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4 CHAPTER 1 · INTRODUCTION – THE UNIQUE EVOLUTION OF TOURISM AS ‘BUSINES S’

While early man was therefore no tourist, he showed great propensity to travel. His
travelling might involve journeys of thousands of miles. The Celts, often characterised as
a race which inhabited the north-west fringes of Europe, can be shown to have inhab-
ited Halstadt in Austria and originated in central Asia. Such an enormous journey by an
entire people again cannot be characterised as tourism since it does not involve a return
to home. It does, however, involve a major change of home, the characteristic which
identifies it as migration rather than tourism.
Early man did not simply either wander nomadically round a particular area or
migrate in search of pastures new. Professor Trevor Sofield of the University of
Tasmania has argued on the Trinet discussion forum for tourism academics that:

Australian Aboriginals engaged in ‘special annual events tourism’ when the nomadic
bands came together every year for a range of ceremonial activities and festivities as
long ago as 30,000 years or more.
Berndt and Berndt, 1964

Sofield makes this argument in the context of a plea for recognition of the fact that
travel was not a great European invention. He points out that the Emperors of China
appointed Ministers of Travel some 2000 years before the Roman Empire saw large-
scale travel taking place systematically across much of Europe, the Near East and North
Africa. He also points out that religious tourism – the pilgrimage to a holy place or
shrine – was not an invention of the Rome-based Christian religion, but was, in fact,
common practice in the Indian subcontinent, China, Nepal, Thailand, Iran, Vietnam and
Myanmar well before the birth of Christ.

Some basic concepts

The notion of pilgrimage as tourism may appear strange at first sight. At this point it is
worth looking at two definitions of tourism. One of the earliest official definitions is
that made by the League of Nations in 1937:

people travelling abroad for periods of over 24 hours.

This definition would not be acceptable today as it excludes all forms of domestic
tourism, i.e. tourists visiting destinations in their own country. Such a definition
excludes the massive flow of tourists from the northern USA, cities like Chicago for
example, to Florida.
The most widely accepted modern definition of tourism is that given by the World
Tourism Organization (WTO), the agency of the United Nations tasked with developing
and promoting tourism:

the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environ-
ment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business or other purposes.

By this definition pilgrimage clearly qualifies as tourism since it involves the temporary
displacement of the pilgrim, or religious tourist, and his or her return to home. The
reason that ‘pilgrim’ as ‘tourist’ strikes us as odd is that the purpose of a pilgrimage is
not the purpose of travel that is normally associated with tourism – a holiday, a journey
made for leisure purposes. The WTO definition contains, in fact, no restricting reference
to the purpose of the journey – it includes ‘or other purposes’ – leaving us with a very