关键词: 布里顿, 资本积累, 批判性旅游地理研究, 旅游的政治经济, 旅游的劳工地理, 旅游的空间生产与地方转型, 旅游的政治生态

Abstract:

Stephen G. Britton, for the first time, brought Marxist political economics theories into the global capitalist social production and consumption system to criticize tourism and answer the question of what tourism it is, which provided a very important research path in understanding the phenomenon and nature of tourism development. As a pioneer in critical tourism geography research, Britton has been dead for nearly 30 years, but his ideas have not yet been fully recognized and valued. With the burgeoning rise of critical tourism research at home and abroad, it is increasingly necessary to translate and interpret the knowledge of notable scholars with milestone achievements. Combined with Britton's representative literature, this paper attempts to understand his main viewpoint that “tourism is an important way of capital accumulation, from which it is recognised that how the social meaning and materiality of space and place is created through the practice of tourism itself, and how these representations are then incorporated into the accumulation process.” Specifically, at the individual scale, as a kind of commodity, tourism has the property of capitalism. It exists in the commodity production and consumption system with both value and use value. On regional scale, regarded as a form of industry, tourism acts as a tool to promote urban renewal, industrial transformation and territory competition by means of producing place and guiding new consumption preference to expand economy as well as sustaining economic growth. From a global scale, tourism, as a kind of intermediary, becomes a carrier of capital to transform the marginal places into the modern mass tourist destinations, which is integrated into the capitalist production system, further deepening the existing inequalities between investment countries and destinations. Then, this paper analyzes the follow-up scholars' application on Britton's viewpoint and points out the expansion of his theoretical framework, including the following three aspects: labor geography of tourism, production of space in tourist destinations and their place transformation, rural tourism and political ecology. These themes clarify the research topics of critical tourism geography, responding to Britton's farsighted assertion at that time. From a critical perspective, tourism was also an area worthy of study by geographers. Moreover, traditional theoretical direction of tourism geography research which emphasizes the empirical paradigm of spatial analysis and application-oriented without a theoretical system should turn to and embrace the political economy and power analysis approach. Finally, this paper points out the shortcomings and remedies of Britton's ideas, illustrating and highlighting the inspiration for the study of Chinese tourism geography, and trying to discuss how to go beyond the capital dimension of tourism.

Key words: Britton, capital accumulation, critical tourism geography, political economy of tourism, labor geography of tourism, spatial production and place transformation of tourism, political ecology of tourism