Tourism is a practice of considerable cultural and economic importance and, unlike a good many manifestations of contemporary culture, is well known in some guise to every literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of television or rock music or fashion, but all have been tourists and have observed tourists. Yet despite the pervasiveness of tourism and its centrality to our conception of the contemporary world (for most of us, the world is more imperiously an array of places one might visit than it is a configuration of political or economic forces), tourism has been neglected by students of culture. Unlike the cinema, popular romance, or even video, tourism has scarcely figured in the theoretical discussions and debates about popular culture of recent years.