Destinations

Cultural Landscapes of Tourism

Greg Ringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415515009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134824779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book presents new directions both for tourism and cultural landscape studies in geography, crossing the traditional boundaries between the research of geographers and scholars of the tourism industry.
Drawing on selected research from Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and North America, the contributors combine perspectives in human geography and tourism to present cultural landscapes of tourist destinations as socially constructed places, examining the extent and manner by which tourism both establishes and falsifies local reality.
The book addresses many critical themes which recent critiques in tourism studies focusing on the attitudes and behaviour of the tourist and on the industry as agents of social change have ignored, including the marginalization of the 'host' community, the privatization and commodification of local culture, and how tourism acts as both agent and process in the structure, identity and meaning of local places.

Part I
Writing the Tourist Landscape

1
Tourism and the Semiological Realization of Space

George Hughes

In 1738, John Wesley, with his brother Charles, founded the movement that became the Methodist Church. Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1988, the British Tourist Authority (BTA), using the 250th anniversary, considered the possibility of establishing a Wesley Trail intended to appeal to an estimated 54 million Methodist worshipers worldwide. That such a conjunction of tourism and evangelism was considered sufficiently uncontroversial to be pursued by a national tourist authority, and to be used subsequently in a vocational tourism text (Lumsdon 1992: 132) is symptomatic of the scale of cultural change that has occurred in the intervening centuries and of the current role tourism is playing in facilitating and reflecting the change.

The objectives established for this project did not address the religious sensibilities of Methodists or conceive of the trail as a mark of respect for the Wesleys or Methodism. Rather, the project was addressed in exclusively commercial terms. More specifically, the idea satisfied a number of criteria in terms of BTA objectives:

1. The Methodist Church provided a clearly-defined group which could be targeted;
2. As Wesley had so many strong links with different parts of the country, such a promotion would spread the benefits to areas which would otherwise not readily attract overseas business;
3. The idea had potential for sound public relations work which would have a wider impact than the specific promotion;
4. The campaign could also be extended to include the centenary of John Wesley’s death in 1991;
5. The campaign had a potential for joint sponsorship (Lumsdon 1992:133).

Yet this potential interaction of tourist development with a belief system, so important in the structure of many Western societies, arose capriciously from the touristic opportunity afforded by an anniversary. The opportunistic, accidental and aleatoric ways in which tourism alights on such themes, and the potential this has for “realizing” particular geographies demands attention if only for its seemingly limitless embrace of topics and places in the world. This spatializing potential raises particular issues and offers an opportunity to consider some of the contrivances at work in the late twentieth century which are subtly but perceptibly changing the cultural and physical geography of the globe.

As tourism impinges on the remoter margins of the world, so it has been increasingly implicated in concerns about the cultural and physical wellbeing of the localities that it incorporates. A brief acquaintance with the academic literature on tourism quickly demonstrates a critical turn in which tourism has been routinely censured for its economic insecurity and its cultural exploitativeness (Crick 1989). The question at issue therefore seems no longer to be one of whether tourism has become a potent agent of change, but of how to address the character of this change. In this chapter I wish to develop a geographical perspective in which tourism will be considered as a spatially differentiating activity which has the potential to realize different “geographies” in a semiological way.

Tourism is, after all, essentially about making available a diverse range of geographical locations to potential visitors and thereby translating those locations into tourist destinations. In other words, tourism is inherently geographical. Yet this proves to be a very ambiguous process, for while the necessity for destinations to be imaginatively differentiated is recognised, in order to capture particular tourist markets, the process has been simultaneously criticized as a culturally homogenizing one. As places get to look more like each other, the rhetoric of tourism has been stretched in its attempt to contrive geographical distinctiveness. Thus the ways in which tourism is involved in the construction of place and space warrants attention from geographers.

The geography of tourism

In the light of the current ubiquity of pleasure, the relative paucity of geographical studies on tourism and leisure seems curious. Geographically, tourism has been treated as marginal to the serious business of both economic and academic production. Geographers have not entirely neglected tourism and recreation, but rather their studies have been predominantly taken up with monitoring and describing the characteristics of recreational land use patterns and flows (Coppock 1982). These patterns and flows have been discussed as if they were an effect of some more fundamental causes, such as the tendency for frequency of visits to decline with the distance of travel (or distance decay), car ownership (and its influence on the propensity to travel), age and stage in the life-cycle (and the motivation to undertake travel) and the like. As such, leisure, recreation and tourism have tended to be treated by geographers as the epiphenomena of a range of more fundamental spatial determinants.

