This article contributes towards debates concerning media tourism and tour guiding by using Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments regarding field and capital to analyse performed tour guide identities on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour in Cardiff Bay. The article pursues three core arguments: first, a Bourdieusian framework provides an enhanced understanding of the insecure positions that tour guides occupy in what is referred to throughout as the tourism field; second, the divergent pulls between heteronomous and autonomous poles which position tour guides are magnified in officially-located media tours because of the presence of branding and theming discourses; third, drawing upon empirical data from the Doctor Who tour, the symbolic capital of official guides involves demonstrations of what is named tourism-cultural capital, but such displays do not result in an increase in individualised status as any accrued capital transfers to the institutional level.
Tourists experience a range of everyday practices that are subtle, momentary and mundane, which can be difficult to document. Finding documentation techniques that encourage hands-on and collaborative experiences can assist in gathering and producing a variety of perspectives from researchers and tourists. Using the Deleuzian concept of the ‘diagram’, this article examines how creative documentation methods can be used to explore everyday practices of tourists. From a creative arts and philosophical perspective, a diagram is a methodological tool that allows the tracing of relations through a range of techniques. Tracing the development of participatory artwork that uses a diagrammatic approach demonstrates how the experiences of both tourists and researchers can be fused. This encourages a wider perspective of how tourist practices are generated through interactive and affective registers. Diagramming is a creative methodological approach that can assist in tracing experiences and relationships that emerge in tourist studies.
‘Disaster tourism’ is usually conflated with ‘dark tourism’ and also is often linked with disaster recovery. This article contributes to discussion on these relationships by examining the post-disaster narratives which have played out through tourism in the central Canterbury city of Christchurch, New Zealand, following the major earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011. Through an analysis of regional and national media and tourism promotion material related to the earthquakes, the post-disaster narratives which developed in relation to tourism were observed. The article thereby highlights how disasters become framed through tourism, showing how post-quake tourism narratives can transition from narratives of destruction and loss to narratives of renewal and hope. The notion of ‘transition’, having become a powerful tourism product in itself, sheds new light on the relationship between ‘disaster tourism’ and ‘dark tourism’ and also between tourism and disaster recovery.
A key feature of voluntourism is that participants expect both to be entertained and to help others to different extents. The duality between the leisure and volunteering aspects of the trip creates ambiguities in expectations. This article focusses on group sensemaking about this leisure-volunteer duality and the role of trip leaders in its management. It uses a case study approach to investigate the behaviours of participants on a voluntourist trip to South America. Among other things, it compares participants’ ex ante expectations with ex post evaluations of the trip and tracks the events that shaped views on the quality of the experience. More concretely, the key events that triggered conflicts between the leisure and volunteer dimensions of the trip are identified and analysed using the factors that influenced the sensemaking outcome. Implications centre on the importance and use of sensemaking tools for voluntourist organisations and trip leaders in the management of the leisure-volunteer tensions that are part and parcel of voluntourism.
This article considers the growing phenomenon of music festivals on cruise ships. These commercial events, partnerships between event companies and shipping lines, celebrate a particular genre of music and occur aboard a cruise ship. The views of 138 festivalgoers primarily concentrated within six festivals were considered. According to these sources, the festival experience of these events is centred on three factors: live performances, interaction with fellow festivalgoers and star musicians (collectively referred to as ‘ship fam’), and interaction with the constructed space of the cruise ship. Cruise ship music festivals are a different type of music festival, still occurring within festival space, but within the mobile experiential cocoon of a cruise ship.
To date, consideration of the carnivalesque at the seaside has focussed on the practices and behaviour of tourists. Less attention has been paid to tourism employees who are not participants in the carnival but may nevertheless be affected by the ‘playful crowd’ that they work with. This study focuses on employees in a seaside amusement park. Employees regularly experienced ‘misbehaviour’ (such as abusive language, attempted theft and violence) by visitors reflecting the spirit of carnival. Employees responded by treating tourists with contempt and retaliated with tactics such as cheating, and reciprocal abuse and violence. The spirit of carnival rubbed off on employees in other ways such as using alcohol or drugs in the workplace, and participation in casual sexual encounters with both other staff and customers. In a variety of ways, employees inverted and transgressed the norms of the hospitality encounter in ways which reflected the influence of the carnival.
