Development of Tour Uriely 2005

210 THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE
de-differentiation. Specifically, the tendency of recent studies to de-differentiate
everyday life and tourist experiences deconstructs the early
definitions which emphasize distinctiveness. Practices of deconstruction
are also evident in the shift from generalizing toward pluralizing
depictions of the tourist experience, which involves two stages. In the
first, the early conceptualizations are deconstructed by the emergence
of tourist typologies. The second is manifested in recent studies that
deconstruct well-established typologies by stressing the diversity of tourist
experiences within each of the existing categories in these
typologies.
The third development presented in this study indicates how the
attention of researchers was shifted from the displayed objects to the
tourist subjective negotiation of meanings. This clearly illustrates
the inclination of postmodernist thought to stress the role of subjectivity
(Frazer 1989; Uriely et al 2002). The fourth development indicated
above—from debates that existed between competing standpoints of
modern tourism to the compromising nature of the discourse between
different interpretations of postmodern tourism—corresponds to the
nondualistic and anti-hierarchal intellectual attitude associated with
postmodernist modes of analysis (Bauman 1987; Denzin 1991; Lather
1991).
By utilizing the modernist/postmodernist dichotomy, this analysis
acknowledges that a general cultural change referred to in the literature
as postmodernity is underway, and that it affects various domains
of cultural activity, including the fashion of constructing knowledge in
tourism studies. Specifically, the analysis presented above suggests that
the depicted developments are not detached from a contemporary
trend in the social sciences addressed as ‘‘postmodernist thinking’’,
which is in itself a manifestation of a wider cultural change referred
to as postmodernity. Nevertheless, the modernist/postmodernist
dichotomy utilized in this analysis should not be grasped as a proposition
regarding the extent of change or competition that contemporary
conceptualizations introduce to the literature on the tourist experience.
Instead, it is suggested that contemporary conceptualizations of
the tourist experience introduce complementary extensions to the earlier
theories rather than a contrasting new approach that invalidates
them. For instance, the essentialist views of Boorstin (1964) and
MacCannell (1973) are included in Cohen’s phenomenological typology
of tourist experiences (1979), which is intersected with the differentiation
between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized tourists
(Cohen 1972) in order to create the recent subtypology that captures
the diversity among backpackers (Uriely et al 2002). In this process, later
conceptualizations seem to introduce additions rather than a contrasting
alternative to the logic of earlier works. In this respect, the
current analysis challenges the notion of postmodernist thinking as a
contesting and sharp departure from earlier modernist theorizing
(Bauman 1987, 1992; Denzin 1991; Flax 1990; Frazer 1989). Thus, it
is suggested that with regard to the specific trends in the literature
the term late modernist (Giddens 1990; Wang 2000) seems to be more
appropriate than postmodernist.