Performing Tourist Places

This book looks at the making and the consuming of places in the contemporary world. Illustrated through various case-studies from Denmark, it considers how places, performances and peoples intersect. It examines the fascinating circumstances through which visitors to a place, in part, produce that place through their performances. Places are intertwined with people through various systems that generate and reproduce performances in and of that place. These systems comprise networks of ’hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machines’ that contingently realize particular performances of specific places. The studies featured here develop an exciting ’new mobility’ paradigm emerging within the social sciences.

Book Review

Drawing upon theories of landscape and performance, this work weaves together existing tourism literature with new scholarship to forge a geographically informed theory of tourism. Such a theory integrates the ways in which places are co-produced, circulated, interpreted, experienced, and performed for and by tourists, tourism boards, and even as everyday spaces. Bringing together theories of ritual, Peircean semiotics, ideology, and performance, the authors blend the often separate literatures of tourism sites and touristic practices. Whereas most tourism texts focus on a part of the 'tourism equation'-the tourism site, or the tourist experience-a geographic theory of tourism brings these constituent parts together in thinking about notions of place. Place processes are central to geography as well as tourism studies because tourism facilitates encounters with distinct locations. As this book argues, considering tourism as performative draws disparate areas of tourism theory together to better understand the ways tourism happens in and across places.

Drawing upon theories of landscape and performance, this work weaves together existing tourism literature with new scholarship to forge a geographically informed theory of tourism. Such a theory integrates the ways in which places are co-produced, circulated, interpreted, experienced, and performed for and by tourists, tourism boards, and even as everyday spaces. Bringing together theories of ritual, Peircean semiotics, ideology, and performance, the authors blend the often separate literatures of tourism sites and touristic practices. Whereas most tourism texts focus on a part of the 'tourism equation'-the tourism site, or the tourist experience-a geographic theory of tourism brings these constituent parts together in thinking about notions of place. Place processes are central to geography as well as tourism studies because tourism facilitates encounters with distinct locations. As this book argues, considering tourism as performative draws disparate areas of tourism theory together to better understand the ways tourism happens in and across places.

This title offers a dynamic understanding of tourism, usually defined in terms of clearly circumscribed places and temporalities, to grasp its changing spatial patterns. The first part looks at the "befores" – everyday places such as daily markets, flea markets, urban neighbourhoods, that have captured the tourists’ interest and have progressively experienced new development in their ordinary patterns. The second part investigates the "afters" – former tourist spaces moving beyond the tourism sphere and becoming places of everyday life, study, or work. Chapters explore what this means for local societies and examine this contemporary phenomenon of former tourist attractions becoming ordinary and everyday, and of ordinary places beginning to take on a tourist dimension. The hybridisation of tourist practices and ordinary practices is also explored through a range of international case studies and examples written by highly regarded and interdisciplinary academics. This edited volume will be of great interest to upper-level students, academics, and researchers in tourism, urban studies, and land use planning.

Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia.

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.