Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel

What feeds the impulse to explore new horizons? What makes travel meaningful? In Being a Tourist, Julia Harrison explores the motivations of a large group of middle-class travelers to find out why people invest their financial, emotional, psychological, and physical resources in this activity. She suggests that they are fueled by several desires: to find intimacy and connection, to express a personal aesthetic, to explore the idea of "home," and to make sense of a globalized world.

Engagingly and thoughtfully written for readers of travel writing, tourism studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, Being a Tourist goes beyond current debates about authenticity and consumption to analyze the nuanced moral and political complexity of privileged travel.