Featuring the tourist as a subject position powerful enough to
activate new market mechanisms by way of choosing to travel in more
ethical ways, theorists argue that new tourism activities present an
alternative to the modern conception of mass tourism and the
devastation it has come to represent. Tourists, once portrayed by
leisure theorists as mindless consumers conforming to the script of
corporately produced adventure, are now theorized as the very
embodiment of democratic choice and social agency, capable of
overturning the social, ecological and economic travesties of mass
tourism. It is argued that new tourism presents no substantial
alternative to mass tourism and no substantial challenge to the liberal
doctrine that lay at the root of a global power imbalance. Control of
tourism, including the construction of the tourist's desires, remains
firmly in the First World. Though the case of India is presented, the
presentation is concerned more theoretically with the problematic
trend in social theory towards the increasing liberalization of thought
as it is represented in theorizations of new tourism. It is argued that
the dominance of a liberal paradigm represents a diminished capacity
to critically understand and challenge the social structures that
perpetuate domination, hence allowing for the proposition that
tourism, steeped and rooted in hierarchized social relations, could be
ever ethical.