Genealogy of Tourism in the Historical Course of Social Changes

Genealogy seeks to study the modern man as a historical and cultural reality. It looks through past to discover and identify the present inspiration, ideology or tenets. Genealogy denies historical continuity to analyze the historical ancestry; on the contrary, it uncovers instabilities, complexities and probabilities over the historical events. Genealogy of tourism reveals that the initial formation of tourism had different varieties due to diversities of historical periods in terms of power and knowledge. In the ages of tradition, traditional tourism had been engaged with pilgrimage to holy places, geographical quests, discoveries and the related results. Modern tourism, differentiating between home and workplace, has appeared as a type of passing leisure time and has brought consequences like travels, experiences, entertainments, etc. for the modern man. In postmodernism, preference of freedom over determinism, multiplicity for unity, coalition for combination and complexity over simplicity (Mary Rosnao, 1380: 28). And it is the appearance of an undifferentiating process that has reorganized tourism in different ways. In the postmodern era, no one and nothing, either holy or unholy, should escape the reaches of capitalism. Tourism in postmodernism is the electronic tourism in the virtual space; it happens at home and workplace through modern technology, satellite, huge load of information, images and videos which have filled this space with visibilities as well as with learning and entertaining facilities. Although different types of tourism and even world travels still exist, this fact still has multiplied popularity of tourism.