Leisure/Tourism Geographies

Practices and Geographical Knowledge

David Crouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135115258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Leisure and Tourism Geographies considers leisure/tourism as an encounter. An encounter that exists between people, between people and space and between people and their expectations, experiences and desires.
The contributors explore diverse aspects of leisure and tourism, ranging from the methodologies behind leisure practices to detailed case studies including: *Disneyland, Paris
*tourism in sacred landscapes
*leisure practices in cyberspace
*leisure and yachting
*use of recreational/holiday cottages
*National Parks, local parks and gardens
Presenting an exciting mix of attitudes and ideas concerning leisure and tourism, this book documents a lively debate, placing geography at its centre.

1
INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERS
IN LEISURE/TOURISM

David Crouch

Introduction

This book considers leisure/tourism as an encounter. That encounter occurs between several things. It occurs between people, between people and space, amongst people as socialised and embodied subjects, and in contexts in which leisure/tourism is available. The encounter is also between expectations and experience, desire, and so on. This chapter introduces these themes. In their own way each chapter explores different ways in which people make leisure/tourism. Thus aspects of the encounter are actively contextualised and practised by active human subjects. People as human beings (rather than, say, consumers) enjoying leisure/tourism are the subject of this book. Leisure/tourism is a process rather than a product, although it is frequently abstracted as the latter. Knowledge in leisure/tourism is also a matter of process, being worked, refigured, in flows rather than fixed in time-space. As a practice leisure/tourism involves complex human and social engagements, relations and negotiations and it is therefore appropriate to write in terms of ‘practice’. Of course, leisure/tourism may not become enjoyment and instead may be marked by a frustrated hope or mirage and negative memory. Space is important in each of its aspects.

Tourism is often theorised in terms of meetings of cultures, or one-way exploration, and suggests travel. There is a persistent confusion of categories between leisure and tourism. This is no accident, as tourism and leisure become de-differentiated in post-Fordism and together are emblematic of postmodernity (Lash and Urry 1994). As tourism and leisure have become less and less functional and increasingly aestheticised, the differentiation of tourism and leisure is eroded. Leisure becomes commodified (in places) and tourism is accompanied by similar commodification, and both have capacity for reflexivity. This book adopts an ambivalent position and uses the couplet ‘leisure/tourism’. Distinctive chapters take up aspects that may be recognised as more one than the other. In terms of practice there are more similarities than differences. This book deals with both — or the one, sometimes dual, category.

Practices that we understand by leisure/tourism merge with other areas of life, and work regimes are becoming increasingly flexible. For many people their primary investment of themselves and their identity may still be in their work. It may be that what they do outside of work is merely routine (house-keeping, garden maintenance, ‘necessary’ visits to family, looking after the children) yet for others may be key fulfilling parts to their lives as leisure. Leisure may become similarly imprecise (entertaining and playing golf with colleagues for example). Supporting services of leisure/tourism can double for work, such as filling stations, airport lounges (Augé 1995). Strictly, time outside unpaid work as a distinction of leisure is equally misleading, as numerous feminist texts have shown. Leisure/tourism is a means of practising space, although not the only one, as Crang observes in terms of work (1994). Leisure/tourism can provide one means of imaginative play and expressive behaviour and identity.

The individual is relatively grounded in different sets of context: as socialised subject, exemplified in this volume as the gendered subject; the socialised contexts of particular leisure spaces and practices and abstract ideas of space, practice, and leisure/tourism. Just as leisure/tourism is very contextualised, socially and culturally, we too are profoundly socialised subjects. In Bourdieu's terms, our habitus of settings and contexts are sustained by practice (1984, 1990). In the contemporary period however, the possibility of being reflexive subjects unsettles this relation (Crouch and Matless 1996). Indeed, Lash and Urry have argued that leisure/tourism is a typical example of the reflexivity of contemporary culture, with opportunities for aestheticisation, in a critical negotiation of the self (1994).

