Tourism in culture: catalyst or cancer

Abstract

Tourism in culture rafers to tourism as a constituent element in modern culture which is quite different from the touristic practices of a particular culture. Mass tourism, for example, cannot be regarded as a form of folk practice, as compared to certain indigenous forms of travel such as malaga among the Samoans, kula among the Trobrianders, bejalai among the Ibans and merantau among the Minangkabaus. Whereas in the latter forms travel are organic parts of particular cultures, the same cannot be said of mass tourism which originate from the West. In this sense tarrism has been appropriately described a form of imperialis (Nash 1979; Lanfant 1980), which is grafted from a metropolitan culture resulting in new structures and varying degrees of cultural dependency of the host on the former community (Erisman 1983).