Sociology of Mobilities Traveling Cultures Styles what we buy and collect where and how we travel serve as codes of distinction We have the ability to master the signs of many and complex styles and periods and to read construct codes of distinction into our local subcultures There is a search to articulate give meaning to one s cultural tastes Travel is one of the ways that modern humans articulate their cultural taste Travel Characteristic of modernity Offers an escape from the confinement of existing social roles and obligations liminality Offers travelers new roles to play discovery effects change in a person Fun intensifies experience heightens imagination Contrasted with work Clear boundaries between beginning and end Equips traveler temporarily with unaccustomed power Jonathan Culler The Semiotics of Tourism Travel is a social construction in different time periods it fulfills various cultural needs culinary scholastic eyewitness accounts exoticism back regions authenticity danger excitement The tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself All over the world the unsung armies of semioticians the tourists are fanning out in search of signs of Frenchness typical Italian behavior exemplary Oriental scenes traditional English pubs Culler p 155 To be a tourist is to dislike other tourists Dean MacCannell To be a tourist is to want to be less touristy Culler paraphrased p 158 Tourists can always find someone more touristy than themselves to sneer at Culler p 11 The tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself All over the world the unsung armies of semiotics the tourists are fanning out in search of signs of Frenchness typical Italian behavior exemplary Oriental scenes traditional English pubs Jonathan Culler Framing the Sign p 155 The tourist seldom likes the authentic product of a foreign culture The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey Daniel Boorstin Narratives discourses of tourism What is authenticity How is authenticity constructed What is the process by which any item of culture or practice achieves an aura of being authentic What are the processes of production of authenticity Edward Bruner we valorize innovation and then yearn for more stable worlds whether these reside in our own past in other cultures or in a conflation of the two our feelings of tender yearning are neither as natural nor as panhuman and therefore not necessarily as innocent as one might imagine Renato Rosaldo Imperialist Nostalgia Representations 26 Spring 1989 pp 107 122 My concern thus resides with a particular kind of nostalgia often found under imperialism where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have destroyed someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention people destroy their environment and then worship nature Renato Rosaldo In travel quests for authenticity the primitive back regions the unusual the spectacular Fulfillment of these lend distinction cultural capital Juxtaposed with the primitive the other the undeveloped etc the snowboarder is empowered his her wealth race are thus highlighted symbolically as superior free intelligent etc