The 'worldmaking' prodigy of tourism: the reach of power of tourism in the dynamics of change and transformation

This review article is the second of a pair of articles that introduce the field of Tourism Studies/Tourism Management (hereafter Tourism Studies) to the concept of worldmaking as an operational construct to help critically describe the creative/inventive role and function of tourism in the making of culture and place. In the first article—the companion manuscript, which appeared in the preceding issue of Tourism Analysis—the recent work of Meethan in Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture, and Consumption (hereafter “Tourism as Global Society”) was used as a conceptual catalyst to help make the case for deeper and more frequent critical and interpretive inspections of the power and reach of tourism in significantly and variously contributing to the making/demaking/remaking of peoples, places, and pasts, rather than just serving as a reproducing authority cum agency, which just mirrors what is already there in each location. While Tourism Studies was found (by Meethan) to be an as yet rather contained theoretical field, the concept of worldmaking was put forward in the first article as a thinking tool to assist critical understanding of the everyday articulation and the everyplace effectivity of tourism as a particular strong and pervasive producer of political meanings (or contested versions) of locality. In this follow-up article, an attempt is made to encourage more commonplace reflective and reflexive examinations of the creative and inventive manufacture capacity of tourism—as it works, or is worked upon, in collaboration with other formative and educative vehicles in society—to produce particular vistas of place and space, or to otherwise reconfigure the held visions of meaning and of becoming by populations. Such is the very prodigy of tourism (such are the potential prodigies of tourism!!), with all the immense myriad cultural, social, psychic, and political—as well as economic and environmental—ramifications that are entailed by that sort of sometimes-grand-and-magnificent/sometimes-petty-and-quotidian mediation of locality and heritage. While the article concludes by codifying (and damning!) a number of clichés that litter much hastily-derived contemporary commentary on and about tourism—as drawn from the insight-loaded sociological work of Meethan—this second article is composed under the judgment that too many commentators in Tourism Studies (itself) are prone to reifying tourism as an almost undifferentiated industrial force of globalization.