MacCannel argues that the tourist is the pilgrim of the contemporary secular world, paying homage to attractions and symbols of modernity (1973, 593). He goes on to state that all tourism involves a search for the "sacred," which he posits as a universal human concern. For him, the tourist is a type of contemporary pilgrim, who seeks authenticity at other times and places away from his everyday life. The tourist infrastructure, however, attempts to profit from this by creating tourist spaces of staged authenticity (MacCannel 1973). MacCannel argues that the pseudo-events result from the social relations of tourism and not from peoplesą search for the authentic.

    Similarly, Horne (1984 ) describes the contemporary tourist as a modern pilgrim, carrying guidebooks as devotional texts. In this modern-day pilgrimage, tourism becomes the search for unique objects: the Eiffel tower, the Empire State Building, Nyatapola Temple [L]. Accordingly, as Culler (1981, 128 ) argues, tourists are semioticians, reading the landscape for signifiers or certain preestablished notions or signs derived from various discourses of travel and tourism.