The Cultural Moment in Tourism

Laurajane Smith, Emma Waterton, Steve Watson, Laurajane Smith, Emma Waterton, Steve Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136831539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book is a response to the burgeoning interest in cultural tourism and the associated need for a coherently theorized approach for understanding the practices that such an interest creates. Cultural tourism has become an important and popular aspect of contemporary tourism studies, as well as providing a rich seam of upscale product development opportunities in the industry as a whole. Much of the related literature, however, focuses upon describing and categorizing cultural tourism from a supply-side perspective. This has prompted the taxonomizing of cultural tourists on the basis of their level of involvement and interest in cultural tourism products and/or their economic worth as a sought after market segment. There have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues beyond conventional representational theories; this book aims to fill that void.

This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and empirical account of what it means to be a cultural or heritage tourist. It achieves this by exploring the interactions of people with places, spaces, intangible heritage and ways of life, not as linear alignments but as seductive 'moments' of encounter, engagement, performance and meaning-making, which are constitutive of cultural experience in its broadest sense. The book further explores encounters in cultural tourism as events that capture and constitute important social relations involving power and authority, self-consciousness and social position, gender and space, history and the present. It also explores the consequences these insights have for our understanding of culture and heritage and its management in the context of tourist activity.

In capturing the 'cultural moment', this book provides a better understanding of the motivations, on-site activities, meaning constructions and other cultural work done by both tourists and tourist operators. The volume confronts and explores the cultural, political and economical interrelations between culture, heritage and the tourism industry. In so doing, it also investigates how this co-mingling of identity, representation and social life may be better apprehended with the wider shift in critical thought towards notions of affect and performativity. The book is a fundamental and influential contribution to research in this field. It will be of significant value to students, academics and researchers interested in this broad topic area.

Part I

The moment in theory

1 Meaning, encounter and performativity

Threads and moments of spacetimes in doing tourism

David Crouch

Introduction

The ‘performative’ ‘moment’ across disciplines is particularly interesting and informative in the re-conceptualization surrounding matters generally known as ‘tourism’. As such, this chapter advances a contribution to a new perspective on tourism related explanation. At the same time, the chapter contributes to those very moments, such as they may be, of doing tourism. Performativities occur both in and as moments, numerously among things we do and feel. The notions of performance and ‘the performative’ (unfortunately a very awkward expression) point to the character of the experience of being a tourist, what that means and the meaning that may make possible in somebody’s life – perhaps above all, how it feels to be alive. What is it, what is it like to do tourism, to be a tourist? What is the character of its moments and how do they happen? Do we find answers in the notion of the consumer as receiver of signposted images, the pilgrim or the gazer, or the more recent attempt to redefine tourism in the notion of mobilities?

The potential for a finer and more clearly conceptually grounded grasp of doing tourism, rather than using tourism research mainly to bolster business, is at the heart of this chapter’s concerns. The chapter seeks to open up afresh the complexity, nuance, subjectivity, potential and otherwise, as well as identity, belonging and disorientation that may surround the practice of being tourist. In so doing, I hold on to the influence of contexts, but remain acutely aware that contexts flicker and inflect; they do not determine. A hopefully fairly accessible consideration of Gilles Deleuze’s thinking, alongside that of others, informs the chapter. I examine the tourist’s doing and feeling through considerations of how the individual encounters spaces (sites or destinations, as they tend to be labelled in tourism studies). I have chosen notions of space to project my thinking, not least as a geographer. While cultural geography provides the main disciplinary thread, this paper is as much informed by social anthropology and cultural studies.

However, the momentary character of doing tourism is also crucially phenomenological, and my arguments incorporate that character by tracing the way moments emerge and are felt. Indeed, doing tourism can encompass a mass of anastomosing moments, rather than just one piece of performativity, or even grasping the time of holiday as a moment in itself. The multiple moments can commingle, and draw upon other spaces and times of moments of experience, whether over a confined period of time or through, in and across our memory and its engagement with other people. Moments relate also to inter-subjective and more generalized cultural contexts. Contexts are noted through a constellation of influences and affects, but they flicker and inflect; they do not determine.

Further central concerns of this chapter address the fluid character of space and time – or spacetime – in human activity and feeling. Not least, these work with the complexity, belonging and disorientation germane to tourist experience. In a more familiar manner, destinations and the pre-given projection of their character tend to obscure the actuality of moments of doing tourism, their presumption resting on their prior shaping rather than experience, encounter, and performativity. Two other strangely persisting or prevailing directions of thinking the tourism moment considered here are the visual in the reductive form of the gaze, and the more recent arguments concerning so-called ‘mobilities’ that, it is argued, essentially distract attention from the tourism/moment.