Tourism was a major player in the introduction of mass consumerism in post-war European societies. In Portugal, during the Estado Novo, it remained limited in scale and kind, being mostly targeted at a foreign and up-market consumer niche. In 1964, the number of international tourists finally reached the million mark, a figure that would rise threefold in the next 6 years. Bodily centred leisure practices were on the rise, taking tourism beyond the confines of state propaganda and tourists beyond sightseeing. Drawing on archival research conducted at the Portuguese Film Museum, this article analyses how the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw the appearance of a renewed idea of tourism that owed as much to an expanding consumer culture as to the period’s experimental filmmaking practices. The contours of this renewal can be appreciated in short tourism documentaries around the figure of the foreign woman tourist.
This research employs an extended social situation analysis to examine how social interactions of backpackers in New Zealand are manifested, how they can contribute to the visitor experience, to common travel motivations such as self-development and cultural exploration, and how they compare to and influence contacts with the host community. Results from 37 in-depth interviews indicate that backpacker interactions underlie strict rules and are based on a shared understanding of how they are to proceed in terms of conversation topics and personal elements. Certain settings and a positive relationship between interaction participants contribute to longer and more personal social interactions. These in turn are required for emotional well-being, which is why fellow backpackers often replace friends and family as a social support system. Due to the national diversity of backpacker travellers, these interactions also provide exposure to different cultures as well as opportunity for self-development. Contacts with the host community, however, have been reported to be more difficult to establish and were found to be less beneficial for backpackers who have to rely heavily on interaction partners who are social, desire to spend longer amounts of time and are willing to proceed to a more familiar level faster than non-travellers.
Music tourism, the act of travelling to places associated with music, has become part of the tourism itinerary of many European cities. Although academic interest in this phenomenon is growing, little empirical research explores the experiences of music tourists – what are music tourists looking for? This study is based on participant observation and 15 in-depth interviews with tourists to Wagner’s Bayreuth, ABBA’s Stockholm and U2’s Dublin. It is argued that music tourism experiences involve a process of identity-work on a personal, cultural and embodied level. For most of the respondents, music plays an important role in their story of self, which is one of the main motives for travel and a source of performing self through music tourism practices. Once there, tourists relate personal music memories to music histories encountered in situ. Thus, music tourism effectively connects personal memories with shared identities and social spaces created by embodied practices.
Tourism to Iceland has and continues to benefit from its geographic position as a stopover between the North American and Eurasian continents and as an extension of the exoticised Arctic North. In that context, we argue that Iceland as a destination functions as a gateway, which should be used as a way of recognising the wider network responsible for the multiple interpretations of destination image. Accordingly, this article argues that despite the relationality of Iceland’s destination image, it has been represented as a tourism gateway by those with power to do so, producing a destination between centre and periphery as a gateway to an exoticised and commodified elsewhere. A recent advertising campaign from Iceland’s leading airline, Icelandair, was semiologically analysed as an example of travel representations that inform and shape destination image. A postcolonial lens was applied recognising that these representations are produced within a dichotomy of centre–periphery that has implications to Iceland’s present image as a travel destination.
The article interrogates the rationale and origins of changing imaginaries of tourism in Greece in the context of the current economic crisis. We detect a radical change in the ‘picture’ of the country that circulates in global media conduits (YouTube, Facebook, official press websites and personal blogs). We enact a journey into past media representations of Greece as an idyllic peasant and working-class site, but proceed to highlight that such representations are being recycled today by Greeks (especially but not exclusively) living and studying abroad. This stereotype, which focuses on embodied understandings of happiness and well-being, is being challenged by the current economic crisis. In its place, we detect the emergence of a new dark and slum imaginary, propagated by both native and global intellectuals–activists. The new imaginary both tests in practice and bears the potential to re-invent Greece as a tourist destination. Not only is the change informed by the European histories of art, slum and dark tourism, focusing on middle-class refinement and philanthropy, it also bears the potential to promote Greece as a cultural tourist destination in global value hierarchies in controversial ways.
