THE FUTURE OF POST-HUMAN TOURISM
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is tourism really so vital that, as Jeb Bush once claimed, “tourism and visitors are our lifeblood”? (TE 2016) This supportive view on tourism can be contrasted with the critical one by Don Delillo, who once remarked that “tourism is the march of stupidity.” (TE 2016a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), tourism (in relation to hospitality and non-hospitality) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. In fact, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that tourism is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to tourism)—like hotel management, international trade, transportation studies, communication studies, real estate economics, hospitality studies, entertainment business, cultural studies, travel literature, culinary art, public health, environmental studies, pilgrimage studies, and so on—should be ignored. On the contrary, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of tourism (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between hospitality and non-hospitality—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the multiplex theory of tourism) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about tourism (in relation to the dialectic relationship between hospitality and non-hospitality) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.