Going deeper on the tourist gaze: considerations about its social determinants

Abstract

This article aims to a better understanding of social processes which lead tourists to different kinds of behavior at the places they visit, having as a frame the way social classes are related in western modern society. Theoretical contribution from important scientists as John Urry, Piérre Bourdieu and Jost Krippendorf are developed in search of new approaches to enhence processual knowledge in tourism instead of proposicional. It was found that tourist gaze is a construction crossed by dialectic and complex relations among some determinant factors, embedded in the different kind of roles played by subjects in the social arena, which have been consolidated during a long process beginning in XVII century and taking its present feature in the middle of the XXth.

Keywords

• Olhar do turista. Processos sociais. Classes sociais.