For nearly a century, literary tourists have sought the settings of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables on picturesque Prince Edward Island, Canada. As tourism infrastructure on the Island developed in the latter twentieth century, tourists’ whimsical wearing of red braids to emulate the novel’s girl protagonist became a popular practice. Playing "Anne," while certainly a different experience depending on whether one is a little girl, an adult woman, or an adult man, is today a widely practiced performance of tourist identity. Through close readings of visitor comment cards, tourism promotions, souvenir hats, and the Green Gables Heritage Place historic site operated by Parks Canada, this article argues that the desire to play "Anne" rehearses themes of Anne’s anticipation, arrival, child-like wonder, and outsider status, all of which resonate with a touristic perception of place.
This article investigates the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania focussing on the relationship between the residents of a place and their principal tourist attraction. Called the ‘Getty of the Antipodes’, the museum mounts a permanent collection, special exhibitions and music/art festivals intended to shock conventional moral sensibilities. Yet, the conservative people of the community embrace their purposefully provocative attraction for having put them on the world map. This article raises a number of questions. Does creating an attraction and the arrival of tourists change local thought and practice in any fundamental ways? Or is it all a masquerade for the golden horde? Is understanding one’s own locality as an attraction-for-others changing the locals’ perception of where and how they live? And of one another? Ultimately, how sustainable are these new cultural ventures in boosting economies, maintaining new cultural identities and engaging visitor interest in the long term?
In 1932, the Tourism Syndicate of the French Protectorate government in Morocco published a guidebook for French tourists to follow the ‘Route des Kasbas’ through southern Morocco. The trajectory described is still in many ways reproduced by contemporary guiding materials, delineating specific routes where this ‘heritage’ might be found in Morocco and what sorts of mobilities are necessary to seek it. Using these guiding resources from ‘the field’, along with our own ethnographic experiences as travelling researchers, we trace how colonial cartographical rationalities structured in this region along its ‘road’, through promotion by the French Protectorate government as a mobile site for tourism, and how that infrastructural and economic sedimentation persists in contemporary mobilities through it – including our own mobilities as tourism researchers. We question when and how it might be possible to escape this cartographic specificity for other spatialities of this road.
This article presents the disparate, yet similar, stories of foreign tourist resorts built on Yugoslavia’s coast in the 1960s: two of them owned privately, by the French Club Méditerranée, in Pakoštane (Croatia) and on Sveti Marko island (Montenegro); one, in Bečići (Montenegro), the property of socialist Czechoslovakia and its Trade Union organization (Revoluční Odborové Hnutí). Drawing on archival documents, newspapers, and magazine articles as well as interviews, I discuss why these resorts were established, and how they operated within their specific material, financial, and metaphorical contexts, while also examining how tourists and tourism planners assigned meanings to tourism, and envisioned it within its global context. The French-owned Club Med’s resorts were profit-oriented, private initiatives that catered toward individuals and families on vacations that were envisioned as a means of personal growth. Revoluční Odborové Hnutí’s resort, by contrast, was owned by socialist Czechoslovakia’s labor union. It served union members and their families, and was designed according to principles of social and collective tourism. Nevertheless, as this article argues, each of these resorts embodied core features of the modern, time-restricted, spatially managed, and pleasure-oriented experience of vacation abroad. Moreover, a concept of insularity—the comfort of sojourning in a self-contained space that was at once foreign and familiar—defined each resort’s conception and promotion of their seaside vacations, thus bridging the projects’ ideological and institutional differences, and superseding local understandings of place. The projects’ histories, finally, prefigured contemporary tourism’s contradictions and complexities, such as the dwindling of conventional distinctions (between home and abroad, for instance). At the background of this comparative analysis is the broader history of tourism in postwar Yugoslavia, which held high hopes for tourism as a vector for economic development and the promotion of good international relations.
