This innovative volume focuses on tourism through the twin lenses of cultural theory and cultural geography. Presenting a set of innovative case studies on tourist destinations around the world, the contributors explore the paradoxes of the tourist experience and the implications of these paradoxes for our broader understanding of the problems of modernity and identity. The book examines how tourism reveals the paradoxical ways that places are both mobile and rooted, real and fake, inhabited by those who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, and both subjectively experienced and objectively viewed. The concepts of travel and mobility long have been used to explain modern identity and social behavior, but this work pushes beyond the established literature by considering the ways that place and mobility are inherently related in unexpected, even contradictory ways. Travel, the international cast of authors contends, occurs 'in place' rather than 'between places.' Thus, instead of offering yet another interpretation of the ways modern societies are distinguished by their mobilities-in contrast to the supposed place-bound quality of traditional societies-the chapters here collectively argue for an understanding of modern identity as simultaneously grounded and mobile. This rich blend of empirical and theoretical analysis will be invaluable for cultural geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists of tourism.

Contents:
Introduction Part I: From the World to the City to the Street, and Back Again 1. The World Defined 2. The World in the City 3. The World on the Street Part II: Hard City, Soft Planet 4. The City Hardens 5. Planet Softeners 6. Miscege-Nation Part III: The Clash of Globalizations 7. The Limits of Coca-Colonization 8. De-Coca-Colonization Classic Conclusion Bibliography

This book is a novel theoretical account of globalization, one that has the potential to shake up the very large field of globalization studies. Steven Flusty argues that, in studying the phenomenon, we have to move away from top-down visions of the processes at work and concentrate on how ordinary people who are by and large locked out of the power structure create other 'globalities' on their own. He contrasts 'Globalization' with little-g 'globalization', maintaining that the latter is where much of the action that is transforming global social life is happening.