Abstract
An essay summarizing key lessons gleaned from the autobiographies of pioneers of tourism geography, published as The Discovery of Tourism. Five lessons, based on common themes among many of the personal histories, are presented with examples drawn from the autobiographies.
Introduction
Tourism is a constellation of diverse phenomena, including impacts, motivations, behaviours, places. As a subject, it attracts the attention of different social scientists, planners and policy makers. For example, sociologists are drawn by the social interactions, structures and impacts associated with tourism, while psychologists are attracted to understanding the behaviours, motivations and decision-making patterns of tourists. Economists find the economic impacts and the allocation of scarce resources to tourism activities a fascinating topic, while management and business scholars are often interested in the structures and dynamics of tourism enterprises and alliances. Planners, anthropologists, policy scientists, even architects and landscape architects, find questions and challenges among tourism phenomena to inspire enquiry and work. Not surprisingly then, geographers have also long been interested in tourism. For example, the rise of the automobile in the 1930s began reshaping the US tourism landscape, a phenomenon that drew the attention of some geographers, such as Carolson (1938). Tourism as a subject was also of importance in Europe during the same period. Selke Citation(1936) explored some of the geographical aspects of tourism in the early years of the Third Reich.
Tourism is a quintessentially geographical phenomenon. The very definition of tourism as articulated by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO Citation2004) – ‘activity engaged in outside a person's usual environment for any purpose other than the pursuit of remuneration from within the place visited’ – is based on geographical concepts, such as place and travel. Origins, destinations, nodes, transportation linkages, mobility and environment are also intrinsic to our understanding of tourism and are fundamentally geographical concepts. As a result, an examination of the emergence of the geography of tourism can provide valuable insights into the nature, not just of tourism, but of geographical scholarship generally.
This discussion summarizes key lessons from the personal histories of 15 ‘pioneers’ of tourism geography, published as The Discovery of Tourism (Smith Citation2010). These stories were submitted in response to invitations by this author to selected scholars to share their memories of their careers. It should be emphasized that these ‘lessons’ are the opinions of this author only and not necessarily ones the original contributors themselves would make about the stories of their lives.
The lessons that form the heart of this discussion grew slowly from my reading, re-reading and editing of the stories as they came in. The patterns and themes of careers pursued and lives lived showed a number of convergences (as well as, of course, divergences and personal idiosyncrasies). The contributors’ stories, as any good story, lend themselves to multiple interpretations, from allowing us to project our hopes and insecurities on the stories and even becoming metaphors for our own life stories.
Before turning to my reflections, though, a few words about the making of The Discovery of Tourism may be useful. The collection was seen as a vehicle for allowing the contributors, within the guidelines provided by the publisher, to tell their own stories. Minimal editing of the contributions was done, and then generally only for consistency in grammar and spelling. As a result, coverage and detail was highly variable across the stories.
In preparing the collection, the most significant challenge was to select contributors. A couple of criteria were relatively objective: the author had to be able to submit his/her story in English and was to be at least at the peak of his/her career, if not retired. The initial list of invitees was first developed from my own awareness of geographers whom I felt had made seminal contributions to tourism geography. I shared this list with some colleagues who suggested additional contributors, several of whom were unknown to me. Two of the original invitees declined due to other commitments, resulting in 15 authors from 10 nations. The final selection is my responsibility alone and I acknowledge that there may be scholars some readers might feel should have been included in the list. No slight was intended to anyone. While there may be regrettable omissions, I hope that there will be general agreement that those who contributed their stories are worthy of being included. The contributors are shown in .
Table 1 Contributors to The Discovery of Tourism
There are Many Paths
A Chinese proverb attributed to Lao Tzu states, ‘[t]here are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take the one with heart’. This advice has been implicitly followed by every one of the contributors, although, in some cases, their routes were constrained more by circumstances or coincidence than being the fruit of freedom of choice.
