TOURISM SITES AS SEMIOTIC SIGNS: A CRITIQUE Daniel C. Knudsen Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd Indiana University, USA In a recent research note Raymond Lau (2011) calls attention to a trend in tourism theory—tourism sites as semiotic signs—and in so doing returns to MacCannell’s original formulation in an effort to link the concepts of site-as-sign, authenticity, and pilgrimage. Lau makes two points. First, he argues that the idea of sites as signs is anti-essentialist, while authenticity and pilgrimage are essentialist concepts. Second, he contends there exists a flaw in MacCannell’s site-as-sign con- cept, in which the signifier and the signified are confused. To correct this latter point, Lau argues that, contra MacCannell, the signifier is the site itself, and not the marker of the site and the signified is what we as a society have come to make of it (and thus we make a pilgrimage to it). Having clarified MacCannell’s concept of site-as-sign using Saussurian semiotics, Lau fails to recognize that MacCannell’s original formulation actually engaged Peircean semiotics. To address his first point, the author identifies an essentialist element to sites-as-signs, which he argues makes it complementary to an essentialist authenticity. This strict re-working of MacCannell’s site-as-sign, authenticity, and therefore pilgrimage, may provide a consistent essentialist theoretical framework, but this framework will not work generally, particularly given the new developments toward understanding tourism as a performance. Here, we build on Lau’s note, but with two important caveats. First, we correct what we see as an error in Lau’s formulation of site-as-sign. Despite his clarification of Peircean semiotics and Saussurian semiology, Lau wrongly conflates the semiotics of Saussure and Peirce and thereby implies MacCannell utilized Saussurian semiot- ics. Thus while Lau’s critique that MacCannell confuses marker and site is correct, he wrongly substitutes one kind of semiotics for another. Lau does this, we suggest, in order to create a consistent essentialist theoretical framework, but in so doing he destroys the generalizability of MacCannell’s original formulation. Second, we situate tourism within the framework of performance, not pilgrimage. We suggest that a consistent anti-essentialist theoretical framework can be constructed using Peircean semiotics and that, furthermore, it is generalizable. Our framework in- volves site-as-sign, performance and authenticity. Let’s begin by examining the tourism site-as-sign as anti-essentialist. Metro-Ro- land (2009) and MacCannell (1976, 1999) before her argued powerfully in favor of a Peircean semiotic understanding of the tourist experience. In this formula- tion, the tourist confronts the tourism site (or object in the Peircean sense) as a sign, which triggers an image in the mind (the representamen) which must then be made sense of. The process of making sense involves the contrasting of the mental image with accumulated codified and tacit knowledge (collateral informa- tion) so that an interpretation of the sign (in this case the tourism site) can be made. This interpretation in turn leads to an action, often but not always a verbal articulation, which may be appropriate or not. Those who know and understand Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 1252–1254, 2012 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 1252 Research notes and reports / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 1242–1263