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I’ve been following the Popular Landscape Tourism series with much interest and I’d like to contribute some comments regarding the notion of “Popular”. The implicit idea in the series seems to be that “landscape tourists” may be divided in two groups: a) one that includes those belonging to some sort of intellectual or cultural elite and b) all those that
don’t belong to that elite and which carry out “popular” or “mass” tourism.
In my view that is an oversimplification which might result in considerable distortion of the overall picture. A picture closer to the actual situation may be attained by using, for instance, the cultural types proposed by H. Gans in “ Popular Culture and High Culture” (revised edition, 1999). He proposes five divisions of taste cultures or “taste publics”, namely: high culture, upper middle culture, lower middle, low culture and quasi-folk low culture. Gans book is aptly subtitled “ An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste”; it could be safely assumed that there are “tastes” in landscape, (and hence preferences in or about landscape tourism) as there are in Art, books or general entertainment, which vary considerably along those categories. In a following post I’ll try to outline some traits of those groups that may be relevant to tastes in landscapes.
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