Of importance, too, is the relationality of one moment in doing tourism among other moments, both as tourist and across life, in recent presents and pasts. Those times are worked, or felt, in relation to spaces, as spacetimes. Rather than the felt moments of tourism being channelled through particular ‘destinations’ or labelled ‘places’, for example, the chapter is oriented towards a more flirtive, subjective and fluid character of individuals’ encounter, and perhaps engagement, with space. The discussion considers moments of tourism in terms of their flows – commingling events even of the most subtle kind, fragments that mingle in different ways. I argue that doing tourism can be germane to our negotiation of identity amid moments of disorientation and belonging.

Working through these elements, this chapter offers a re-conceptualization of what we mean by cultural tourism – essentially that all tourism is inevitably cultural. In my argument, all tourism is, by reasoning rather than mere definition, cultural. All tourism occurs through human-related contexts: encounter and action. In terms of remembered other spaces, spacetimes, experiences and moments, doing tourism contributes to our feeling of heritage; heritage is not something ‘other’, pre-given or institutionally enabled, whether by international governments or club interest groups. All tourism has a character of our own heritage, feeling of belonging, identity and change in the making. Driven by management and industry thinking, tourism is habitually considered in discrete customer packages, as ‘tourism types’, and each is rendered its distinctive ‘moment’. Yet a number of disciplines seeking conceptually to understand the character of doing tourism in terms of being human can assert a more considered, nuanced conceptualization that works from individuals’ lives and the feeling of practice and its performance: dynamics, process and emergences – relationalities.

Along the way, this chapter problematizes the ‘making distinct’ of performativities surrounding doing tourism in relation to other fields of human living. The moment as tourist, as I intend to consider here, is not simply some isolated lacuna, separate from living or, as Andrew Metcalfe and Ann Game put it, of ‘liveness’ (2008). Doing tourism happens; it occurs and it is worked along and among other flows of being alive, of practice and its performativities. I suggest that it is curious that tourism is habitually made distinct from, for example, leisure. I ask why the habitual distinction between leisure and tourism is trapped in unthought convoluted considerations, where distance is only measurable and objectified. My argument revolves around notions of performativity, the relationality of life, its spaces and times where being tourist, doing leisure, alongside other arenas and moments of practice, commingle rather than occur in isolation. Similarly, tourism is often presumed to mean travelling long distances. It is surely difficult to grasp the significance of short, medium and long distances, and, I suggest, their particular technologies.

Thus the chapter proceeds in the following way. Initially, I seek to unpack some of the character of the performative dynamic, noting also the imperative considerations of phenomenology and social constructivism. Performativity is considered in relation to life spaces – thus spacetimes – through which moments occur. Next, I turn to the complexity, belonging and disorientation associated with the tourism’s performative moments. These considerations are considered in relation to notions of the gaze and mobilities, which, problematically, have come to be regarded as core concepts in making sense of tourism. The completing section brings these discussions to the matter of ‘cultural tourism’ and the example of heritage. Thus, in positioning performativity’s contribution to unravelling the tourist encounter, I seek to contribute a little to using it to make sense of that encounter. Above all, this chapter is concerned with process (not category): process as relational, not bounded.

The performative dynamic

What is called performativity can be situated inside practices – social and cultural practices – rejecting the idea of cultural contexts acting in a prior capacity to doing, feelings and thinking; the idea of performativity positions our practices, actions, relations, memories, performative moments as emerging contexts too. These many facets of being alive, and affected, commingle in a fluid, part open, part limited manner.

Practices, performative and embodied, are characterized in doing. Each is articulated for the individual in terms of doing as constituting or refiguring their own significations, as material or embodied semiotics, and may respond to other representations of the world (Game 1991; Crouch 2001). Performance as performativity is taken further as ongoing and multiple interrelations of things, space and time in a process of ‘becoming’ in engaging the new that may be similar to Radley’s (1995) consideration of embodied practice: unexpected and unconsidered, not only prefigured, and suggestive of a similar performative shift beyond the mundane and routine habituality. It is possible that going further may emerge from exactly those apparently momentary things (Dewsbury 2000). Moreover, the borders between ‘being’ – as a state reached – and ‘becoming’ are indistinct and constantly in flow (Grosz 1999), although they may be focused in the ‘event’ (Dewsbury 2000: 487–89). In the present discussion, becoming is distinguished from being in the sense of Grosz’s becoming as ‘unexpected’, where performance’s performativities may open up new, reconstitutive possibilities. It is in the notion of multiple routes of becoming that the discourse on performativity is particularly powerful.

