The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture [SOLD]

The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture

Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest

Edited by Hal K. Rothman

University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque

Hardback with slipcover, first edition, 2003, 250 pages, illustrated with vintage photographs.

Condition: very good condition, however, a previous owner made written notations on 9 pages at the end of the book

From the flyleaf

“The Southwest has long been one of America’s dreamscapes, a place we go to relive and reinvent our past for the purposes of the present.  Yet the Southwest is a real place, too, one where people live and make a living.  The collection of essays looks at the ways tourism affects people and places in the Southwest and at the region’s meaning on the larger state of national life.

“Contributors include Chris Wilson, Phoebe Kropp, and Rina Swentzell, who explicate tourist sites in Albuquerque, California’s Camino Real, and Taos.  Essays that deal with collecting and belonging include discussions of scrapbooks, souvenirs, and virtual tourism on the internet by Marguerite Shaffer, Leah Dilworth, and Erika Bsumek.  William L. Bryan, Jr., a leading ecotourism operator, provides perspectives on a different kind of tourism and Susan Guyette and David White argue for the autonomy of native people in presenting their experience to visitors.  The final essay examines how places are transformed by tourists. Sylvia Rodriguez explores the power dynamics of tourism, Char Miller chronicles the way San Antonio has become a colonial town, and volume editor Hal Rothman presents Las Vegas as a place where authenticity and inauthenticity are purposefully indistinguishable.”