international tourists are tending to escape these sociocultural bonds and, urged on by the capitalist tourist and advertising industries which see more profit in the individual free choice of tourist styles, this avant-garde population is beginning to emulate the panoply of middle-class styles of the West.
Yet, the more culturally self-confident middle classes of the West have since the 1920s begun to explore—and often to develop and symbolically control—the cultures and habitats of the poorer "other half' of the world for their own convenience: the poor (Harlem), the ethnic (Chinatown, Greektown, etc.) and the exotic neo-colonized peoples (New Guinea, Nepal, the Andes). This taking control of the locales and lifestyles that the poor are trying to abandon or leave is exactly analogous to the model proposed by Thompson (1979) in his provocative book Rubbish Theory in which he shows that the cultural debris of the lives of the disadvantaged eventually fall into the hands of the affluent, to be used, collected, museumized, and made valuable to the advantage of the new owners. Thus this dialectic relationship between value and class is obviously a major dynamic of modern touristic evolution (cf. the very powerful movie "Le Soleil des Heyenes")
RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY
Jafari (1977:8) has defined the goal as "the study of man away from his usual habitat, of the industry and of the Impacts [of the tourist) and the industry" (italics original). The papers in this issue
have been solicited and selected to emphasize only a small part of the anthropology of tourism: the study of tourism in terms of the social, economic, and cultural background of the tourists, including the efforts of the industry situated within the tourists' societies to effect tourist behavior. The focus is on the matrix of symbols and meanings—the social semantic as the Thurots call it—by which tourism is part of, structures and affects the rest of life. Social semantics interface with other disciplinary approaches through cognitive structures and motivation (psychology); the significance of consumption patterns (economics); class, prestige and hierarchy (sociology); the meanings of spatial displacements (geography); verbal and written representations (linguistics); visual representations (the arts); and so on. These studies fall within range of modern cultural anthropology and the research methods used are those of cultural anthropologists.
The goals of gaining insight into the nature and structure of cultural meanings are attained through both ethnography and