Throughout this chapter there is a tension between the related threads of performance, ‘performativity’ and embedded practice in terms of how each contributes to our feeling, doing and thinking tourism. Significations and their ontological potential, in relation to performance’s significance in making sense (temporally, unevenly, nonlinearly, multiply, or performative structures of feeling) may be seen as affecting an individual’s protocols and contexts (Harrison 2000). Through performativities, practice and performance individuals are able to feel, think and rethink. Although Dewsbury (2000: 481) suggests that we may eschew performativities as ‘not being moments of synthesis’, they may constitute important informing elements, their fluidities merging in events, nodes or knots of complexity, awkward and of both apparent resolution and potential contradiction – exemplified in Roach’s performance as ‘transformative practice’ (1995). Their significance may be in advancing the individual, intimate worlds beyond where individuals are felt to be.

The expressive character in performativity is especially significant in becoming. The significance of becoming tends to be considered in terms of profound rearrangement of the self and the niches and nuances of getting along in life that may or may not make life more enjoyable and bearable, and may consist of numerous momentary performativities that may themselves be significant (Dewsbury 2000). The potential existence of so-called ‘ordinary’, mundane or routine practices for becoming may seem limited. Instead, performance, generally, and expressivity have tended to be interpreted from powerful projects, around the borders of staged performances of theatricality and more intentionally and selfconsciously expressive practices such as dance. Yet as a range of interpretation elucidates, much can happen in simple things, including dance itself, sitting in a deckchair, walking or simply doing calm things: moments outside the ordering of performance (Radley 1995; Carlsen 1996; Thrift 1997; Crouch 2001, 2010; Dewsbury 2011; Lorimer 2011).

Moreover, life and (cultural) meaning, and feeling and thinking, are not all in performativity, of course. There are manifold contextual influences, of social situations of diverse qualities, of mediated meanings and significance. The character of performativity occurs through the body, the individual. Thus the affects of embodied, phenomenological practice work among performative moments and commingle. Phenomenology’s character, of multiple sensualities, intersubjectivity, expressivity and poetics, merges and affects. Furthermore, our ongoing practice in the world, with all its performativities, contributes to what Shotter (1993) calls our ‘practical ontology’ – and that becomes part of ongoing contexts, too.

The tourism moment emerges as complex, enormously variable but surprisingly situated in one simple thing: the sometimes awkward, sometimes wonderful moments of negotiating who we are, how we feel in being alive. Insights of performativity emphasize the divergent and multiple possibilities of reconstituting life. These varied themes are interwoven through a discussion on empirical work and, iteratively, the challenge of identifying and of interpreting performance and its significance in and through spacing. Performativity acts and happens in dynamic interplay among sensory feelings, imagination, sensuality and desire, expressiveness and meaning making. Moreover, the character of process in the relationality of performativities and objects we can feel, touch and reflect upon operates multiple affects, time and space.

Performativity in flirting with space

Rather than continue the habitual emphasis on tourism ‘destinations’ being pre-figured and labelled with a character that individuals will connect with, privileging the power of context, I engage a notion of flirting with space. In his marvellous story The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (1984: 174) asks what flirtation is:

One might say that it is behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Such pregnancy of possibility and possibility of becoming: the implicit if possibly agonizing playfulness. The very combination of contingent enjoyment, uncertainty, frustration, anxiety and hope would seem to thread across living. Along with these, living holds a felt possibility of connection, meaning, change. To fix them may take assurance, certainty or entrapment, closure or a mix of these.

The more explorative, uncertain and tentative ways in which our being is part of a world of things, movements, materials and life – openings and closures, part openings mixed with part closures, engaged in living – suggest a character of flirting, spaces of possibility. It can be exemplified in the way in which we can come across very familiar sites and find new juxtapositions of materials, materialities and feelings, as it were, ‘unawares’. The unexpected opens out. Even if we may feel ordinary, repetitive, extraordinary, we find that we can ‘look … for the first time’, feel the world anew (Bachelard 1994: 156). Our emotions become alive in the tactility of our thought; we discover our life and its spaces anew. Time and emotion can deliver the change. However modest these feelings of vitality may be, this quiet dynamic can unsettle familiar and expected cultural resonances and the work of politics. What was felt ordinary, mundane and everyday changes – changes in texture and in a feeling of what matters. Encounters like this can happen in diverse, nuanced and complex ways among moments of doing things, across different spaces and journeys of our lives and different intensities of encou...