Jean-Michel Dewailly writes about how, at the age of only eight, his father referred to him as ‘le géograph’. The influence of this early stereotyping is, Jean-Michel acknowledges, unknown, but geography – especially exploring rural landscapes – appealed to him from an early age. In hindsight, he feels he was predestined for a geographical career. He chose university teaching as a general career path, but initially was undecided between history and geography. A required but challenging course in German plus an inherent love of fieldwork and maps eventually directed his choice to geography. When it came time to select a topic for his doctoral research, he chose land use and planning in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Western Belgium. This was the result of a combination of his interest in rural areas and the fact that he had grown up in the region. Tourism and outdoor recreation were increasingly important land uses and when he began to do fieldwork, he realized the potential of tourism as a legitimate, challenging and intriguing topic for a researcher – enough so as to provide the basis for a life in tourism geography.
Allan Williams and Gareth Shaw provide a different picture of the evolution of careers. Both worked in the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter. They had become involved in a research project on the evolution of the Cornish manufacturing sector. Sitting in a pub on a cold, dark night en route to London after a period of fieldwork, they chatted about how the number of manufacturing firms in the region was declining dramatically and being replaced by service firms, particularly tourism businesses. Gareth and Allan decided to look at tourism, recognizing that the field also brought in concepts from management, economics and sociology – an interdisciplinary quality that appealed to them. They pursued a small research grant to fund a study of tourism enterprises that, over time, became their dominant research focus. One fortuitous and unexpected development was a presentation by Williams at a conference on small firms in tourism in 1987, which caught the eye of a local entrepreneur who recognized their passion and the value of their work. He offered to fund the first large-scale visitor survey in Cornwall. This, ultimately, led to the creation of two research consultancy groups and an ever-growing research network.
However, over time, Allan recognized the challenges of balancing his growing consulting work with the expectation to do academic research. So he eventually pulled back from consulting to pursue more academically-orientated inquiry, especially in the area of ‘uneven regional development’. He also developed a large network of collaboration with tourism researchers from Australia and Europe, pursuing ever-broadening interests. One of these led to a chance encounter with Vlado Baláž, which led to a growing interest in the economic evolution of Eastern Europe and, eventually, labour migration, Vietnamese entrepreneurship, budget airlines and regional externalities.
Gareth's interest in geography ‘happened in part by accident’ (p. 79; page citations are to pages in The Discovery of Tourism) – being given the opportunity to take day courses while employed by the civil service in London to ease his boredom with his first job. Geography, history and economics courses were available to him, but it was geography that captured his greatest interest. Geography afforded the opportunity for fieldwork, including rock climbing and hiking, and was usually followed by an evening in a congenial pub. He found academic life suited him and, eventually, as a result of an invitation by Allan and Gareth's department head, joined Allan to form a research centre looking at economic changes in Cornwall.
His research and teaching into tourism was coincidental with other interests, including urban renewal, urban historical geography and retail geography. He began to observe that paradigm shifts in human geography resulted in fundamentally different approaches by geographers to tourism. Gareth argued that there was not a single tourism geography, but multiple ‘tourism geographies’, an observation that ultimately became the inspiration for the title of this journal.
While in the Department of Geography, Gareth faced a significant health crisis – a serious stroke. With the support of his wife and friends, he eventually recovered. Gareth was inspired by his experience to study the experiences of persons with disabilities attempting to travel. Although he has found funding for research on the topic difficult to secure, the subject has become a personal passion – a Tzuian path he has taken with heart. Gareth entitled his story ‘A long and winding road’ – a characterization of a life that many tourism geographers could use for their own careers.
A final example (for the purposes of this paper) of a life directed by following one's heart is the career of Tej Vir Singh. Tej Vir begins his story by recounting an experience at a conference on mountain tourism. He was sitting apart from the other delegates, enjoying the quiet buzz of congenial chatter by the delegates. One of the delegates sought him out and opened the conversation by observing,
I looked into your biographical details, which show a queer combination of disciplines you have pursued to make an academic career: Masters degree in English Literature, Law, then Geography, and a doctorate in Tourism. In short, this may be classified as academic Bohemianism or an undisciplined attitude towards life and learning (p. 108).
Tej Vir graciously avoided taking offence, observing that, in the context of Indian academics, ‘[w]e are too many, while the jobs are few. There are many crossovers before we arrive [at a sustainable career]’ (p. 108). Tej Vir's story is filled with a sequence of ‘crossovers’ including broadcasting and writing scripts for radio dramas. However, it is his academic career as a tourism scholar that has shown the greatest number of diverse paths. He earned the first doctorate in tourism studies in India, headed a research institute on Himalayan studies, founded a tourism research centre and a journal (Tourism Recreation Research), founded a university programme in tourism studies and a training programme for Himalayan guides, developed an extensive international network, produced a series of edited and authored books and has earned a number of national and international honours.