This study investigates guided tours and guide narratives in the context of Hindu pilgrimage in Rishikesh and Haridwar, two pilgrimage towns in Northern India. Combining participant observation with analysis of audio-recorded guide narratives, it finds that the overall structure of the guided tours, combined with a variety of narratives and rhetorical devises, promotes the benefits and uses of religious objects. Cooperating with retailers of religious goods, guides are retailing religion as they combine and coordinate commercial and religious interests in their tours. Conceptualising pilgrimage and tourism as two separate domains, it is argued that tourist guides and their guided tours have become an integral part of Hindu pilgrimage and its operation in contemporary India.
Political ecology, as a perspective for exploring power-permeated socio-ecological transformations, has to date rarely engaged with tourism. Neither has tourism theory, with some notable exceptions, engaged much with political ecology. In this article, I argue that the resultant lack of dialogue between these signifies a loss for political ecology and tourism theory alike, but also that current conceptualisations of tourism have much to offer for instigating a dialogue. Combining social-constructivist, political economy–oriented and Actor–Network-Theory conceptualisations of tourism with political ecology work, I account for the establishment of Bro Hof Slott Golf Club in Upplands-Bro, northwest of Sweden’s capital. Here, immense investments have transformed shorelines into a meticulously maintained upscale golf landscape. But the development simultaneously sparked new future visions for what Upplands-Bro could become and conflicts concerning whether the development breached local plans, thereby illuminating the political nature of tourist-oriented environmental transformation.
As a national site of commemoration that materially enshrined the democratic values of reconciliation and freedom, Freedom Park is South Africa’s premier post-apartheid heritage venture. Branded as a heritage destination, this complex raises questions about the relationship between practices of heritage formation and tourism. Heritage destinations are considered significant not merely as end points of tourist discovery, but also as sites that structure the practices of consumption, central to the functioning of the tourism industry. Mediating the cultural and commercial pressures that bear on visitor experience, considered the most valuable commodity in tourism economies, heritage destinations also situate meaningful experience. This article engages with how and in what ways this particular category of knowledge is mobilized around Freedom Park to legitimate the venture and shape visitor understanding of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article analyses how Freedom Park wielded aesthetics of persuasion, an experiential inducement, regarding the legitimacy of the site and the complex set of meanings it was meant to represent.
This article shows that tourism development was a driving factor in the formation of Hiroshima memory culture from the start. By focusing on tourism, this article discusses a hitherto neglected aspect of public atomic bomb memory and raises criticism of area studies’ ongoing preoccupation with the nation which risks overlooking local as well as structural factors. Many aspects, such as postwar pacifism, can be explained from the perspective of tourism. Dean MacCannell’s concept of "staged authenticity" is used to explain how atomic bomb tourism ties into previous research on Hiroshima memory and how tourism discourse is structured. Furthermore, it offers an alternative approach to understanding sites of dark tourism defining them the particular way in which their "staged-ness" plays out.
Based on the premise that pictures are not only culturally but also economically meaningful in the context of tourism, this article proposes a rearrangement of MacCannell’s model "semiotics of attraction" to discuss current negotiations of meaning of sight/site marking with urban photography. In Detroit, the city’s negative image has changed from ill-reputed urban wasteland to picturesque ruinscape of "America’s Great Comeback City." Turning the post-industrial shrinking city into a tourist attraction has not resolved socio-economic problems but instead commodified them. Carving out the underlying neoliberal ideology in cultural meaning of urban decline at the example of Detroit’s changed image, this article puts forth to debate in how far tourism shifts from being a leisure activity to being a marketing strategy and what that means for negotiations of cultural values through tourism semiotics, the significance of photography, and the visual in urban tourism, and eventually for the significance of tourism in urban development.
From 2012–2013, Northern Ireland was rocked by loyalist protests over limits placed on flying the British flag at Belfast City Hall. The sometimes-violent manifestations were roundly condemned by officials and business leaders as an assault on ‘Brand Northern Ireland’, a threat to the province’s reputation as a successful model of post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction. Accordingly, this article revises and updates Goffman’s concept of ‘a veneer of consensus’ to show how new regimes of political repression are inaugurated in the name of ‘tourism’. With the tourist gaze invoked by local officials as both neutral arbiter and economic imperative, the protests are subsequently assessed as a form of power negotiation, whereby symbolic contestation over the right to define the image of place in both physical and virtual spaces assumed an intensely political role.
