Introduction

Any consideration of tourism today cannot be divorced from its epistemological concerns. The construction of economic, social, political, cultural and religious paradigms of tourism analysis reveals an inadequacy inherent in examining each of these constituents separately. The tension demonstrated by such risk is more palpably revealed upon the failure of each dimension to explore, examine and act independently as a point of reference for the success and failures of tourism on various levels.

Tourism has not always had its history rooted in the economy. Its modern form is heir to a modernist tradition of travelling to foreign lands, completely uninvited and unsolicited by locals, thus engendering a knowledge about the real and epistemological geography of the destination as Said (1979) argues. The general trend of social sciences to consider it as yet another source of national income emasculates the profundity of tourism as a cultural phenomenon, first and foremost. Harvey (1993) argues that ideology, values and power relations are inscribed in our very notion of what constitutes a 'place' and its representations. In the academic discourse of today, tourism mostly belongs to the domain of figures and numbers. Its only viability resides in the ability of nation-states to develop valid strategies for attracting tourists through various context-based strategies. Hall and Jenkins (1995: 5) reveal that tourism has been constrained by 'the lack of well-defined analytical and theoretical frameworks'.

But whilst the economic dimension of the tourism sector demands painstaking attention and incorporation into the wider framework of respective countries' economic super and supra structures, the more important aspects of tourism necessitate a critique of the cultural and discursive representations that galvanize this sector.