Despite a life of successes, Tej Vir concludes his story with two regrets. The first is the still-unresolved challenged of raising tourism's profile as a field of inquiry among Indian academics. The second is watching the growth of tourism's negative environmental impacts, particularly in the Kulu Valley. A career path followed with heart does not guarantee success, but it can bring personal pride in a life lived well and honourably.
Geography, Culture and History Matter
The fact that there are many paths implies there are many starting points. The fifteen contributors work in not only 10 different nations (many more if one counts the locations of individual international teaching, research and consulting work) but, as a corollary, come from different cultures and time periods, and follow different paradigms or research interests. Although there are exceptions to the following generalizations, one can observe that early tourism geographers tended to emphasize empirical methods, including statistical model building and forecasting, morphology and land-use planning.
Carlton Van Doren, whose history goes back the furthest of the contributors, got involved in doing visitor surveys at US Midwest state park reservoirs as one of his first professional work experiences. That region has very few natural lakes. Most bodies of water are anthropogenic and can become magnets for outdoor recreation. Later, he became part of a team doing visitor forecasting, including developing empirical measures of state park and reservoir attractiveness. His work has not exclusively been empirical – one of his papers of which he is particularly proud is a published history of Pan American Airlines. However, the dominant theme of his research has been the statistical analysis of visitor surveys.
Peter Murphy, a recently retired contributor explicitly labels his approach as ‘positivist’ – approaching tourism as a subject that can be understood using falsifiable hypotheses and statistical analysis. His empirical approach is, at least in part, the result of his graduate education in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University, one of the fountainheads of the quantitative revolution in geography. However, Peter was not interested in modelling for its own sake but in using statistics to guide tourism development so that it could make a contribution to communities. This practical bent stems from personal experiences – being raised in a house of two shopkeepers in St Albans, England. He developed an early appreciation of the need for a strong work ethic and of the responsibility for using one's talents to make a real difference – not just criticize.
Peter's first position was in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada. He joined the faculty at a time when the tourism sector was experiencing dramatic growth in the city of Victoria. Peter recognized that development of the tourism sector would need to be based on reliable statistics and an understanding of potential impacts. His academic skills and understanding of the needs of tourism business operators enabled him to play a key role in the formation of Tourism Victoria, the local DMO. As time went on, a shift in the academic environment in the department left less and less room for tourism in the Department of Geography. This encouraged Peter's move into the Faculty of Business – a shift similar to one also made by a high percentage of the contributors to Discovery. His talent and experience in working with diverse business representatives as well as municipal and provincial civil servants helped prepare him for a still greater professional shift – into university administration that led, eventually to a move to La Trobe University in Australia. Even as an administrator, Peter was articulate about the need for evidence-based decision making and a practical, personally responsible attitude to one's profession.
Geographers whose careers are at a somewhat younger stage are more likely to work with more subjective – even critical – paradigms. C. Michael Hall opined that ‘the role of the university [is to be] about ideas and their communication, especially as a counter-institutional function that provides ways of thinking “other”’. He further described his research as being ‘embedded in a geography of relevance and emancipation that does not fit well into some of the business schools in which I have worked or still work’ (p. 65).
Allan explored the role of tourism in regional economic restructuring, including projects that were ‘part of an explicit attempt to build a European Research area to challenge Anglo-American hegemony’. He also co-founded the journal, European Urban and Regional Studies with colleagues from Durham University ‘as a forum for hearing the diverse voices of European researchers, and for a critical social science that challenges the prevailing regional science paradigm’ (p. 103).
Some geographers have migrated from empirical to subjective paradigms. Alison Gill began her research programme utilizing statistical analysis of survey data. However, she became familiar with the work of Reg Golledge who was increasingly moving towards what he termed ‘the middle ground’, employing both empirical and subjective tools. This gave her the confidence to use subjective tools increasingly to interpret her growing banks of field observations.
