Leisure and Tourism Landscapes

Social and Cultural Geographies

Cara Aitchison, Nicola E. MacLeod, Nicola E Macleod, Stephen J. Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134688739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Increasingly significant as mediators of spatial identity and meaning, leisure, tourism, culture and heritage are only now beginning to be located within the rapidly evolving discourses of poststructuralist geographies.

Exploring the influence of leisure and tourism on the production, representation and consumption of landscape, the first half of this important book focuses on different ways of 'seeing' or representing landscape, whereas the second half examines different forms of productive consumption in leisure and tourism. Both symbolic and material spaces of leisure and tourism are also examined in relation to urban and rural landscapes, heritage landscapes, gendered landscapes, and landscapes of sexuality and desire.

With a multidisciplinary approach and a strong theoretical content which builds on poststructuralist theories, this is undoubtedly an important addition to literature in the field.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203754900-1

A place for leisure and tourism?

This book is about the production, representation, consumption and (re)presentation of the British landscape. At first glance this appears to be a focus that has long captured the gaze of geographers. A more thorough viewing or reading, however, reveals that this gaze is redirected here through the lenses of leisure and tourism studies. Increasingly significant as mediators of spatial identity and meaning, leisure and tourism are only now beginning to be rendered visible, situated and placed within the rapidly evolving discourses of post-positivist or poststructuralist geographies.

Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies attempts to embrace poststructuralist theory to engage with analyses of the construction of space, place and landscape in everyday life. Simultaneously, however, the book acknowledges the contribution of previous structuralist discourses to informing our understanding of landscape. As such, we draw on a range of interdisciplinary subject fields together with more traditional academic disciplines to explore the significance of symbolic and material spaces and places in the production, representation and consumption of leisure and tourism.

As S. Williams (1998: 172) asserts, The construction and subsequent consumption of tourist places is essentially a socio-cultural process’. This process has previously been conceived of as being mediated through a ‘leisure industry’, where commodification and consumption are controlled increasingly by professional and commercial interests (Adorno 1993). In contrast, writers such as de Certeau (1984) have stressed the importance of everyday life as a form of productive consumption where ‘consumers’, instead of being ‘cultural dupes’, are themselves constantly involved in remaking culture. This scope for agency allows us to see places as continually evolving landscapes with space for resistance, contestation, disruption and transgression of dominant discourses and wider hegemonic social and cultural relations. Whereas such subject fields as cultural studies have long given voice to ‘subversive’ narratives and discourses, it is only relatively recently that geography has rendered audible those previously marginalised voices that have sought to construct a place for both people and discourses excluded from traditional geographical agendas.

From geography to geographies?

In recent years geography has come to be seen as both a fractured and contested discipline. ‘What most of us too readily treat as a universal discipline – a sort of “Geography-with-a-capital-G” – is really only one sedimented and situated product of a series of intersecting historical geographies and colliding geographical experiments’ (Barnes and Gregory 1997: 1). Indeed, the recently established journal Tourism Geographies explains its adoption of the plural term ‘geographies’ as an attempt to:

express a sensitivity and effort to reach out to the diversity of perspectives that fall under this subject matter, including both academic and applied research, regional traditions from Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific and other parts of the world, and disciplinary approaches from geographers and related professionals, such as anthropologists and other social scientists, landscape architects, urban and regional planners, and environmental scientists and managers.

(Tourism Geographies 1999: n.p.)

This book attempts to embrace this plurality of geographies together with the increasing academic freedom offered by the recent blurring of disciplinary boundaries within the academy. Indeed, Haraway (1985: 191) contends that postmodernism has developed ‘as an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’. This more flexible approach to engagement with a range of human and social sciences has offered geographical insights from a range of disciplines and subject fields addressing leisure-related issues. These include: sociology (Urry 1990, 1995), cultural studies (Bell 1991; Bell and Valentine 1997; Skelton and Valentine 1997), gender studies (Bell and Valentine 1995; Bondi 1992a, 1992b, 1998; Duncan 1996; Rose 1993, 1996; Valentine 1996) and tourism studies (Crouch 1999; Edensor and Kothari 1996; Rojek and Urry 1997; Selwyn 1996; Urry 1990, 1995).

Within these disciplines and subject fields, questions relating to the interrelation of production, representation, consumption and (re)presentation have recently been foregrounded. For example, in social and cultural geographies we are aware of the iconography of landscape (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988) the mapping of desire (Bell and Valentine 1995), the theorisation of ‘BodySpace’ (Duncan 1996), images of the street as refracted through leisure and tourism (Fyfe 1998) and analyses of the interrelation between shopping, place and identity (Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook and Rowlands 1998). In sociology, we have witnessed increasing interest in food, health and identity (Caplan 1997), body cultures (Bale and Philo 1998) and touring cultures (Rojek and Urry 1997), and in gender studies and cultural studies we are aware of the significance of Barbie culture (Rogers 1998), Nike culture (Goldman and Papson 1998) and internet culture (Porter 1997). In all of these disciplines and subject fields, leisure, culture, sport and tourism have been theorised as central sites and processes of identity construction, performance, contestation and negotiation. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes attempts to contextualise, illustrate and theorise these struggles for space. In doing so, we seek to identify and build on interdisciplinary synergies that can contribute to the ongoing development of social and cultural geographies.

