, somewhat surprisingly, often enough finds reason to sympathize with the tourist's reaction. He's scornful of the elitist division between tourist and traveler; we are all tourists, he insists.
Perhaps the most striking inference I made from my reading is the claim--not quite explicitly laid out--that we are not only all tourists, but we are tourists all the time. Our interactions with our hometown as we drive around on our errands can be read usefully as tourist experiences, if attenuated and largely unconscious. At the same, time, ethical questions about tourism writ large have been more and more pressing: in the Anthropocene is it really ethical to fly off to Tahiti merely to lie on the beach and ogle the women? MacCannell's book can contribute to helping us think through this problem, whose urgency only grows with each passing day.
The Ethics of Sightseeing is an attempt to explicate what we as tourists owe to the objects of our tourism: the sites, the landscapes, and the people. He rejects the common claim that tourism is about pleasure--what is the pleasure in visiting a tourist site like Hiroshima or Auschwitz?--which is touted endlessly in tourist guides. Rather, he focuses on the experiences of the tourist in the face of the object of the tourist gaze, and, somewhat surprisingly, often enough finds reason to sympathize with the tourist's reaction. He's scornful of the elitist division between tourist and traveler; we are all tourists, he insists.
Perhaps the most striking inference I made from my reading is the claim--not quite explicitly laid out--that we are not only all tourists, but we are tourists all the time. Our interactions with our hometown as we drive around on our errands can be read usefully as tourist experiences, if attenuated and largely unconscious. At the same, time, ethical questions about tourism writ large have been more and more pressing: in the Anthropocene is it really ethical to fly off to Tahiti merely to lie on the beach and ogle the women? MacCannell's book can contribute to helping us think through this problem, whose urgency only grows with each passing day.
October 4, 2016
Really interesting study about what sightseeing is and isn't and how we can do it better. Thought provoking.
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