Tourism is a huge, global industry deeply implicating culture, consumption, meaning, and place; and it deserves the considerable academic attention it receives. The disciplines from which studies emerge include anthropology, history, sociology, English literature, American studies, architecture, urban planning, resource management, and geography, among others. This collection of essays illustrates the disciplinary variety well: The authors include Sylvia Rodriguez and David White, anthropologists; Erika Bsumek, Phoebe Kropp, Char Miller, Hal Rothman, and Marguerite Shaffer, historians (Miller is also involved in urban studies, Shaffer in American studies); Leah Dilworth, a professor of English; Rena Swentzell, who holds degrees in architecture and American studies and writes from the perspective of a member of Santa Clara Pueblo; William Bryan, a natural resources planner; Susan Guyette, owner of a cross-cultural planning firm; and Chris Wilson, a professor of cultural landscape studies. Bryan, Guyette, and White are also practically involved in planning or directing tourism in ways that attempt to both preserve culture and provide economic development.

Variety is a strength of the book, although the result is perhaps a certain lack of focus. All of the essays detail the way in which class, consumption, and capitalism structure tourism. Editor Rothman, who has written extensively on tourism, does not illuminate this shared interpretive focus. Instead, his introductory and closing essays add to the range rather than elucidating themes or comparing points raised by other authors. Under the umbrella theme of “selling the past,” the essays touch on some of the many topics and perspectives of the subject as it pertains to tourism in the American West. Dilworth, Rodriguez, and Wilson examine the way in which politics and ideology play out in cultural tourism, both individual and ethnic or national, as do Bryan and Swentzell. The economics of tourism are represented by Bryan, Miller, and—implicitly, as economic development—Guyette and White. Miller discusses the pressures and politics of state legislatures and chambers of commerce, and Bryan details of price, profitability and size. Bryan and Guyette and White explore the possibilities of, or at least the hope for, what might be called a “moral” tourist economy—moral in the sense that it attempts to minimize cultural and ecological impact and to make special sorts of experiences affordable and, thus, widely accessible, while making the financial return (in these essays, to Native and nonprofit groups or communities who are working with tourists) that a capitalist economy requires.

Essays that examine the construction and shaping of meaning predominate: Bsumek, Dilworth, Kropp, Rothman, Shaffer, and Wilson investigate the making of tourist destinations, commodities and the process of commodification, and the arts and objects sold to tourists. Kropp explores the history of a narrative that is developed to draw tourists to the California missions; Bsumek, Dilworth, and Shaffer, in very different ways, focus on objects—Native American crafts, Southwest souvenirs, and scrapbooks, respectively.

Notwithstanding the subtitle, Wilson deals partly, and Rothman wholly, with the present. Wilson examines present stereotypes of the representation of the Southwest, the tricultural “iconic distillations” (p. 32) that have long been offered by various agencies to promote New Mexico as a tourist destination, in art, by art, or in information about art. Rothman, in contrast, describes Las Vegas, its inauthenticity and glitter, as a future. Not for him the tourism of traditional culture, the romantic past, and if he evokes Las Vegas by contrast to some free-handed stereotypes about New York City, at least the reader is given an interestingly iconoclastic view of the Nevada city. But I have to ask, how does such a scholarly distillation differ from a public relations description?

Tourism is a fruitful field of study for anthropologists, not least because it involves behavior, interaction, and change; economics and politics; and issues of (among other things) stereotyping, modernity, and authenticity. I, for one, would have enjoyed more anthropological insights and references to anthropological literature, especially regarding people. Shaffer, boldly stating the silent assumption of most of these authors, describes the common attitude toward tourists: “I suspect we have all shunned the tourist hordes scurrying from one spectacle to the next with their guidebooks in hand … exuding a superficial yet insatiable curiosity” (p. 73). This tradition of disdain for and stereotyping of tourism and tourists goes back at least to the 18th century. Tourists—all of us, as Shaffer notes—are people engaged in an exchange of sorts and it behooves us, especially anthropologists, to look more closely at behavior, perceptions, and less obvious effects. Rodriguez, describing the complex political arena of the American Southwest, writes, “Stay tuned” (p. 202). To which I add, and listen to more than one station—the anthropological perspective is multichanneled and designed to strip, examine, and explore stereotypes, starting with our own.