Theorising the social–cultural nexus

Geography's cultural turn has encouraged analyses that take account of both structural and cultural determinants of spatiality. Simultaneously, these geographical interpretations of the social–cultural nexus have begun to address issues of leisure space, place and landscape. In their socio-cultural analyses contemporary social and cultural geographers have embraced Cooper's (1994) assertion that power is ‘productive, relational and everywhere’. This emphasis on cultural construction rather than material determinacy can be seen as building on Elshtain's (1981) critique of socio-structural theories as ‘narratives of closure’.

One of the major concerns of poststructural geographies, then, is the refutation of the notion of one single theory or ‘grand narrative’ capable of explaining spatiality throughout time and across space. In particular, poststructuralism denies the existence of one single truth or logical reason – logocentric constructs that have been so important in Western philosophy since the Enlightenment:

the search for a single all-encompassing theory is therefore rejected in principle, as is the very possibility of objectivity. Western philosophy's quest for truth and certainty … is therefore abandoned and is seen as the product of a particular historical era that is becoming inappropriate in a postmodern society that is increasingly characterised by fragmentation, diversity and diffuseness in all spheres of life.

(Bryson 1992: 225–6)

There is no doubt that contemporary social and cultural geographies have been influenced by the works of such key poststructural theorists as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Cixous, Kristeva and Irigary. Hartsock (1990: 169), however, expresses strong reservations about the usefulness of a Foucauldian analysis of power, stating that ‘Foucault has made it very difficult to locate domination … He has on the one hand claimed that individuals are constituted by power relations, but he has argued against their constitution by relations such as the domination of one group by another’. Hartsock therefore stresses the difficulty of embracing wholesale the poststructuralist position because, she argues, poststructuralism's emphasis on social criticism as contextually, temporally and locally specific negates theories of power as systemic phenomena. With no systemic power there can be no overall system of domination and oppression, only specific contexts of subordination, resistance and transformation. Clearly, one of the questions for this book to examine is the extent to which systemic power exists in the creation of leisure and tourism landscapes and/or the extent to which localised, contextualised and pluralised power relations exert their influence upon the landscape. In attempting to answer such a question, the book seeks to situate contemporary leisure and tourism landscapes within their historical contexts. Drawing on a range of sources and critiques, these ‘histories’ are problematised as social and cultural constructions of the past that offer neither total nor static explanations of the place of leisure and tourism as mediators of landscape.

The totalising explanations offered by the meta-narratives of structural theories are therefore seen as ‘narratives of closure’ because of their emphasis on power as repressive and dominating rather than productive and relational. Lash (1990: 4), developing Elshtain's critique, emphasises the importance of postmodernism and other cultural paradigms as ‘regimes of signification’. These regimes, he contends, comprise the ‘cultural economy’ and the ‘mode of signification’. According to Lash (1990: 5), the cultural economy is made up of the ‘relations of production’, the ‘conditions of reception’, the ‘institutional framework that mediates between production and reception’, and the ‘particular way in which cultural objects circulate’. Drawing on established cultural studies analyses, Lash contends that the mode of signification depends

on a particular relationship between signifier, signified and referrent … Here, the signifier is a sound, image, word or statement; the signified is a concept or meaning; and the referent is an object in the real world to which the signifier and signified connect.

(Lash 1990: 5)

This book attempts to examine leisure and tourism landscapes as regimes of signification in which the production, representation and consumption of landscape are mediated by sites and processes of leisure and tourism. An analytical framework such as this, which recognises the productive and relational nature of landscape, is also more open to the concepts of resistance, subversion, transgression and reappropriation.

Social and cultural geographies of leisure and tourism landscapes

The book comprises ten chapters structured loosely into two parts. The first half of the book attempts to contextualise leisure and tourism landscapes by problematising the interrelations between landscape, leisure and tourism and by situating a discussion of these relationships within the wider discourses of social and cultural geographies. This first half of the book introduces a range of ‘ways of seeing’, representing and interpreting landscape. The second half of the book then seeks to examine ways in which dominant notions of landscape have been both maintained and disrupted by different processes of consumption, reproduction and representation.

Chapter 2, ‘Locating Landscapes: Geographies of Leisure and Tourism’, chronicles the development of geographical discourses that have informed our knowledge of the place of leisure and tourism within landscape studies and spatial theory more generally. This chapter ‘sets the scene’ by examining the place of landscape in creating both sites and sights of leisure and tourism. The chapter chronicles eight distinct geographical discourses that have informed our understanding of leisure and tourism landscapes. These discourses, in turn, inform many of the subsequent discussions within the book and are revisited in the final chapter where we attempt to relocate leisure and tourism landscapes. Chapter 3, ‘Moving Landscapes: Leisure and Tourism in Time and Space’, turns our attention to the contribution of historical geography in informing our understanding of the ways in which leisure and tourism landscapes have altered over time. This chapter highlights the significance of travel, the journey and the route to or through the leisure and tourism landscape. In drawing upon environme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Locating landscapes: geographies of leisure and tourism
• 3 Moving landscapes: leisure and tourism in time and space
• 4 Valuing the countryside: leisure, tourism and the rural landscape
• 5 Representing landscapes: literary and artistic ways of seeing
• 6 Heritage landscapes: merging past and present
• 7 Gendered landscapes: constructing and consuming leisure and tourism
• 8 Retrophilia and the urban landscape: reinterpreting the city
• 9 Landscapes of desire: reappropriating the city
• 10 Relocating landscapes: leisure, tourism and culture
• References
• Index