Geographers working in developing economies tend to emphasize empirical, planning-orientated research, while those working in developed economics more frequently explore political and social topics. Bihu (Tiger) Wu, working in China at a time geography meant physical geography, specialized in geomorphology and Quaternary geology, with particular reference to sedimentation patterns. However, what particularly drew his interest was the role of Quaternary sedimentation in the formation of China's traditional mountain resorts. As time progressed, Tiger's interests shifted to Shanghai where, among other contributions, he articulated a morphological model for the evolution of ‘recreational land uses around the metropolis’. Tiger's interests have continued to expand and deepen, but they remain centred on land-use and tourism planning.
Tej Vir has devoted much of his tourism research career to advancing knowledge of the impacts of and planning for tourism development in the Himalayan Mountains, particularly in the form of nature-based and eco-tourism. One particular locale to which he has devoted substantial effort is the Kulu Valley in Himalchal Pradesh. As he notes, the idea of nature-based integrated development by blending forestry, agriculture and native crafts. Singh, as many tourism scholars, identifies deeply with special places and has devoted his career to trying to guide appropriate forms and volumes of tourism development in the Himalayas.
Family and Childhood Matter
An aphorism suggests, ‘the child is father to the man’. Childhood experiences shape an adult's experiences and perceptions. Many of the contributors spoke of their childhood and its impact on their lives. Michael writes evocatively of his early childhood, his parents and his uncles. Of his father, Michael expresses a poignant awareness of loss. For example, he writes of his father,
[t]raveled hugely during ‘the war’. Ceylon, South Afirca, Persia, Iceland, Egypt, and the landings at Salerno. Things I never knew about growing up. Only found in a leather-bound collection of postcards and photographs telling my family, ‘not to worry as everything's alright.’ Perhaps they were … But you never talked about all those places you went. Sometimes you never talked at all – perhaps I now do some of that talking for you? They say things pass down generations but then some things are forgotten (But I miss my Dad) (p. 53).
Michael attributes to his mother his drive for an education and a love of learning, his grandfather's books and especially his Uncle Harry's gift of National Geographic magazines found in an empty flat his uncle had been hired to maintain.
The theme of family ties is found in several stories. As noted earlier, Jean-Michel's father recognized a budding geographer in him when Jean-Michel was only eight. Jean-Michel also acknowledges the importance of a good marriage: ‘In 1968 … I got married. The importance of a spouse in the career of some teacher-researchers can never be stressed enough: such is my situation, especially as I married a geographer, farmer's daughter, and a teacher’ (p. 5).
Van's father was a soil scientist who travelled extensively for his work and was the inspiration for Van's love of travel and especially flying. Peter notes his daughter is a regional planner working on tourism-related projects in south Florida and has collaborated with Peter on some of his publications. Dick Butler reflects on whether an interest in geography is at least partially genetic, in that some people appear to have an innate spatial awareness that others lack. He cites as tentative evidence his son who pursued a Masters in Geography (‘OK, it was in physical geography, so I don't talk about it much’ (p. 48) and became, for a while, an environmental planner. His elder daughter has a PhD in anthropology but, as Allan once pointed out to her while he was visiting her father, her dissertation was really applied geography. And Dick's younger daughter works in heritage conservation, including managing tourism impacts.
You Aren't Alone
Geoff Wall entitles his story, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’. That's a sentiment with which many of the authors could empathize. After a rough start at the University of Kentucky (‘Kentucky turned out to be a troubled department’, p. 156), Geoff moved to the University of Waterloo, in Canada. This was a fortunate move for Geoff: ‘I have always worked [since his move to Waterloo] in a supportive environment and, as such, have been pleased to establish my career at this very progressive institution’ (p. 156). Geoff's career has been marked by working with a large number of graduate students and scholars. Of these collaborations, he observes, ‘[m]ost of my collaborative work has not been with other scholars who read the same literature as I do but, rather, with those from different fields who are in a position to provide insights that may differ and challenge mine’ (p. 160). Elsewhere, he also reflects, ‘I responded to the overtures of others but worked hard to take advantage of and build on the opportunities that were given to me’.