Space and knowledge

Leisure/tourism happens in spaces. That space may be material, concrete and surround our own bodies. Space may be metaphorical and even imaginative. That imaginative space is not only in contemporary virtual leisure but in the imaginative practice of the subject. Metaphorical space in leisure includes abstractions of city and country, nature, and many leisure/tourism practices happen in spaces that are culturally defined. In the more poetic sense of Bachelard, abstract notions and senses of sites of being — corners, enclosures, ‘home’ — may be inflected by an actual knowing of spaces in material, everyday encounters (1994). Thus space is important in metaphorically ‘shaping’ the enjoyment of leisure. Such an interpretation of the importance of space in leisure/tourism differs markedly from a more instrumental, empiricist view of space as enabling leisure/tourism to be ‘located’. These chapters consider the encounter of leisure/tourism as practised. In the process of enjoying leisure/tourism as human subjects we figure and refigure our knowledge of material and metaphorical spaces where that leisure happens. Particular features of geography become artefacts through which we remember. They are also embodied in our knowledge as lay geographies that enfold and are enfolded by relationships, movement and laughter (Radley 1990).

There is a renewed interest in popular geographical knowledge as lay geographies. This approach to popular geographies works from the subject and practice rather than from representational geographies of media popular culture. However, this does not mean ignoring context and socialisation of the subject. Instead it seeks to wrestle with the active process of practice, where subjects may negotiate and refigure. Lay geographical knowledge amounts to an ontological knowledge, ‘the feeling of doing’ (Shotter 1993). Once again, this is not to imply that ‘doing-knowledge’ is wholly different from learnt, expert knowledge or of knowledge by reading representations. It is instead a knowledge that incorporates all of these, and is perhaps incoherent, certainly ‘incomplete’ and uneven. Harre's notion of the feeling of doing is not the same. Rather it emphasises those components of practice that directly, freely engage the body in the surrounding physicality of the world (Harré 1996). This acknowledges a sensual, multi-sensual subject (Pile and Thrift 1995) that comes to know the world in part at least as embodied subject.

Knowledge may be too strong a word to apply to the often fleeting, sensual practice of leisure/tourism. Movements and engagements may be vicarious. Bauman argues that play is not cumulative (Bauman 1993). Up to a point. Like the occupation of liminal spaces these moments of practice offer a refiguring of normal roles that may be played with or played at rather than temporarily erased or inverted (Urry 1990). Repetitive and ritualistic practice such as may accompany visits to the theme park and sports ground, as much as music group performance, offers time for mutual refiguring, reappraisal, or avoidance, of everyday knowledge. The complexity of these events, the intersubjective nature of leisure/tourism, the tracking of different cultural and social meanings and representations and the activity of the socialised, embodied subject coping, trying out, negotiating, contesting, makes the term practice very appropriate.

Part of the interest in reflexivity and in the non-representational has been the emergence of new interest in the poetic. Rojek argues that the poetic has been ignored for too long, yet has been used with an everyday acceptance in the literature that promotes tourism (1995). Travel is frequently aligned to the exotic, rendered in the poetic. Crang's case for lay geographies includes an explicit acknowledgement of the poetic (1996). Ann Game's discussion of de Certeau's working of spatial practice is important. Whilst de Certeau's words that ‘every story is a travel story’ would seem to support the organised romance of tourism companies, he emphasises that such a travel story is a spatial practice (de Certeau 1984:115, Game 1991:166). To make a spatial practice is to engage in a transformation, not to return or imagine a past, but creatively to enliven, to repeat only the possibility of a new, unique moment. Agencies that represent tourism and leisure can only provide structures into which our imaginative practice enters and through which it explores its desires, and their promotional messages that inflect these structures may not be ours. Crude consumption figures do not reveal very much of spatial practice. Indeed, those structures may deflect or deaden interest. We may need to come to a place unawares.

For Ann Game her ‘desire has indeed been to know the place, to be able to read the codes of, for example, public footpaths and bridle ways; to have a competence with respect to this landscape as [she does] in body surfing at Bondi; to be a local and party to local stories. In a sense, it is a desire to “know” what cannot be seen’ (1991:184). It may be easy to misrepresent what Game is saying. She does not want to read according to a proscribed story, but from the plurality of phenomena and imagination that may be engaged by letting oneself open to space itself. This does not require one to walk, but to experience the surrounding world. It is not a gaze but a multi-sensual sensitivity that is also in touch with an imaginary sensitivity. Game does not romanticise de Certeau (who can overstate the socialised subject's freedom to do and to act and to transform), but uses his text to raise the possibility of the subject from the familiar repressive position of object. These dimensions of spatial practice are explored through the case of visiting the Arctic Circle by Inger Birkeland (Chapter 2). Birkeland explores the poetic and the working of myth in the subject. Engaging the gendered subject and using Kristeva (1996) she explores and develops an interpretive study of the feminine dimension of the human subject and the possibilities of imagination and myth in refiguring place.

