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Abstract
Tourist texts, such as brochures or guidebooks, are among the first sources of encounter between tourists and destination people. Indeed, such texts provide tourists with a 'cognitive framework' (Bhattacharya 1997: 372) for interpreting a destination and its cultures, and language in travel writing is paramount for negotiating between different cultures and meanings. Guidebooks should thus be read critically in order to assess the cultural images they construct to promote a specific destination, and the language they use to create them. This article offers a linguistic and discursive analysis of how mainstream travel guidebooks of Aotearoa New Zealand in English (i.e., Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, National Geographic Traveler and the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide) represent Maori culture. Specifically, the sections on the culture of tangata whenua (the people of the land/Maori people) in these guidebooks will be studied to determine which aspects of Maori culture are used to depict the Maori people of Aotearoa New Zealand and how the language of tourism shapes such descriptions. The title of this article refers to the four words in te reo Maori (Maori language) that are most commonly associated with Maori culture in tourist texts. The aim of the article is to determine whether these descriptions offer an exoticized version of Maori culture, or whether they effectively engage with its actuality and complexity. Following a transdisciplinary approach that bridges sociolinguistics and tourism studies, the article seeks to present a case study that demonstrates how fruitfully linguistic analysis can be used in the discussion of the production and dissemination of the tourist image of Maori people in Aotearoa New Zealand from an Indigenous tourism studies perspective.

This article charts the historical stability and continuity of participatory and crowdsourcing practices. Theoretically, it suggests that the blurring of the boundaries between audiences and producers, with the ensuing result of user-generated content, is by no means solely the upshot of new media technological affordances but largely a function of relatively stabilized, genre-specific formal and functional properties, or 'genre affordances'. Certain referential and performative genres enable interaction between audiences, texts and producers independently of new media technologies because these genres constitute what matters for both producers and audiences in specific historical circumstances. Genres make available shared cultural, social and pragmatic resources for appropriate and desirable being, doing, feeling and thinking. Empirically, this article builds upon an archival study of co-production related to the specific genre of travel guidebooks. It investigates (a) audience feedback in the form of handwritten letters sent to John Murray, a venerable 19th-century British publishing house, and (b) the ways in which John Murray's yesteryear guidebook producers actively solicited and implemented reader-authored content in professional production practice.

Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guide books in particular encourage a form of 'responsible independent travel' that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonely Planet's publication of guidebooks to Burma, this article uncovers the problematic colonial logic embedded in that ethical vision. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractAside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of 'responsible independent travel' that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonely Planet's publication of guidebooks to Burma, this article uncovers the problematic colonial logic embedded in that ethical vision.

"Tourism constitutes both an economic activity and a cultural force that involves a dynamic interplay between travelers and their ideas about the societies they visit. This paper traces the construction and negotiation of 'tourism imaginaries' (Salazar, 2012) in popular guidebooks and independent travel-blogs, critically examining questions of representation and power relations in a Southeast Asian context. Employing critical discourse analysis, this paper investigates how particular Southeast Asian destinations are represented from a Western perspective. Whereas long-established commercial media such as guidebooks function mainly to communicate destination images to the reader, recent participatory media formats (e.g. travel-blogs) are more experienced-based and enable tourists to form ideas about foreign places in idiosyncratic ways. The preliminary insights of this study show that hegemonic narratives from guidebooks are rather reproduced than critically challenged and subverted in the examples under review." (author's abstract)