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This thesis focuses on contemporary British travellers visiting Peru. It examines the investments in and uses of long-haul travel in the construction and narration of self-identity, in particular exploring the relationship between representations of place, travel practices and identities. Using literatures based in post-colonial theory and tourism studies, the thesis argues for the contribution which a study of the desires of 'First World' consumers can make to the wider project of understanding and intervening in tourism's socio-economic role in the modern world. The qualitative methodologies used in the thesis reflect the need to conceptualise tourists as actively constructing the 'imaginative geographies' of tourism. The use of both participant observation at tourist sites in Peru, and a series of in-depth interviews with returned travellers, provide an account of the important role of travel in the participants lives and the consequences for their travel practices. The empirical research undertaken for the thesis shows that travel is an important part of the ongoing construction of an 'autobiography' of the self by the travellers who took part in the project. In particular travel practices are associated with, and used to narrate, a sense of living a fulfilled life. The projects of travel to Peru are based in an 'authorisation' of travel as set of practices which provide 'direct' and 'unmediated' access to spatial difference, such as the 'authentic' Peru. In their material travel practices in Peru, travellers therefore have a very clear sense of the 'proper conduct' which they have to enact on the ground if they are to achieve this sense of fulfilment. The thesis concludes that by understanding the 'fetishisations' of place invested in by travellers, studies of tourist consumption open up new spaces for thinking about and intervening in the politics of travel.

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Tourism is about the production and consumption, and the transformation and appropriation of cultural meanings. These meanings are imposed on landscapes to facilitate economic development but their interpretation by visitors is also important. A case study of Beatrix Potter tourism in the English Lake District is used to explore the links between literary tourism and a range of personal, social and cultural values. The thesis develops a cultural studies approach for tourism and literary analyses. It then combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to evaluate how visitors made sense of their encounters with the literary place. From the resulting field study material three key themes emerged: childhood and adulthood; city, country and preservation; and marketing literary heritage in an increasingly global context. These themes both reflect and contribute to contemporary debates in cultural geography. They also help to clarify aspects of the relationship between tourism, popular culture and society.

This thesis focuses on the relationship between tourism policy and economic growth. Primarily it evaluates the effects of specialising in tourism on the growth performance of small economies and in particular the effects of tourism specialisation based on natural resources. A secondary but related question is how do changes in the quality of natural resources affect the relationship between specialisation and growth? These questions are considered in the framework defined by recent literature on endogenous growth theory [EG]. Consider a two-sector economy, where growth is driven by the accumulation of sector-specific human capital. The two sectors differ in their associated rates of potential learning. If the low- (no-) learning sector is defined as Tourism and the other as Manufacturing, the condition for balanced growth, under complete specialisation (i.e., equal per capita growth rate in both countries), is the presence of homothetic preferences are those spelled out in Lucas (1988). This approach provides a rather promising outlook for economies characterised by a comparative advantage in the tourist sector - as long as the elasticity of substitution between tourism and other goods, produced under decreasing marginal costs, is low. However, this result is based on a characterisation of the demand side that ignores an important feature of the market for tourist services: the income elasticity of the tourist may be other than one. To take account of a non-unitary income elasticity, the EG conditions for balanced growth should be redefined under a non-(quasi) homothetic utility function. After presenting the model, two empirical analyses, using different techniques, are provided. If consumers allocate a constant share of their (increasing) income toward financing their holidays and two, different types of tourist goods exist - one based on natural resources and the other on activities unrelated to natural resources and supplied at decreasing marginal costs - then a reduction in the quality of a country's natural resources may weaken the capacity of the country's tourist sector to retain a non-decreasing share of the market. This idea is based on the hypothesis that the two tourist goods are vertically differentiated. Quality, however, depends on the rate of exploitation. Lowering the quality lessens the value of the luxury good attached to the resource-based good. This framework should allow for a description of the relationship between the rate of exploitation of natural resources and the conditions which allow economies specialising in tourism to reach a balanced growth path, in a market where more than one tourist good is offered.

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