This article expands on the concept of existential authenticity by considering its scalar dimensions in the Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, "back of the motorbike" tourism industry. This article has three related goals. In the first place, I show that the concept of existential authenticity demands a scalar component because of the term’s focus on the embodied, the emotional, and the interactive. These characteristics lend themselves to thinking about the urban dimensions of existential authenticity. Second, this article responds to calls pushing for empirical work to be conducted on existential authenticity. Lastly and given the possibilities that exist at the intersection of scale and existential authenticity, future research paths are sketched.
This article profiles the ‘techno-tourists’ of Berlin: music fans who return repeatedly to the city in order to participate in the local electronic dance music scenes. Based on interviews, this article sketches a profile of these music-minded voyagers, surveying their motivations, their attitudes, their patterns of travel and their strategies for making this mode of travel possible in terms of work and money. It also situates this recent wave of tourism within a broader history of tourism in Berlin, as well as considering its representation in local popular discourse. Local debates about the impact of tourism are reflected in interviewees’ ambivalence towards tourist identities, as they strive to describe the terms of their socio-cultural belonging within a sub-cultural scene that is spatially distant from house and home.
This article examines the discursive structure of several popular travel blogs to understand the relationship between authenticity and self-branding. Instances of present-day "canonical" blogs are examined, showing up high on Google searches, attracting significant audiences, and featuring on "best of" lists presented by other websites. Through a discourse analysis of the blog’s About pages, it is shown that professional bloggers reconcile the search for a self-dependent and inward-turned existential authenticity with the performance of self-branding techniques. Bloggers construct an image of a resilient self in times of hardship, while acting as travel and life coaches and ensuring their readers that such a nomadic lifestyle is attainable for anyone who really wants it. Simultaneously, there is an unmistakable influence of socio-economic resources that these travelers have at their disposal. The enmeshing of authenticity and self-branding results in a discourse in which it is possible to both sell and become oneself.
This article focuses on neglected social hospitality dimensions of food and accommodation on family holidays. Holidays signify concentrated periods of family time not only allowing for more shared food experiences but also necessitating more confined living spaces compared to home. A whole-family methodology was used as a critical and holistic approach to understand the holiday experiences of 10 families. Positive and negative memories of hospitality encounters for different family members are illustrated through the emotive concepts of commensality and spatiality highlighting their embodied, visible and interactive aspects. Family meals take on symbolic and publicly celebrated characteristics, whereas shared accommodation space is privately contested. The theoretical implications of the antithetical nature of family hospitality dimensions are further discussed and the family tourism research agenda is further developed.
Recent academic debate into women’s experiences of tourism employment has emphasised the extremely heterogeneous nature of such work and the need for sensitivity to local political, economic, social and cultural contexts. This article focuses on one such context which has received little attention – state socialism – and we explore women’s experiences of tourism work in socialist Romania. Such work had characteristics in common with non-socialist contexts, but in other ways took a form which was distinctive to the socialist state. It was characterised by extensive training, good pay and opportunities for promotion (at least to middle management level). The socialist state also devised unique solutions to the problem of the seasonality of tourism work. However, women also faced extensive surveillance by the state’s security services and faced harsh penalties for under-performance.
This article examines the intersections between musical practices and tourism on the island of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil, and draws on field research undertaken by the authors in 2012 and 2014. Tourism currently represents the major source of income for island residents, and musical activity is largely oriented towards the tourism industry. Complex patterns of interconnectivity become apparent when one traces specific links between tourism and musical activity in relation to areas such as ‘covers’ versus original music, musical genre selection, live performance practices and recorded music. The research suggests that while the island’s largely self-contained musical environment fosters and rewards musical versatility, the tourism industry acts as a continuing impediment to the development of original music. This posits a conundrum to the island’s musicians, who need to find their own musical identity within a space that at the same time nurtures and curbs their musical development.
