Tourism, Performance and the Everyday

Consuming the Orient

Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415467131
• eBook ISBN: 9781135256913
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Tourism has become increasingly 'exotic', a process made possible by low-cost charter tourism and cheaper air tickets. Faraway and evermore 'exotic' holidays are becoming widespread and within reach as destinations make their entry into the mass tourism market. Strolls through the bazaars of Istanbul and cruises on the Nile are packaged into the sea, sand and sun culture of traditional forms of organized mass tourism. At the same time new technologies weave the fabric of tourism and everyday life even closer, circulating images, information, and objects between them. Taking off from this observation, Tourism, Performance and the Everyday invites readers to follow the flow's of tourist desires, objects, meanings, photographs, fears, dreams and memories weaving together the spaces of and between Western Europe, Turkey and Egypt.

Tourism, Performance and the Everyday carefully analyzes the cultural and social impacts of mass-tourist experiences of 'exotic' places on the wider aspects of everyday life. It treats mass-tourism as a cultural phenomenon that feeds into the practices and networks of peoples' everyday lives rather than as an isolated, trivial or 'exotic' event. It traces how these impacts are mediated by various mobilities between home and away through innovate mobile and ethnographic research methods at tourist destinations and the home of tourists. The book contains analysis of diaries, photographs, blogs and photo web sharing sites, participant observation of performing tourists and 'home ethnographies' of the afterlife tourist photographs, souvenirs and memories.

In doing this, the book traces out the multiple interconnections and mobilities between everyday spaces and leisure spaces as well as the multiple ways in which the Orient is consumed on holiday and at home. The book appeals to a wide audience among students, researchers and educators within the social and cultural sciences studying, researching and teaching theories and methods of tourism, Orientalism and cultural encounters as well as broader issues of leisure, consumption and everyday life.

1
Performing tourism, performing the Orient

Introduction

One of the most striking features of contemporary social life is the persistent presence of the Other in consumption and everyday life. The most remote corners of the globe now seem within daily reach when we work, shop, dine, watch television, surf and participate in the internet or walk the streets. Even the most spatially bounded forms of local social life and identity in the neighbourhood community or within the walls of territorial nation states are in part enacted on the premise of global flows, networks and scapes, and legitimized with reference to the perceived threats of the mobility of migrants, crime, terror, diseases, pollution, goods, capital and so on. In a sense we have all become ‘everyday cosmopolitans’ (Beck, 2006). Whether or not people turn their back on it, the Other emerges in the midst of the everyday through a variety of such mobilities. In contemporary discourse ‘the Orient’ has very much emerged as the epitome of Otherness to West European and North American culture, economy and society. To a degree not experienced before, the West and the Orient are woven together in webs of mobilities, corporeal, imaginative and virtual. The Orient has travelled to the West through the immigration of humans and the travelling of objects, signs and ideas. In many European towns and most cities, the Orient is within reach and consumable: one can see, touch, hear, eat, smell and click on it.

Although the Orient is part of Western home geographies, Westerners increasingly jump on jet planes to consume ‘the real thing’. As a result of low-cost charter tourism and cheaper air tickets, many consume the places, people and cultures of the Orient at first hand, and perform connectedness with or detachment from these when performing tourism. Despite recurrent terror bombings at tourist destinations, global tourism continues its massive growth, and the Middle East countries are among the prime drivers (World Tourist Organization, 2008). Strolls through the bazaars of Istanbul and cruises on the Nile are packaged into the sea, sand and sun culture of traditional forms of organized mass tourism. Safe but beaten tracks are replaced with exotic geographies of Oriental Otherness.

This present book is concerned with rethinking the nature of tourism consumption. Globalization theorists address the changing spatio-temporal relationships of the contemporary world under labels such as ‘time–space compression’ (Harvey, 1989), cultural hybridity (Bhabha, 1994) and global flows (Castells, 1996, 2000). Instead of thinking of ‘the global’ as something that merely adds to, extends, enriches or threatens our everyday lives and capabilities to consume, we suggest refocusing on the interdependent mobilities that transform everyday performances from within. As the global moves within reach, it also emerges as a condition for the mundane practices, minutiae and performances of day-to-day routines and interactions. We become intimate with the global, and the intimate fabrics of our daily lives become global. Touristic consumption is a particularly interesting example of this globalization ‘from within’. As tourist travel becomes widespread, ever more people and places are drawn into the cultural-economic circuit of the tourist industry, and as the global cultural industry fills our everyday spaces with touristic objects and signs so the world can be consumed from afar. Conventionally, tourism theories define tourism in contrast to the everyday, but this book examines how tourism and the everyday complexly converge on many fronts. It shows how there is a touristification of everyday life and especially how everydayness informs tourists’ performances. Tourist travel is not only about consuming Otherness but also about (re)producing social relations within family and friendship networks. Souvenirs, videos and tourist photographs decorate and become part of our bodies, living rooms and photograph albums while blogs, home pages, social networking sites such as Facebook and multimedia-sharing sites such as Flickr (photos) and YouTube (video), made possible by the ‘Web 2.0 revolution’, have made the internet more open, collaborative and participatory.