Some of Van's early research experiences were made possible by contacts he made as a graduate student with a number of leading researchers in the US Forest Service who introduced him to the US outdoor recreation literature and, eventually, led to his doctoral research on assessing state park attractiveness. His research advisor, Les Reid, eventually moved to Texas A&M University and offered Van a position in a new Department of Parks and Recreation that Les was creating. However, before moving to Texas, Van spent a couple of years at Ohio State as a new professor where a colleague, Barry Lentnek, helped Van hone his research skills. And, as a personal aside, it was Van's connections first at Ohio State and then at Texas A&M that opened doors for me for my masters and doctoral education, then my first position at Michigan State and my first book, Recreation Geography (Smith Citation1983).
Tej Vir recounts how relationships opened doors for him, making possible a diverse career including the founding of a tourism research centre and a journal, Tourism Recreation Research. Personal relationships have been particularly important in Tej Vir's career for a couple of reasons. Tourism has not been seen as a desirable academic career path for Indian academics so he had to form alliances with like-minded scholars internationally. Further, resources in India for tourism research were scarce. Being able to purchase books and journals was largely impossible due to financial and currency barriers. However, through reaching out to international colleagues, especially through correspondence and infrequent and expensive conferences, Tej Vir was able to gain access to materials that would otherwise have been unavailable. He mentions Jafar Jafari, then-editor-in-chief of Annals of Tourism Research, who provided him with copies of that journal as well as helped to publicize Tej Vir's own journal. Charles Goeldner, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of Travel Research and one of the founders of the Travel and Tourism Research Association, regularly sent Tej Vir copies of anything he published in tourism. ‘Such is an exemplary North–South bonding that tourism and research make possible’ (p. 112).
All the contributors have stories of the importance of friends and colleagues. Allan and Gareth's careers have been closely intertwined with their long-standing friendship. Gareth also notes the importance of his wife, family and Allan in the long moths of recovery after a major stroke. Allan, and another friend, Tim Coles, helped carry Gareth's work forward during his long convalescence.
However, some careers have been marked by the influence of colleagues who were less than supportive. Gareth and Allan write of the intrigue at Exeter University that eventually led to the shutting down of their tourism programme, despite its international standing and financial success in obtaining external grants and graduate student support. The challenge was largely one of uninformed perception by human geography colleagues who felt that tourism was not an appropriately serious topic for geographical research.
A lack of support for his interest in tourism geography at the University of Canterbury eventually led Doug Pearce to build his career further at another university. While the department happily accepted his teaching service and benefitted from his international scholarly reputation, they would not hire another specialist in tourism geography. That failure made his ability to apply for competitive research grants that required a team approach much more difficult, which meant he had problems obtaining funding for his research. He eventually moved to a tourism management position at the University of Wellington. He observed subsequently how his previous department did not replace him with another tourism geographer.
Contrary to the title of this sub-section, sometimes one does feel alone in one's home department. Doug and Peter both wrote of their sense of being isolated in the academic units. So did Dick. Even after spending 30 years in the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario, and having served as departmental chair and university senator – he was the only tourism specialist in his programme. When he retired, he did return to the UK and took a position with the University of Surrey where tourism was the focus. While the move was rewarding, as with many choices in life, there were trade-offs. The Surrey programme was a management programme, lacking the research and academic traditions of a traditional geography department, not to mention cartographic support. Still, whether at Western, Surrey, or his final position at the University of Strathclyde, Dick has developed, nurtured and maintained relationships and collaborations with colleagues and graduate students internationally.
Myriam Jansen-Verbeke experienced a number of reversals in the political and social environments in which she worked at different universities. For example, she helped launch a new tourism curriculum in the Geography Department of the Katholieke Univeriteit Leuven, which, for the first few years, was well received and successful. However, the programme was designed to be an elite academic programme for doctoral students. The curriculum was seen, in the long run, as politically untenable by the administration and this elite academic programme was shut down ultimately by the sponsors and government authorities who saw no value in a research-orientated programme.
Myriam concludes her description of her experience in Leuven by quoting Pausch Citation(2008):
[l]oyalty in a selfish and competitive academic environment is a precious and rare gem … what happened in Leuven was unworthy of an academic community: to slide on our bellies for politicians and VIPs who have no academic credits in tourism and who have by now long disappeared from the scene, rather than keeping integrity and loyalty towards their own staff (p. 218).