This study examines how tourists experience authenticity and the ethics of "hill tribe" trekking in northern Thailand, and what they learn as a result of their touristic encounters. A "netnography" methodology was used to analyze on-line data from travelers’ touristic encounters with highland people in two sites. The first was the on-line reviews, blogs, and videos of travelers’ experiences in Baan Tong Luang, a multi-ethnic "hill tribe village" tourist attraction outside of Chiang Mai. The second was the blog and video reviews of visitors to three exemplary "community-based tourism" highland village sites. Findings show a variety of complex understandings of authenticity, both "objective" and "constructivist." For community-based tourism reviewers in particular, authenticity was understood as a hybrid, fluid concept which derived from meanings ascribed to objects, practices, and place; personal relationships with hosts; and opportunities for cultural learning afforded visitors.
This article applies the multiscalar ‘staging mobilities’ framework from the emergent subfield of mobilities design to analyse an enduring European rail travel phenomenon, interrail. This discussion extends and contributes to tourism mobilities research. Second, the article enriches previous studies of rail travel, by exploring how interrail travel is embedded in, and (im)mobilised by socio-material environments and institutional design decisions. More precisely, it explores the affordances of three objects that shape interrail mobility: the interrail pass, the RailPlanner application and seat reservations. To reach these aims, the research design intertwines multi-sited ethnography, netnography, survey and interviews. The conclusion offers theoretical reflections pertaining to the role of mobilities designs and methodical hybrids in tourism mobilities research.
Rather than take the tourist or the tourist place as the starting point of analysis, in this article, I begin with a seemingly superficial souvenir object, the Texan cowboy boot, in order to trace a more complex picture of the material cultures of tourism. I describe the Texan boot at the intersection of three threads: historical legacies, materialities of animal encounters and a political economy of ‘things’ (including their composite materials). The iconic Texas cowboy boot is a mythological but very material object of mobility – made by hand, with wild cowboy flair, by (mostly) Mexican artisans who use slowly accrued haptic skills with a variety of leathers to assemble neocolonial, hyper-masculine artefacts of fashion, fable and travel. Drawing on archival work and interviews in bootmaking workshops, I unravel a historical cultural economy of material production and consumption that entangles animal skins, migrant workers, Western movie stars and tourists.
This article examines the narrative strategies employed by US and UK plastic surgeons’ associations to discredit the practice of aesthetic tourism. Cosmetic surgery tourism, one of a broad set of activities involving travel for medical care, represents a growing marketplace and, thus, a significant professional threat to aesthetic/plastic surgeons practising ‘at home’. Drawing from an analysis of five associations’ websites, I argue that their claims about aesthetic tourism’s dangers reflect the same repertoires of evaluation – that is, lines of argumentation deemed credible within particular national settings – employed by American and British consumers of cosmetic surgery to defend their actions as ‘deserved’ and ‘legitimate’. While evaluative repertoires are grounded in material conditions, those conditions allow for flexibility in their implementation. When US and UK physicians’ associations employ the narrative strategies made available by their own nation, they do so in ways that present cosmetic surgery – when conducted abroad – as ‘undeserved’ and ‘illegitimate’.
An experiment in both form and content, the essay lightly adopts an Australian storytelling style to perform its material as it narrates a road trip across central Australia. Arriving at the Daly Waters Pub in the Northern Territory, the travellers are taken by surprise by the strange décor. It is a place made significant by the multiple ‘authorships’ of hundreds of tourists. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures, and signatures, but also flags, number plates, thongs, caps, and bras. We analyse these traces left by travellers as objects of exchange that signify people’s desire to mark a place and use this phenomenon to introduce the idea of a complementary concept to that of the ‘souvenir’, and which we call ‘survenir’. The palimpsest effect of these survenirs (since none is erased) introduces time by accretion, rather than by chronology. The sociality generated through ‘survenirs’ is not just among humans but among all sorts of things, concepts and affects that assemble to create Daly Waters Pub as a tourist destination made not for, but by, its visitors. It is a materially interactive site composed by them.
Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions. Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.
