travel and the times

How do you choose where to go on vacation? Maybe you consult friends or family or follow the advice of a travel influencer. Or maybe you plan your trips by flipping through The New York Times Travel section. While the latter might feel like an antiquated approach for the more online among us, sociologists Hesu Yoon and Andrew McCumber argue in their new Poetics paper that elite media institutions like the NYT still play an important role in shaping our cultural imagination about faraway places.

Combining computational text and qualitative discourse techniques, Yoon and McCumber analyze over 10,000 articles published in the NYT Travel section between 2000-2019 to show how elite travel writers symbolically construct places as particular types of destinations. European destinations are widely valorized for their culture—museums, cafes, and cultural venues—while non-European countries, particularly places that experience colonization, are primarily heralded for their scenic and recreational beauty. This geographic hierarchy between cultural and natural destinations is further compounded by the tendency of writers to afford a broad definition of culture to European contexts (e.g., celebrating France’s entire cultural history) but a much narrower discussion of culture in non-European places (e.g., focusing on the food of East Asia).Elite media institutions still play an important role in shaping our cultural imagination about faraway places.

While scholars have long documented how the global north and south are stratified by material outcomes like economic growth, this study demonstrates how the selective attribution of symbolic value can also retrench global hierarchies through the construction of countries as particular types of “destinations.” The patterns identified here show that global tourism is still largely experienced through a “western gaze” in which non-European nations, and nations with histories of colonialism in particular, are further marginalized based on the attractiveness of their culture as a tourism experience for the readers of the NYT.