The fact that tourism is a major global industry forecast to continue its dramatic growth well into the twenty-first century is often cited as a rationale for its analysis. However, while the connection between individual locations and the world's global markets is an obvious product of tourism, the heart of the tourist experience is the construction of identity: the relation of the traveller to resident populations; the participants' views of themselves and others; tourists' search for authenticity and their testing of boundaries.This book significantly furthers current debates on tourism by asking important and vexing questions about the nature of the tourist experience: 'folk museums' that forget many of the 'folk' who live in the areas represented; the environments and events that are shaped to meet the 'imagined dreams' of tourist spectators; the categorization of visitors and returnees who take up residence and participate in the construction of 'local' identities; the evolving meanings associated with indigenous culture, tradition, heritage, representation, reality and authenticity. In renegotiating the definitions of tourism for the new millennium, this book represents a major contribution to an emerging and highly topical area of study.

Contents: Simone Abram & Jacqueline Waldren, Introduction -- Tamara Kohn, Island Involvement and the Evolving Tourist -- Simone Abram, Performing for Tourists in Rural France -- Jacqueline Waldren, We Are Not Tourists: We Live Here -- Sara Cohen, More than the Beatles: Popular Music, Tourism and Urban Regeneration -- Connie Zeanah Atkinson, Whose New Orleans? Music's Place in the Packaging of New Orleans for Tourism -- Hazel Tucker, The Ideal Village: Interactions through Tourism in Central Anatolia -- Donald V.L. Macleod, 'Alternative' Tourists on a Canary Island -- Niels Sampath, Mas Identity: Tourism and Global and Local Aspects of Trinidad Carnival -- Ken Teague, Representations of Nepal -- Michael Hitchcock, Nick Stanley & Siu King Chung, The Southeast Asian 'Living Museum' and its Antecedents -- Mark Nuttall, Packaging the Wild: Tourism Development in Alaska