Marie-Françoise Lanfant and her contribution to the sociology of tourism: a French Portrait

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. John Urry heads the rankings for The Tourist Gaze which by 20 February 2015 had been cited 7527 times since its first appearance in 1990. MacCannell's The Tourist followed with 5903 citations since its initial publication in 1976 and Cohen (1972) “Toward a Sociology of International Tourism” took up third position with 1822 citations. Interestingly, the first two works were books while the third was a journal article.

^3. The following licenses to teach in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris Sorbonne included: “Philosophy and Logic” (6 November 1953), “General History of Philosophy” (10 July 1954), “General Psychology” (15 July 1955), “Ethics and Sociology” (9 November 1955), and “Psychology of Social Life” (7 November 1956). She also received the Superior Diploma of Philosophy from that same university in three more areas of specialisation: “The Notion of the Imagination in the Theory of Knowledge of Hume and Kant” (8 June 1956), “Psychophysiology”, Faculty of Sciences (October 1956), and “Pathological Psychology”, Institute of Psychology (15 November 1957).

^4. Unfortunately, none of the papers of this symposium was ever published.

^5. She has rightly insisted that, in making presentations to such gatherings as the research committee on international tourism (RC50) of the International Sociological Association (of which she is a former Vice-President), she should be allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to deliver in French, particularly since over 10 years ago a former distinguished head of that organization stated in unequivocal terms that “the use of multiple languages, while having some negative administrative effects, is intellectually essential to the scientific future of social science” (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 9). Even so, she, like many of her fellow nationals, has been obliged at the alternative risk of being intellectually sidelined, to publish a great deal of her output in English, and, since Wallerstein's remarks, the situation, if anything, has deteriorated.