On a more positive note, though, Myriam concludes her story by observing,
[t]here is no road map to navigate on the path to bliss … I have always enjoyed the company of colleagues who have the capacity to be genuinely enthusiastic about new ideas and who are truly collegial and reliable in matters of collaboration. True friendship in job-related networks might have been rare, but it occurs and when sustained over the years, even beyond the work floor, is a precious gift of life (p. 222).
Embrace Change
Change, in the sense of a significant shift in one's career path or research focus, is a common experience among the contributors. Jigang Bao had hoped to have a career in mathematics or theoretical physics, but was not accepted in the programmes to which he applied. He eventually landed in one of the leading departments of geography in China, at Sun Yat-Sen University, where he began to apply mathematical modelling to better understanding patterns of tourism development. This interest evolved into a focus on tourism planning, which led Jigang to work closely with planners and government officials in solving practical problems – not just academic questions. Over time, as he gained experience in local tourism development, he began to observe that, rather than technical planning problems, the most important questions for him appeared increasingly related to the impacts of tourism development on local residents. He eventually made a conscious shift in his research from what he characterized as a focus on efficiency to one of equity.
The more I study, the more I am convinced that tourism research cannot be simply explained by mathematical models [despite his beginnings in mathematics], nor can it be explained thoroughly by just the theories of geography, economics, or other social sciences. Instead, it requires the collaboration of a number of disciplines (p. 78).
One of Alison Gill's first jobs was a contract with the Canadian Wildlife Service studying the nesting habitats of endangered raptors in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba. The experience led to reflections on the difficulty of classifying whether observed activities are leisure/tourism or not. She was engaged in many of the same activities as visitors to the park, such as hiking and canoeing – but for her, these were hard, physical labour, not recreation. While at the park, near the end of the season, she was approached by the Chair of Geography at Brandon University who asked if she’d be interested in teaching some courses at a series of remote northern Manitoba mining communities, travelling among the towns by bush plane. Although she had no teaching experience or teaching materials, she had a five-year-old son and needed a job, so she leapt at the opportunity. The specific courses were based on student requests: introductions to physical geography, human geography and economic geography. Despite temperatures routinely falling to −40, she enjoyed the experience and, when asked the subsequent year if she would do it again, she agreed. One of the students’ requests for the second year was a course on something called ‘tourism geography’.
Her work in remote communities gave her an interest in life and development in small towns, which led her to move away from statistical methods for analysis of data to increasingly subjective approaches examining community development topics. After she graduated, she faced a recession in the Canadian economy and a scarcity of permanent teaching jobs. A temporary sabbatical replacement position put her back in a classroom teaching tourism, which then gave her some experience which she could use to compete for a position in tourism geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Subsequently, she pursued research opportunities in both tourism and community development, particularly in mountain resorts. Although tourism had not been an interest in the beginning – indeed, Alison joked how she first thought tourism studies were trivial because they seemed to be so much fun – it has become the focus of a lifelong career.
I have always been quite amazed at young people who, from an early age, have been able to trace a career plan – and carry it out. As I grew up, I certainly had no idea of what I wanted to be or to do with my life … (p. 124).
With similar thoughts, Gerda Priestley introduces her story noting she never had a conscious career plan in mind, other than to travel and move out of Northern Ireland. She has had an eclectic academic career, pursuing research opportunities in parks and protected areas, golf tourism, cultural tourism, urban tourism and more, as well as pursuing her sports interests, tourism education innovation and university administration. At the conclusion of her story, she writes, ‘I certainly have no regrets about my career “choice”, even if “choice” is perhaps not the correct term because my career unfolded as a succession of fortuitous events and decisions not always directly related to my career’ (p. 138). Having a love of travel and a hunger to get away from the clouds and damp (and troubles) of Northern Ireland, she first worked during summer vacations in Spain as a nanny. She fell in love with Spain, especially the region around Barcelona, selecting it as the location for her thesis research. That initial experience led to a 40-year career based in Spain as well as a Spanish husband and numerous international collaborations.
In Conclusion
I expected the compilation of these stories would be a rewarding experience and my expectation was met. However, what I had not expected was to be moved emotionally by a number of the stories. Feelings of humour, sympathetic anger, pride in accomplishments of colleagues and even tears at a few passages that personally moved me were all part of the experience of editing the stories. This collection of stories engendered a strong sense of tourism geographers as an extended community with a complex and evolving history.
