Although the concept of exchange has traditionally been central to a number of disciplines ranging from anthropology and economics, to social psychology and marketing, it is not for reasons of its disciplinary ubiquity that we have chosen it as key to the conceptual framework discussed in this chapter. Rather, we privilege the concept of exchange because it was a recurring and central practice in the tourist matters we surveyed and participated in. Anthropological research tells us that exchange is a universal human activity. It is found in all societies and communities, whether large-scale market-based societies, or small-scale subsistence societies, and across all times. Our everyday lives are filled with different kinds of exchange; not only commercial exchanges when we swap money for desired goods and services, but also exchanges of love, friendship, community. Exchange can be predictable, the stuff of habit such as the visit to the (super)market, but it can also be unexpected, fun, unusual and uncertain. Exchange does not, however, exist in a social vacuum. Mauss famously identified ways in which exchange between human beings is both enabled and constrained by a number of societal and cultural forces, organised variously as market structures, social hierarchies or cultural values. As John Davis puts it: Exchange is interesting because it is the chief means by which useful things move from one person to another; because it is an important way in which people create and maintain social hierarchy; because it is a richly symbolic activity, all exchanges have got meaning; and because for Britons and many others it is an important source of metaphors about social relations, about social order, about the fundamental processes of nature. Whilst acknowledging exchange as a universal human activity, it might be suggested, however, that it is a social practice that takes divergent cultural and institutional forms which have emerged in historically and societally specific ways, and whose meaning is contextually embedded in certain spatiotemporal relations. This means two things in terms of its theorisation. First, that notions of exchange and its organisation have been subject to the impulses of many theoretical grand narratives told about the emergence of modern society. As Ning Wang reminds us, ‘the emergence of the tourist has to do with the enabling conditions of modernity’ (sic), a suggestion which has framed the notion of exchange within a very particular set of theoretical (and primarily sociological) vocabularies and traditions of research in a variety of disciplines, which encourage a reading of tourism against the development of capitalist relations of production.
Cultural Tourism and Ancient Inspiration for Modern Achievements
