La recherche historique sur le tourisme

Abstract

Time and again it is lamented that research disregards tourism in general, and its history in particular. Yet this field of study is all but a tabula rasa and there were trailblazing attempts already in the postwar period. In the 1970s the crisis of traditional historiography allowed for professional studies in the subject of tourism (mostly in Germany). Later the traditional tourism science broadened its scope and partly opened itself to historical and “cultural” questions. The quantity of historical studies in tourism has increased noticeably lately – quality, however, did not always increase correspondingly. Tourism history is not an end in itself; it only makes sense if it produces contextual knowledge and syntheses, if it identifies essential functions of tourism in a given culture and/or uses tourism as a key to otherwise hidden structures and processes, in particular to mental longues durées.

Keywords

• histoire du tourisme
• recherche historique sur le tourisme
• historiographie du tourisme