Summer Session I
MTuWThF, 11:45 AM-1:00 PM, C2 100

Note: CMCL-C 334 can be taken twice for credit when the topic
varies.

Instructor: Aneliya Dimitrova
Email: adimitro@indiana.edu
Office: 800 E. 3rd St. – room 279
Phone: 856-7385

How did the age-old practice of travel become tourism, a
multibillion industry that markets experience to over 560 million
travelers annually at thousands of destinations?   Why do tourists
travel and does it matter how they do it?   How do sites like the
Giza Pyramids, the Alamo, and Masada become tourist attractions?  If
places and artifacts “tell stories,” whose stories do they tell and
how does it matter when they first start telling them?  How can non-
living things like sites and museum exhibits have “agency”? Why are
souvenirs collected by individual tourists, while “sites
are ‘collected’ by entire societies” (Dean MacCannell)?  How do the
local, national and global impact the creation of particular tourist
sites (like the US Alamo and Greek Rethemnos) and experiences (like
Maasai cultural performances for tourists)?  What are some of the
ways in which hosts and tourists interact and perform identities?

This course introduces students to tourism studies.  It explores
heritage, cultural, and identity tourism as well as some
alternatives like couch surfing, dark and toxic tourism as
burgeoning social practices.  The significant scope of tourism makes
it an important venue where meaning is produced and challenged,
while fashioning the self.  As tourist locations and interactions
are subjected to local, national and global influences, they offer a
potent site to explore issues of social change and authority, nation
and globalization, meaning production and reception, performance,
representation and the politics of identity within specific
historical and geographic coordinates.  A significant focus is
placed on the concept that touristic performances (or heightened
embodied forms of communication) and sites are not “natural” and
their culturally constituted meanings give them a degree of agency.

The course combines lectures, class discussions and in class film
screenings.  Grading is based on active class participation,
discussion leading, several forum postings, one group project and a
final critical essay.

Authors include Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Dean MacCannell,
Richard Handler, Michael Herzfeld, Richard Flores, Edward Bruner,
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Judith Adler, John Lennon and Mark
Foley, and Phaedra Pezzullo.