1252 Research notes and reports / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 1242–1263

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 1252–1254, 2012

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TOURISM SITES AS SEMIOTIC SIGNS:

A CRITIQUE

Daniel C. Knudsen
Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd
Indiana University, USA

In a recent research note Raymond Lau (2011) calls attention to a trend in

tourism theory—tourism sites as semiotic signs—and in so doing returns to
MacCannell’s original formulation in an effort to link the concepts of site-as-sign,
authenticity, and pilgrimage. Lau makes two points. First, he argues that the idea
of sites as signs is anti-essentialist, while authenticity and pilgrimage are essentialist
concepts. Second, he contends there exists a flaw in MacCannell’s site-as-sign con-
cept, in which the signifier and the signified are confused. To correct this latter
point, Lau argues that, contra MacCannell, the signifier is the site itself, and not
the marker of the site and the signified is what we as a society have come to make
of it (and thus we make a pilgrimage to it). Having clarified MacCannell’s concept
of site-as-sign using Saussurian semiotics, Lau fails to recognize that MacCannell’s
original formulation actually engaged Peircean semiotics. To address his first
point, the author identifies an essentialist element to sites-as-signs, which he argues
makes it complementary to an essentialist authenticity. This strict re-working of
MacCannell’s site-as-sign, authenticity, and therefore pilgrimage, may provide a
consistent essentialist theoretical framework, but this framework will not work
generally, particularly given the new developments toward understanding tourism
as a performance.
Here, we build on Lau’s note, but with two important caveats. First, we correct
what we see as an error in Lau’s formulation of site-as-sign. Despite his clarification
of Peircean semiotics and Saussurian semiology, Lau wrongly conflates the semiotics
of Saussure and Peirce and thereby implies MacCannell utilized Saussurian semiot-
ics. Thus while Lau’s critique that MacCannell confuses marker and site is correct,
he wrongly substitutes one kind of semiotics for another. Lau does this, we suggest,
in order to create a consistent essentialist theoretical framework, but in so doing
he destroys the generalizability of MacCannell’s original formulation. Second, we
situate tourism within the framework of performance, not pilgrimage. We suggest
that a consistent anti-essentialist theoretical framework can be constructed using
Peircean semiotics and that, furthermore, it is generalizable. Our framework in-
volves site-as-sign, performance and authenticity.
Let’s begin by examining the tourism site-as-sign as anti-essentialist. Metro-Ro-
land (2009) and MacCannell (1976, 1999) before her argued powerfully in favor
of a Peircean semiotic understanding of the tourist experience. In this formula-
tion, the tourist confronts the tourism site (or object in the Peircean sense) as a
sign, which triggers an image in the mind (the representamen) which must then
be made sense of. The process of making sense involves the contrasting of the
mental image with accumulated codified and tacit knowledge (collateral informa-
tion) so that an interpretation of the sign (in this case the tourism site) can be
made. This interpretation in turn leads to an action, often but not always a verbal
articulation, which may be appropriate or not. Those who know and understand
 Research notes and reports / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 1242–1263 1253

