Tourism and the Universal Drama of Work

Sažetak

Almost fifty years since the publication of Dean MacCannell’s seminal work The Tourist, this article revisits one of the developments addressed in his book, namely the fact that the work of others has become a tourist attraction. The article critically reexamines MacCannell’s claim that a work display enables the industrial man to adopt a synthetic social perspective and experience his role in the universal drama of work. I argue that a work display has a conservative function as it compels the tourist to remember that she might become part of a work display, not as a spectator but as a low-paid worker on display. It is precisely a work display, the article claims, that reveals precarity to be the fundamental feature of the universal drama of work. I demonstrate that the deculturization of the workplace, on which MacCannell’s analysis of work display is based, has been reversed and brought to its ultimate conclusion in the emergence of workplace culture. This, in turn, requires us to reevaluate not only our understanding of work display, but also of work and tourism. Elucidating the relationship between work and tourism as symbolic systems, the article fully acknowledges that both sustain the contemporary symbolic order.

Ključne riječi: neoliberalism, tourism, tourist, precarity, work display