This article is based on an ethnographic study of the community of Positano on the Amalfi Coast in the south of Italy. It examines how the flows of visiting tourists have shaped the economy, lifestyle and rhythms of this small but world-famous tourist destination. Through visual imagery and narratives, I explore how residents of the community create meaningful identities amidst the continuous flux and flow of people arriving and departing. The article builds on the concepts of travel and mobility as underlying features in postmodern societies and as vehicles of identity formation among residents in tourist destinations. The findings illustrate how tourism has transformed the locality of Positano into a network of networks, and has thrust the inhabitants of this small coastal village into the global economy. The research also explores some of the intergenerational differences among older and younger residents that are exacerbated by the changes brought about by tourism. Reflecting on my role as an anthropologist doing research ‘at home’, the article seeks to contribute to the growing field of the anthropology of tourism.
Museums are largely neglected in the tourist research literature. This is even more striking given that they are arguably designed for gazing. There is little doubt that "graying" of the Western population adds to the number and range of museums. And yet, even in adult museums, there will be children who are "dragged along." Museums are increasingly aware of such conflicts and dilemmas. Many museums offer printed booklets with "treasure trails." They afford a trail through the museum that forms a treasure hunt for specific objects and correct answers to questions related to the objects. This article draws attention to this overlooked, mundane technology and gives it its deserved share of the limelight. We are concerned with exploring ethnographically how trails are designed and especially used by young families in museums for gazing. The article gives insight into how children, broadly speaking, learn to gaze within museums as well as small-scale negotiations and conflicts between families gazing. So we are concerned with how family trails affect the museum visit.
In this article, I explore the relationship between evolving technologies of image production, different kinds of desire, and how Tahiti is marketed as a tourist destination. I focus the discussion on an award-winning online contest, "Invest In Your Love," which Tahiti Tourisme North America launched to encourage tourism in the wake of the 2008 worldwide economic crisis. Little has changed over the centuries in the dominant Western image of Tahiti as an exotic paradise, although how that paradise is interpreted is influenced by personal and historical situations. What has changed, however, is that viewers can now manipulate the images to express their personal perceptions, dreams, and desires. By encouraging viewers to create their own image of paradise, and to engage in imaginary travel and self-transformation, the "Invest In Your Love" contest cleverly played with blurring boundaries between various categories as well as kinds of desire. This was seen not only between categories such as producer and consumer, here and there, and private dreams and public videos, but also between love and money, and professing love for one’s partner and love for a brand. I explore these contemporary trends and the entanglements between categories by bringing together ideas and perspectives from two fields not usually joined in conversation; namely, cultural anthropology, and brand marketing.
This article examines three performances of cultural identity that occur or have occurred in three European cities that rely heavily on the tourism industry: Barcelona, Krakow, and Venice. Taking as its starting point the claim of tourism studies scholar John Urry that "social identities emerge ... out of particular structures of feeling that bind together three elements—space, time, and memory," the article analyzes how three cultural performances variously perform sentiments of nationalism, progress, and nostalgia to portray a specific image of cultural identity. In doing so, these performances provide a deep insight into the cultural values of the performers and how they wish their culture to be experienced by visiting outsiders. Furthermore, the article examines how all three of these cultural performances contain within them a Utopian impulse, or a wish to inscribe a new future for the given culture.
Acknowledging the increasing popularity of independent travel from East Asia, this article explores the backpacking experience of young travellers of the region, from a socio-anthropological angle. Using liminality theory as a guideline and adopting a qualitative investigative approach, 31 interviews with East Asian backpackers were conducted. The findings suggest there are dual facets of the liminal experiences of the backpackers. On one hand, young travellers were motivated to escape from temporal, spatial and social pressures at home. On the other, their narratives reflected a strong commitment to home through a sense of filial piety, an awareness of their identity and positive evaluation of home. These findings advance our understanding of the liminal experiences in an Asian backpacking context.
Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? This is one of the principal questions to the practice of tourism from a philosophical viewpoint and posed as such by Dean MacCannell. But it is also a question with a long tradition. In this article, I aim to elaborate on MacCannell’s initial understandings of Stendhal’s work as a starting point for the philosophical deepening of tourism studies. MacCannell has criticised John Urry and argued for an analysis by replacing the term ‘the tourist gaze’ by ‘tourist agency’. MacCannell’s alternative version of the gaze is based on the non-representational discourse of the tourist-subject. Based on the work of the French writer Stendhal, MacCannell argues that the tourist gaze presumes a second gaze which ‘turns back onto the gazing subject an ethical responsibility for the construction of its own existence’. Although this notion makes the tourist not only a passive spectator but also an active narrator, the narration is nonetheless never a formal, ‘factual’ description of the things visited and experienced by the tourist. Instead of objectively representing the world, travel in this respect becomes a way of constructing the self.
