Empty Meeting Grounds

Empty Meeting Grounds examines some of the new cultural forms and community arrangements that accompany the development of global tourism. The book focuses on matters that had not yet become salient when the author was writing his acclaimed earlier book The Tourist (1976). In particular it examines the new stagings of primitivism’ for tourists and the totemism of the postmodernite. The thesis of the book is that human kind has already arrived at the historical moment of the invention of a new kind of community, but that we are not yet capable of facing the implications of our collective invention. Will it be a synthesis of the positive human dimensions of so called primitive’ existence and the beneficial elements of modern social systems and technologies? Or will it be the most repressive, alienated existence we have so far devised for ourselves? The book was written in the spirit of theoretical activism: speculating about the future that is grounded in the present. However, the author has taken scrupulous care to ground his theoretical discussion in practical examples.
His analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Statue of Liberty Restoration Project, the Management of Yosemite National Park and the sale of an entire town of Chinese farmworkers is arresting and compelling. Moreover his discussion of Cannibal Tours’ and The Desire to be Postmodern’ exposes many of the conceits of postmodern discourse.