The embodied subject is a very important part of Birkeland's work. Instead of a seeing and objectifying practice, leisure/tourism emerges as a more feminine, subjective, human spatial practice. One aspect of this is the increasing recognition of the plurality of senses that give access to the world. In Chapter 3 John Urry takes up the story on the gaze with an examination of smell as an informative component of geographical knowledge. In practising space the imaginative, sensual subject encounters metaphors as well as the material world on which different discourses may be inscribed.

The country and the city, the garden, the beach, the desert island, and the street hold powerful metaphorical attention in significant arenas of leisure/tourism (Crouch 1998, Fyfe 1998, Crouch 1992, Selwyn 1996). Macnaghten and Urry have demonstrated this with regard to the predominantly twentieth-century and modern labelling and imagining of the countryside in terms of ‘peace and quiet’, where the body rests (1998). Bale's Chapter 4 explores the use of metaphor in the contexts of practice, through the example of sports stadia. Popular thinking about leisure/tourism involves unexpected cross-overs and here we observe the overlaps of leisure site production between horticulture, stadium and cultivation. These properties and the use of metaphor are interpreted as highly gendered.

Patterns of investment, planning and promotion hold powerful influences over the context in which places, sites and cities are ‘consumed’. It may be surprising that the modern assertion of masculinity in terms of stories of city ‘fathers’ told in the urban fabric is being recycled at the turn of the century. This gendering of places continues to contextualise leisure/tourism and to provide a theatre in which people may negotiate their own knowledge. In the absence of alternatives it is likely to be that city narratives like these will prolong the image of the heroic male. Aitchison's Chapter 5 considers the example of a city that combines a hegemonic story of heritage, gender and nation.

The modern way in which the state provided context for leisure/tourism was through controls and regulations that combined morality, class and gendering, influenced by socialised concern for health and environment, often in the exercise of power (Clarke and Critcher 1985, Rojek 1993, Revill and Watkins 1996). Popular political contest from people who, through leisure/tourism challenged these contexts, led to adjustments in control, exemplified in the Mass Trespass in the Peak District between the wars (Shoard 1997). Clubs have had their own influence on shaping the context of leisure/tourism amongst their members (Matless 1995). Interestingly, the Peak District became the site of the first ‘National’ Park a decade and a half later. More recently ‘countryside’ has been commodified (Crouch 1992) rather than democratised and this is demonstrated in a peculiar case of access for rambling. Ravenscroft's Chapter 6 explores how the management and control of freedom deploys modernist metaphors of countryside (purity, landed ownership) and its politics. However, in an effort to respond to demands for increased access it uses the virtual language of hyper-reality instead to imply access. Payments are apparently made to owners of land in a claim to provide access whose materiality is neither on the ground, nor on maps. The contexts for the subject, the status quo of control and regulation, remain unchanged and there is a reassertion of traditional countryside leisure access formed around traditional land ownership. This is accompanied by a new ideology of commodification ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: encounters in leisure/tourism
• 2 The mytho-poetic in northern travel
• 3 Sensing leisure spaces
• 4 Parks and gardens: metaphors for the modern places of sport
• 5 Heritage and nationalism: gender and the performance of power
• 6 Hyper-reality in the official (re)construction of leisure sites: the case of rambling
• 7 Narrativised spaces: the functions of story in the theme park
• 8 Cultural contestation at Disneyland Paris
• 9 Nomadic-symbolic and settler-consumer leisure practices in Poland
• 10 Tourism and sacred landscapes
• 11 Design versus leisure: social implications of functionalist design in urban private gardens of the twentieth century
• 12 Consuming pleasures: food, leisure and the negotiation of sexual relations
• 13 Where you want to go today (like it or not): leisure practices in cyberspace
• 14 That sinking feeling: elitism, working leisure and yachting
• 15 Leisure places and modernity: the use and meaning of recreational cottages in Norway and the USA
• 16 Leisure lots and summer cottages as places for people's own creative work
• 17 Knowing, tourism and practices of vision
• 18 The intimacy and expansion of space
• 19 Knowledge by doing: home and identity in a bodily perspective
• Name index
• Subject index