Tourism, nation and power-knowledge: A Foucauldian perspective

Abstract

Tourism in its various forms creates knowledge about people and places across the globe. One of the many features of tourism is its productive capacity to create visual images of national identity using people and landscape. Analysis of tourism using Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge can raise questions about the underlying aims of these activities and show how the creation of knowledge is intimately linked with power. It can also help to illuminate the purposes of the relationships formed in such a system and help us to understand the differential access to power that is created by tourism knowledge. These issues are applied to an analysis of the Ghan train, an Australian tourist icon which operates in the Outback and participates in creating the image of nation.