A central source of inspiration for this book is the increased awareness of practices, materials and ethnographic-inspired methodologies within parts of consumption studies in which attention has been redirected from semiotic studies of goods’ symbol values (‘sign-value’) towards material readings of everyday consumption practices and the affordances, or materiality, of objects (‘use-value’) (Warde, 2005; Watson, 2008). This has produced rich ethnographies of consumption practices in shopping malls (Miller et al., 1998), second-hand cultures (Gregson and Crewe, 2003) and private homes (Miller, 2001a), thus uncovering the many different everyday consumption practices and the variety of spaces in which they take place. By doing this, consumption studies has located itself within the material culture of people’s everyday lives and explored the roles that mundane (and material) consumer objects play in our everyday lives, as well as the technological, social, cultural and political trajectories that enable particular practices and objects to be enacted. Although practice is concerned with doings, practices cannot be reduced to what people do. Equally, there is no such thing as ‘just’ doing. Instead, doings are doings and performances, ‘shaped by and constitutive of the complex relations—of materials, knowledges, norms, meanings and so on—which comprise the practice-as-entity’ (Shove et al., 2007:13), and in this book we approach tourist consumption though the lens of performance. In this way we want to locate it within the recent ‘performance turn’ in tourism studies, hence the title of the book: Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient.

The performance turn in tourist studies

In some ways this book is an extension of our book Performing Tourist Places (Bærenholdt et al., 2004), in which we studied the production and consumption of tourist places in Denmark through the lens of performance. That book is framed by and itself constitutive of a performance turn that can be traced back to tourism theory and research in the 1990s. This turn is evident in research books and articles (Edensor, 1998; Desmond, 1999; Löfgren, 1999; Perkins and Thorns, 2001; Coleman and Crang, 2002; Bærenholdt et al., 2004, 2008; Lew et al., 2004; Malam, 2004; Sheller and Urry, 2004; Doorne and Atejlevic, 2005; Ritchie et al., 2005; Weave, 2005; Hannam, 2006; Minca and Oakes, 2006; Quinn, 2007; Ek et al., 2008; Obrador Pons et al., 2010). Given the danger of neglecting differences, it is justifiable to speak of a turn because the above publications share important departures from classical mainstream tourism theories. Much cultural tourism research has been concerned with how tourists are drawn to and experience —sense and represent—destinations, and the performance turn continues in that direction. But it also redirects tourism theory in some important ways. Although we believe that tourist studies have gained much from this turn, we also think that there is scope for theoretical and methodological progress and refinement. The performance turn is formed in opposition to the ‘tourist gaze’ and other representational approaches privileging the eye (e.g. MacCannell, 1976/1999; Shields, 1991; Dann, 1996a; Selwyn, 1996) by arguing that ‘tourism demands new metaphors based more on being, doing, touching and seeing rather than just “seeing” ’ (Perkins and Thorns, 2001:189; see also Cloke and Perkins, 1998). In particular, John Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990, 2002a) has been influential in portraying the tourist experience as a visual experience. The ‘tourist gaze’ suggests that people travel to destinations because of their striking visual qualities. In contrast, the performance turn highlights how tourists experience places in multisensuous ways that can involve multiple bodily sensations: touching, smelling, hearing, and so on. Tourists encounter cities and landscapes through corporeal proximity as well as distanced contemplation. Metaphorically speaking, in addition to looking at stages, tourists step into them and enact them corporeally.

Cultural accounts of tourism have often been trapped within a representational world of place myths and semiological readings of space (Hughes, 1998). The performance turn destabilizes semiotic readings in which places and objects are seen as signifying social constructs that can be unveiled through authoritative cultural readings rather than in terms of how they are used and lived with in practice. By shifting the focus to ontologies of acting and doing (Franklin and Crang, 2001) the corporeality of tourist bodies and their creative potentials, as well as the significance of technologies and the material affordances of places, are exposed. Like the practice turn within consumption studies, the performance turn dislocates attention from symbolic meanings and discourses to embodied, collaborative and technologized doings and enactments.

In contrast to the many studies portraying tourism as an overdetermined stage in which tourists are reduced to passive consumers that follow prescripted routes, the performance turn insists on uncovering creativity, detours and productive practices as much as choreographies and scripts. Much tourism research focuses upon how tourism companies and organizations, through guides, brochures and web pages, design destinations by inscribing them with place myths and staging them in postcard fashions (Larsen, 2006). And they ascribe great power to such symbolic design work in shaping tourist places and choreographing tourists’ vision and cameras. Echoing many others, Urry uses the metaphor of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ to portray the choreographed nature of actual sight-seeing. He states that:

much tourism involves a hermeneutic circle. What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photography images, which have already been seen in tour company brochures or on TV programmes. While the tourist is away, this then moves on to a tracking down and capturing of those images for oneself. And it ends up with travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off.