the signs act accordingly. Inappropriate actions have the potential to lead to tourist
embarrassment and that embarrassment to learning via reinterpretation. MacCan-
nell (1999) refers to this as ‘‘truth marking.’’ For example, the domestic or repeat
tourist stopping for a pint at an English pub knows to go to the bar to order,
whereas a foreign tourist may take a seat and wait for service. This, of course, only
happens once—the foreign tourist learns from his/her mistake. The impact of
MacCannell’s formulation, and Metro-Roland’s (2009) later elaboration, is that
it provides a framework for understanding tourism as dynamic and anti-essentialist,
a practice in which actors and signs change over time and are open to multiple
interpretations influenced by cultural context. This works for MacCannell’s theory
of tourism because he also understood that tourism itself is a performance, albeit
one theorized as a Goffmanian stage of social interaction. Nevertheless, others
since have recognized the performativity, the enacting not just masquing, of tour-
ism sites (see Edensor, 2000, 2001; Baerenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen, & Urry, 2004).
Indeed, tourism is increasingly theorized as a performance rather than a pil-
grimage, gaze or ritual. In this formulation, the tourism site is viewed as a stage
upon which tourists perform tourism (Edensor, 2000). More recent research shows
that the ‘‘stage’’ is not nearly as fixed as once supposed but is part of the larger
performance (see Baerenholdt et al., 2004; Rickly-Boyd & Metro-Roland, 2010);
in this sense tourism is ‘‘doubly performative.’’ With this in mind, an earlier formu-
lation of tourism as performance, one that has its basis in the work of Turner
(1969), is useful for consideration. In Turner’s original formulation, a perfor-
mance is characterized by actors who communicate using signs to an audience.
We use the term ‘‘signs’’ here in the very general Peircean way as something that
stands for something else (Metro-Roland, 2009). Leaving aside a number of com-
plexities in this theorization of tourism, we wish to focus on this basic conceptual-
ization of tourism as Turnerian performance.
Using this basic conceptualization, note that an unusual aspect of tourism is that
it is a performance wherein most of those performing are often hidden, so that
only the signs, not the actors, are observed by the audience. It is for this reason that
within theory, the site is often treated as a stage. Still, actors, though hidden, log-
ically must exist. For example, in the city of Copenhagen there are quite literally
several hundred thousand locations that might be termed ‘‘sites,’’ yet only 47 ap-
pear in the Copenhagen Guide (2009). These 47 ‘‘sites’’ are chosen on the grounds,
that they are the things that those doing the choosing (the ‘‘actors’’) think most
exemplary of the place in question—in this case Copenhagen, Denmark—and
because Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, they must say something about
what it means to be Danish. In this sense they are part of the corpus of Danish
ideology. Yet the actors hidden from view, the various tourist boards at the tourism
destination, are embedded in an ideological framework. This embeddedness, at
least in part, determines their choice of sites as signs. Similarly, tourists are embed-
ded in the ideologies of their home societies, which influences their interpretation
of and behavior at these sites.
Finally, the third leg of Lau’s essentialist reformulation of MacCannell’s theory
of tourism asserts that a social realist approach to authenticity best serves tourism
studies (Lau, 2010). A solely objectivist perspective on authenticity is far too limit-
ing of a concept as it does not consider the multiplicity of ways in which tourists,
hosts, and marketers use the concept (see Belhassen & Caton, 2006). While Lau
(2010) finds MacCannell’s plural uses of authenticity, as object, construction
and feeling, to be problematic, we can again see the rigor of MacCannell’s original
theoretical development. He, as many have since, observed that authenticity is not
a singular, essentialist concept. It has not been treated as such philosophically,
and, more often than not authenticity is experienced through the performance of
tourism, as opposed to judged or measured (see Wang, 1999). Of course, there
1254 Research notes and reports / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 1242–1263

is a place for objectivist investigations of authenticity, but only as one facet of a

complex of relations that together signify this concept (Rickly-Boyd, 2012).
In this note we have first argued that tourism is best treated as a performance.
Lau (2011) is correct in identifying the signifier as the site and the signified as soci-
etal interpretation. However, in using objectivist Saussurian semiotics, objectivist
notions of authenticity and hinging tourism on the arguably objectivist experience
of pilgrimage he has not only created a specific theory from a general one, but
he has made tourism essentialist when most theorists and practitioners readily
admit it is anti-essentialist, subjective, constructive, and performative, elements
which MacCannell (1976) identified and many have since elaborated upon.
What we provide here is the beginnings of a generalized and anti-essentialist
theory based on Peircean semiotics, performance and authenticity, with
grounding in MacCannell’s early observations of the anti-essentialist characteristics
of tourism.

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Received date 3rd August 2011. Revised date 30th November 2011. Acceptance date 13th December
2011.

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2011.12.005
doi:10.1016/j.annals.2012.01.005