This article will discuss the ways in which landscapes have been conceptualised in current literature building on notions of escape to and well-being with nature, and how the tourist has been placed in that context. Drawing among other things on Gadamer’s understanding of the concept of the horizon, as well as Deleuzian understandings of relationality, we argue that landscape is simultaneously an effect of gathering deep-seated emotions and experiences and an open-ended and forever unfinished story. Due to the irreducibility of the landscape to its terms, a landscape is something that can be shared. We will outline how current practices of tourism marketing and promotion in Iceland could in effect mediate landscape experiences in a way that recognises the tourist as an author of his or her own experiences, rather than a predefined stereotype as in much tourism literature. Recognising the tourist as potentially inspired by landscape, we argue, commands the attitude of respect that is a necessary precondition to any ethical notions of hospitality, altering the preconditions of marketing practices using the landscape to their ends.
This article discusses the historical development of nature-based tourism in Iceland, in the light of the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ and the romantic wilderness ideology, which has put a deep mark on modern views on nature and created a widespread demand for coming into touch with wild nature up to such an extent that a thriving sector of today’s tourist industry is built on it. Questions explored are what views on nature have shaped this story and what image of Icelandic nature has been highlighted in its marketing as a tourist attraction. Finally, the harsh conflict that has occurred between the different values of nature preservation and energy production is addressed and how nature-based tourism does, in the light of its values and interests, support the battle for the protection of natural landscape and wild ecosystems.
A traditional Romantic fix for the stress and strain of the everyday has been the idea of ‘getting back to nature’, exploring places of natural grandeur and beauty based on the belief in nature’s therapeutic agency on the traveller. This article introduces a theoretical framework that offers a way to explore how touristic spaces are lived within a human–non-human co-constituted affective process. It then engages with the spaces of nature-based tourism and reports findings from an ethnographic study on British-based trekking holiday to Iceland. These findings suggest that the emotions and therapeutic affect that have traditionally been reported from spending time in nature are relational outcomes; they depend both on nature’s performance and on what the individual contributes to the relations.
This article aims to situate nature, not as an organised and mapped space but rather in the way in which it is lived and experienced. Given the fact that most tourists who come to Iceland claim the reason for their visit to be the natural landscapes of Iceland, tourism in Iceland has focused on so-called nature-based tourism. This is not new because eighteenth-century to early twentieth-century travellers and explorers were affected by the sublimity of the landscapes they encountered and, hence, have had their influences in shaping the meaning of the contemporary, institutional definitions of natural landscapes. These are definitions that leave out the lived experience and also deny nature its vitality and movement. As Tim Ingold has argued, nature as it is experienced is an animated being, and as such, one enters into the atmosphere of vibrant surroundings that one engages with. In order to situate nature, I travel to Snæfellsjökull National Park in Iceland.
The aim of this article is to contribute to problematizing the notion of nature in Icelandic nature-based tourism. Despite a fairly robust recent definition of nature-based tourism by the Icelandic Ministry of Industry as "travellers’ varied experience of nature," in fact, the definition of nature in this context seems limited to places supposedly unspoilt by human influence, and that rather simplistic understanding seems overly prevalent in the discourse of Icelandic tourism. The concept of "nature-based" tourism is necessarily reductive if it is limited to areas conceptualized as pristine. Many places that are identified primarily through their anthropogenic features would not be adequately understood without considering their ecological properties, and certain areas with significant anthropogenic elements give rise to specific—and in many ways unique—experiences of flora and fauna. Central among them are ruins, where ambiguous space is occupied spontaneously, where interactions with the nonhuman can be more unexpected, startling, and dangerous than in more regulated areas. If tourists come to Iceland chiefly due to the country’s spectacular náttúra, the Icelandic tourism industry is well advised to be mindful of the many derelict and abandoned contemporary structures found across the country.