In contrast, this chapter will assert that leisure and tourism, being central to social life, are primary determinants of space in their own right. This has been achieved, semiologically, as places have become subject to strategies of “theming,” “designation,” “re-visioning,” “re-imaging” and the comprehensive application of marketing techniques that are now the familiar repertoire of place marketing. Taken collectively this has generated what may been called “ludic space” (Lefebvre 1976: 82-4) which is now probably the most extensive land use in Western society.

That tourism works through dreams (Reimer 1990) and myths (Selwyn 1990, 1996) is now widely recognized, but the spatializing character of these dreams and myths has been somewhat less developed (but see Goss 1993; MacCannell 1973, 1976) as is also the role of these in differentiating space into places. Lash and Urry (1994), drawing on a larger thesis about the characteristics of modernity, draw attention to the institutionalization of leisure and tourism that was a prerequisite for the development of travel as a mass activity. They argue that the professionalization of travel engendered public trust in its institutions and made it possible for anonymous captains, pilots and couriers to transport and accommodate groups of tourists.

Travelers were likely to be strangers to each other, and their significant personal confinement a necessity of the journey, yet anxieties about personal safety and security have been largely circumvented. But the sophisticated institutional structure, which made mass tourism socially possible, has also been a leading factor in spatializing the globe, since the institutions of tourism are also active in geographically differentiating the world. The trust that the tourist invests in those that arrange for their safe conduct also extends to the character of the places visited, for much tourism relies on the qualities of a destination as represented to tourists through guidebooks, brochures, travel writing, tourist programs and the like.

In tourist promotions, places are represented in a kind of patois. Destinations are referred to, epigrammatically, as “the sunshine coast,” “the city of discovery,” “a world of a difference,” “cultural capital,” etc. This is a rhetorical shorthand intended to convey some kind of spatial identity. It is equivalent to what Shortridge (1984) elsewhere, although not in the context of tourism, considered to be a form of regional labeling. These epithets purport to represent a particular set of traits which may be associated with a group of residents and are not, therefore, to be dismissed as trivia. They insinuate dreams and myths into the public perception of places which may come, in time, to stand, like icons, logos or mottoes, as shorthand statements of their character. How this engages with the affective attachment of residents to their own localities is still a matter of some speculation, however, because it has not been sufficiently taken into account in geographical treatments of the function of place in the formation of group and individual identity (see Boyle and Hughes 1995). However, although under-reported, the place-representational role of tourism in differentiating space would appear to be culturally substantial.

But place representation is an active form of spatializing. The place depicted is intentionally constructed rather than being a passive outcome of some more “serious” economic activity such as mining or manufacturing. The geographical character of a tourist destination is aesthetically managed with an eye to its tourist market potential. This distinction between active and passive spatial differentiation is an important one, for it distinguishes the traditional geography of space from a more cultural approach.

Space may be treated in two fundamentally different ways. While for quotidian purposes it seems impossible to escape the experience of being in space, it does not axiomatically follow that social behavior will always deploy spatializing strategies. Tourism, I wish to show, may be studied in the latter way. Yet this use of place representation should not be interpreted simply as the latest example of irrepressible capitalist exploitation of the disenfranchised (although there are multitudinous examples of this), for the rash of re-imaging strategies that seems to have infected every town and city in the Western world is just as likely to come from within those communities as to be imposed on them from without. As their functions have waned, so towns and cities have become actively engaged in reconfiguring their identity to get themselves onto the tourist map (Hughes 1992; Short et al. 1993).

Whether externally or internally motivated, however, what is particularly noteworthy is that the semiological differentiation of space has become a highly self-conscious, self-reflective process. The content and form in which places are represented can no longer, if they ever could, be thought of as evolving naturally. Rather they reflect an unstable outcome of a struggle between interest groups in which the self-conscious intervention of tourism entrepreneurs, travel writers, governments and tourists have come to play an increasing role.

