Lucy R. Lippard on how we perceive travelers and tourists
“Classist distinctions are conventionally made between travel and tourism. Popular wisdom has is that educated middle-class travelers, more aristocratic and superior, pursue the distant and unexpected, gaining insights as they ply their graceful and god-given way across others’ terrains; while common tourists, traveling in bulk on packaged tours, just gawk, go too fast to see, and are more interested in taking pictures than living in the moment.”
— Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track (1999)
November 7th, 2006 at 12:57 am
I don’t think it is so much necessarily a class distinction, more of a frame of mind. In its most basic form it boils down to what is a person looking for from their trip? Do they want to experience a different country or just stay within their group and either do a whistle stop tour to see as much as possible or just lie on the beach and eat and drink a lot.