There is a popular notion known as ‘six degrees of separation’ – the idea that any two people in the world can be linked by no more than five intermediaries. In the case of the global community of tourism geographers, the concept could probably be recast as one degree of separation. Most of the contributors know each other and have their own extensive personal and professional networks. This potentially allows for a rich cross-fertilization of ideas, even though not everyone shares the same conceptual or methodological orientation. Whether such a tightly-knit network will continue into the future, I find it currently gratifying to think that there are, in effect, no strangers in tourism geography. I may not know a particular scholar, but I likely know someone who does.
The sense of community among tourism scholars was strengthened when, near the completing of the book, I ran into some challenges. Without going into details, I recall with pleasure how several authors offered different strategies to resolve the situation, including one offer of independent funding to publish the book. The contributors view this collection as much theirs as mine.
On a, perhaps, more mundane level, as I read the stories, I could virtually hear the voices of those people whom I knew. Their personalities shine through the words on the pages. Whereas most academic journal articles are impersonal, these essays are intensely personal. The fact that I can hear ‘voices’ in the printed word assures me of the veracity and honesty in the stories.
In relating their stories, some of the contributors shared personal comments that, while not necessarily insightful into the process of becoming a tourism scholar, revealed some of the human and idiosyncratic qualities of the writers. Dick Butler is a historian of rock and roll and an expert on Sherlock Holmes stories; Tej Vir adapted Shakespearean plays for Indian radio; Van applied for a job with the CIA after World War II – he did not get it, but his son-in-law was a CIA operative for 20 years. Michel Dewailly travels to Madagascar almost every year as a volunteer to help with rural development projects. Peter Murphy knows both Mick Jagger and Stephen Hawking. Gerda Priestley and Doug Pearce began their lifelong friendship and professional collaboration when they discovered that both were planning an escape from a boring conference in Mallorca and agreed to head off to the Spanish mainland for some sightseeing. Tourism geographers do not just do interesting work, they are interesting people.
I dedicated the collection to the memory of Roy Wolfe. Roy was, in effect, the godfather of many of the scholars whose lives are told in the book. A professor at York University in Toronto, Roy was among the first geographers to devote his life to the study of tourism. To do so was a battle in the beginning. As a doctoral student, his committee at first vetoed his research into the evolution of the Canadian resort community, Wasaga Beach. Their objections were twofold: first, tourism was not seen as an appropriate subject for a ‘serious’ geographer and, second, Roy's approach was historical, an approach to which his committee objected. Rather than give up his interest, Roy dropped out of his programme. After a year, his committee relented and Roy completed a landmark dissertation. The experience of having to battle his committee, though, took a toll. As his wife explained to me (I knew the Wolfes), Roy got so tired of listening to people whom he considered fools, he stopped listening. Literally. He lost, or perhaps more accurately, shut off his hearing.
Roy went on to produce a number of seminal works related to tourism, including a critical review of the 26-volume US Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission released in 1962. Although ostensibly a book review, Roy's article provided a critical, sweeping and coherent view of the forces shaping outdoor recreation and tourism demand and supply. His body of work inspired at least a full generation of tourism geographers.
In conclusion, perhaps a quotation from the contribution by Myriam Jansen-Verbeke would be appropriate. In closing her story, she recounted,
Looking backwards or in the mirror is not my favourite pastime, so the request of Steve Smith to tell the story of an academic career was rather disturbing. First of all, there never was a moment of consciously choosing an academic career; you embark on a small river and gradually get into more rapid currents, not always knowing where you can disembark, or how to navigate in dangerous waters, or what to do when encountering pirates (and I did meet them!). Or you lose patience while waiting for the opening of too many sluices … And then suddenly, you realize you are cruising at a slower speed and you can enjoy more of the landscape, the unexpected scenic views, the unplanned encounters, and the homecomings. Together with Edith Piaf, I could sing ‘Non, je ne regrette rien!’ (No, I regret nothing!) (pp. 222–223).
This is probably the best any academic can hope to write at the end of her or his story.
Related Research Data
References
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