Organizing tourist space

Tourism is an important conduit for organizing meanings in space. Such meanings may “evolve” as explorers and adventurers are succeeded by less existential forms of mass tourism (Cohen 1973, 1974, 1979); they may be formally imposed by corporate mandate, as in the development of resort complexes; they may be the self-conscious product of local community aspirations for economic development (Boyle and Hughes 1995); or, most probably, some blend of all three. The effect of tourism, however, is to reconfigure the existing cultural and physical endowment of places as they become installed in the more autonomous discourse of tourist consumption.

Tourism, as a mode of spatial organization, confers exchangeability on artifacts by reconfiguring country houses, palaces, safari parks, game reserves, coal mines, theme parks, etc., as tourist attractions (Urry 1990; Crang 1994). In so doing, the particularity of the individual histories of each become subordinated to the thematic demands of a touristic mode of consumption. As tourist “sights,” they carry “markers” (MacCannell 1973, 1976) whose descriptions are likely to deny the cultural and political depths behind their conception. Boniface and Fowler (1993) speak, for example, of the risks involved in presenting heritage to an international audience of tourists. Such presentations tend to homogenize particularity and in the process corrupt it.

we believe the new circumstance of A heritage presentation to a world audience comprised of peoples not just from many countries but also of many different cultural components, is an intrinsically perilous situation … [and] … those who embark upon the presentation of heritage to the global traveller should regard themselves as addressing an extremely difficult and hazardous task.

(Boniface and Fowler 1993: 150)

Yet even the ubiquitous sun, sea and sand continue to assert their spatial particularities in order to attract tourists to one destination over another. This ambiguity between sameness and difference is a useful point of departure from which to examine some of the qualities of tourist space.

Hyper-reality

The notion of space being not real but hyper-real owes much to the work of postmodern authors. It draws attention to the mediating influences which ensure that the representation of a place is never a simple given but is rather a social construction. What makes the ludic space of tourism hyper-real is perhaps easiest to understand in the context of heritage, where the appeal of nostalgia dictates that what is offered to the tourist is authentically restricted. Heritage attractions (as all tourist attractions) must be safe, clean and pleasing. In fulfilling such conditions, each artifact is displaced from its historical moorings and effectively becomes a different object.

Even if based on authentic historical precedents, heritage objects tend to acquire new meanings, which “overwrite” their original significance. In this process the complexities of social life are washed out and replaced with promotional gestures that fuse with the evocative expectations of the visitor. They acquire, in other words, a different reality. Judgmentally, this reality is likely to be evaluated aesthetically rather than scientifically or morally. As a priority it must “look right” irrespective of historical verisimilitude, cultural validity or moral probity. It must be “pretty as a picture.”

In attempting to fulfill such expectations, places engage in intensive programs of aesthetic management. City streets have become pedestrianized and “traditional” ironwork street furniture, resonant of Victorian England, “re”-introduced. Buildings are floodlit, lending the night-time streetscape a theatrical atmosphere, and their frontages historicized and conservation policy extended. Reproduction is the password to a successful tourist destination, for it seems now obligatory, if visitor expectations are to be met, for a destination to engage in aesthetic reconstruction.

The geographical expression of this is no less palpable for its being woven out of the fancies of brochure copywriters or travel journalists, but it is a pastiche of the past. It has no historical authenticity and it evokes a sense of a past that never was. These are spaces that are self-evidently real but, in being faithful to no antecedent circumstances, exhibit a heightened reality framed by the systematic collection, in one place, of aesthetically evocative stimuli.

Liminality

Turner (1974) adapts the concept of liminality to describe the “betwixt and between” moments when people are disposed to feel liberated from the norms of their society. Classically, it described the transitional periods associated with a “rite of passage.” Shields (1991) deploys the concept to describe the social status of the beach:

The liminal status of the eighteenth-century seashore as an ill-defined margin between land and sea fitted well with the medical notion of the “Cure.” Its shifting nature between high and low tide, and as a consequence the absence of private property, contribu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Writing the tourist landscape
• PART II Destinations
• Index