(Urry, 2002a: 129)

Thus, effectively people travel in order to see and photograph what they have already consumed in image form. This model essentially portrays commercial imagery as all-powerful design machinery that turns the performances of tourists into a ritual of quotation whereby tourists are framed and fixed rather than framing and exploring (Osborne, 2000:81). Many conceptual writings about tourism ‘rapidly pacify the tourist—that is they tend to experience, perceive and receive but not do’ (M.Crang, 1999:238). A too fixed focus upon already inscribed destinations and staged experiences renders the tourist a passive sight-seer consuming sites in prescribed fashions.

We need a circuit of performance model that blurs the distinction between production (choreographing) and consumption (acting) and instead see them as interrelated and overlapping in complex ways. Tourist performances do not exist independently of structures of ‘production’ and wider societal discourses. Surely, as Edensor (2001a: 71) says, ‘when tourists enter particular stages, they are usually informed by pre-existing discursive, practical, embodied norms which help to guide their performative orientations and achieve a working consensus about what to do’. Such ‘norms’ are guidelines, blueprints and nothing more (or less). ‘Bodies are not only written upon but also write their own meanings and feelings upon space in a continual process of continual remaking’ (Edensor, 2001b: 100). Performances are never determined by their choreographing, since there is always an element of unpredictability: the places and performances that tourists enact are never completely identical to the scripts in marketing material and guidebooks (Larsen, 2005). Portraying tourists solely as consumers disregards the fact that they produce photos and place myths; in the act of consuming, tourists turn themselves into producers. The act of ‘consumption’ is simultaneously one of production, of reinterpreting, re-forming, redoing, of decoding the encoded. Likewise, performances of production are partly shaped by, and respond to, performances of consumption (du Gay et al., 1997).

Although tourism performances are surely influenced by guidebooks, concrete guidance, promotional information and existing place myths, the performance turn argues that tourists are not just written upon, they also enact and inscribe places with their own stories and follow their own paths.

In much tourism writing, places are presumed to be relatively fixed, given, passive and separate from those touring them. The performance turn destabilizes such static and fixed conceptions of places and sites. Instead places and performances are conceived as non-stable and contingent enactments. Edensor argues:

The nature of the stage is dependent on the kinds of performance enacted upon it. For even carefully stage-managed spaces may be transformed by the presence of tourists who adhere to different norms. Thus stages can continually change, can expand and contract. For most stages are ambiguous, sites for different performances.

(Edensor, 2001a :64)

In this view, tourism performances are not separated from the places where they happen; they are not taking place in inert and fixed places. Tourist places are produced places, and tourists are co-producers of such places. They are performances of place that partly produce and transform places and connect them to other places. Most tourist places are ‘dead’ until actors take the stage and enact them: they become alive and transformed each time that new plays begin, face-to-face proximities are established and new objects are drawn in. Indeed, it can be argued that places emerge as tourist places, stages of tourism, only when they are performed (Bærenholdt et al., 2004).

Thus, studies of tourist performances highlight how tourists not only consume experiences but also co-produce, co-design and co-exhibit them, once they enact them and retell or publish them afterwards. Publication has escalated with the significant rise of user-generated Web 2.0 sites such as social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace), photo communities (e.g. Flickr, Photobucket) and travel communities (e.g. VirtualTourist, TripAdvisor), where users produce web content as well as consuming it. And even when tourists do ‘sight-see’ they are not completely passive; most are busy making, for instance, photographs. The performance turn acknowledges that in the act of consuming tourists turn themselves into producers; they create, tell, exhibit and circulate tales and photographs that produce, reproduce and violate place myths that tourism organizations have designed and promoted.

Simultaneously, the analytical distinction between producer and consumer that has been so durable in tourism and marketing theory is dissolved. Furthermore, the performance turn has challenged representational and textual readings of tourism, in which bodies and places often end up being reduced to ‘travelling eyes’ by making ethnographies of what humans and institutions do—enact and stage—in order to make tourism and performances happen. So the performance turn represents a move to ethnographic research in tourism.

Finally, the performance turn does not see tourism as an isolated island but explores connections between tourism, the everyday and significant others such as family members and friends. Most tourism performances are performed collectively, and this sociality is in part what makes them pleasurable (Bærenholdt et al., 2004). Tourism is not only a way of experiencing (new) places and events, but also entails emotional geographies of sociability; of being together with close friends and family members. And although there are elements of creativity and the unpredictable in tourism performances, they are also full of everyday conventions about proper behaviour and so on.

The performance turn has transformed tourism studies into an exciting and lively research field for those dissatisfied with purely representational accounts of tourism. We may say that the performance turn’s major achievement is that it gives vibrant life, liveliness, happen-ness and joyful banality to tourist studies’ former world of lifeless tourists, eventless events and dead geographies, and this book aims at following this path. And yet we also travel to and across new theoretical and methodological paths to overcome some of its limitations.

The...

Table of contents

• Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Performing tourism, performing the Orient
• 2 De-exoticizing tourist travel
• 3 Following flows
• 4 Material cultures of tourism
• 5 Mobilizing the Orient
• 6 Doing tourism
• 7 Performing digital photography
• 8 The afterlife of tourism
• 9 Tourism mobilities and cosmopolitan cultures
• Notes
• References
• Index