Dialogue concerning tourism and religion

Abstract

This edited email dialogue between a senior American social scientist, Dean MacCannell, and an early career French anthropologist, Thomas Apchain, began soon after they observed that two of the earliest contributions to tourism studies, MacCannell's and Nelson Graburn's, both claimed tourist phenomena to be underpinned by classical theories of religion. The lack of follow-up on either MacCannell's or Graburn's claim of an analytically heuristic relationship between tourism and religion is traced back to a preexisting schism in the sociology and anthropology of religion between Arnold Van Gennep and Emile Durkheim. MacCannell and Apchain find that this division persists as a fracture in the foundation of the social theory both of tourism research and of the human sciences more generally.