The Ethics of Sightseeing by Dean MacCannell (review)

In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) Dean MacCannell examined a range of concepts including “staged authenticity” and “sightseeing and social structure,” and in doing so helped give academic legitimacy to the study of tourism. In Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (1992) he extended his explorations of the topic in interesting and provocative ways. In The Ethics of Sightseeing, which can be viewed as the concluding volume of his trilogy of tourism studies, MacCannell offers a wealth of additional insights into tourism and postmodernity. MacCannell proclaims that the current volume is “an ethics of SIGHTSEEING, not tourism” (emphasis his), and anticipates that it “will be misread as implying more” (xi); yet how can it not be when the word tourism, tourist, or touristic appears in the title of four of the book’s thirteen chapters, in the preface title, and in the titles of two of the book’s four parts?

The Ethics of Sightseeing is challenging, insightful, and frustrating all at the same time. Just like any group of tourists visiting a place and its residents, readers are likely to have responses to the work based on their own preferences and predilections for the author’s methodological approach, which he describes as “nonsystematic naturalistic observation combined with scholarship” (x). Some will find the author’s periodic engagement with critics of his earlier scholarship and his boxed commentaries (short vignettes that appear throughout the book, drawing on personal experiences to illustrate aspects of his argument) overly self-referential; others will find them instructive. The professed goal of these endeavors, MacCannell states, is to “encourage more discussion and research into the ethics of tourism, creative ways of being a tourist, how tourists relate to social symbolism, and the subjectivity of sightseers” (xi). “The ultimate ethical test for tourists,” he adds, “is whether they can realize the productive potential of their travel desires or whether they allow themselves to become mere ciphers of arrangements made for them” (6).

There are moments in The Ethics of Sightseeing where MacCannell moves beyond the all-too-common scholarly trope of tourist bashing, such as in the brief opening chapter, “Tourist/Other and the Unconscious,” in which the sightseer is actually granted the power and responsibility to “rearrange the ground of subjective existence” (11). But at other times MacCannell launches into critiques of contemporary (late capitalist) culture that smack of the predictable. “Today’s version of [Aristotle’s] ‘happiness unto death’ is ‘shop until you drop,’ and ‘the one who dies with the most toys wins,’” we learn (50). MacCannell adds that “in postmodernity, if you are not having fun, or appearing to be having fun, it means you have done something wrong” (51). Has contemporary culture really become so shallow, or has it simply become de rigueur among academics in the humanities and social sciences to suggest as much? Is it actually the case, as MacCannell would have it, that “the late capitalist city, blistered with tourist bubbles, is a glitzy crypt for the bourgeoisie to be buried together with their immense accumulation of commodities”? (98) Or, are life, tourism, sightseeing, and postmodernity as a whole a bit more nuanced than that? Is the mission of directing academicians and the larger sightseeing public down the path towards a higher ethics of sightseeing really facilitated by casually dismissing Edmonton, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, or Orange County, California, or Dubai as “cultural backwaters?” (100)

But then, in the second half of the study, MacCannell turns the table away from his earlier pessimism. We learn that “with effort and ethical commitment, tourists can access the transformative power of the city” (113) and are offered a set of ethical guidelines to help us avoid taking the landscape (the subject of our sightseeing endeavors) for granted: “Become aware that every landscape contains memory. Every square inch of ground on which we walk is hallowed” (37). In his chapter “The Bilbao Effect: Ethical Symbolic Representation,” the Guggenheim Bilbao is offered up as “the embodiment of creative risk taking, human...