October 2, 2005
Leah responds to MacCannell
In her book Young Geographers (1934) Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the founder of Bank Street College of Education, outlines her model for the study of geography as a basis for “exploring” and “mapping” the world. She defines a geographer as an “investigator” who “does more than collect factual data. He thinks in geographical relationships. He sees the bearing of one fact upon another fact and thereby produces something different from and added to the two separated facts – a relationship” (p. 4) She contends that “even young children can and do think in geographic terms” (p. 3) In the education of younger students such explorations center around the various locales and activities present in the children’s most immediate environment; in older grades geographic studies take on more abstract and technical elements, as evident in the study of topography and the making of various kinds of maps.
Mitchell’s students are not “tourists” but rather “investigators” of a geography that is theirs to explore. The purpose of their school-mediated explorations is to help them develop the capacities needed to explore the world in this way. Mitchell’s pedagogical model (which was one of the bases for my professional training in museum education at Bank Street College) came very much to mind as a contrast to the idea of “the tourist” in these readings and in thinking about the content of the course overall.
In part this connection came to mind because of an explicit connection that Dean MacCannell made to such school-sponsored explorations. In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class he notes that “School children’s tours of firehouses, banks, newspapers and dairies are called “educational” because the inner operations of these important places are shown and explained in the course of the tour.” (p. 98) MacCannell’s use of this example made me more aware of my own tendency to think of locations in terms of their potential for experiences that could be described as “educational.”
MacCannell’s analysis of tourist experiences provides a helpful way to begin to move beyond this perspective, by offering a typology that focuses on structural elements, reminiscent of some models of curriculum development. MacCannell’s description of a tourist attraction as “an empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight and a marker (a piece of information about a sight.)” is reminiscent of educational theories that name the various elements of an education experience. For example, it could be compared to the four “commonplaces” of education suggested by Joseph Schwab: teacher, student, subject matter and milieu. While these typologies are helpful in terms of schematizing the elements of a phenomenon and can aid in creating a format for identifying and analyzing these elements, the danger in using them is that they might become “static,” serving more as “markers” then “touchstones” in studying a phenomenon. Hence, while MacCannell defines a tourist attraction as a “relationship” other methodologies need to be employed to understand the nature of the relationship – or perhaps, better, the set of relationships – that constitute the phenomenon itself. If one considers the example of an educational experience (and I would argue that tourist experiences could be considered a form of educational experience) then it should be clear that identifying the commonplaces or describing them is not sufficient to fully capture the nature of the phenomenon or “what is really happening.” (This term that may simply be a fancy way of saying “the truth.”) Such an exercise will not answer such questions as “What are the students really learning?” or “What does the teacher mean to be communicating about this subject?” What is required is a theory and/or methodology which attempts to capture and understand the dynamic that is the interplay of the relationships of all of the commonplaces in an actual enactment of this phenomenon.
The metaphor of performance seems to offer an answer to this conundrum. (Perhaps this could be as true for education as it is for tourist studies.) Tim Edensor’s description of this in his article “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism” points in this direction: “Tourism is a process which involves the ongoing (re)construction of praxis and space in shared contexts. But this (re) production is never assured, for despite the prevalence of codes and norms, tourist conventions can be destabilized by rebellious performances or by multiple, simultaneous enactions on the same stage.” (p. 60) [This last sentence would be a useful one for all education policy makers to read.] By introducing the notion of reflexivity as well, Edensor offers researchers a way to consider both a study of the phenomenon in action and reflect on both its “norms” and subversions of it. Edensor concludes by noting that “there is an unceasing proliferation of tourist spaces and practices which open up the world,” and expand the possibilities of where and how such performances occur.
Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, in their article “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” extend this idea to say “Tourism is at least part of the way we now perceive the world around us, wherever we are and whatever we do. It is a way of seeing and sensing the world with its own tool kit of technologies, techniques and aesthetic sensibilities and pre-dispositions.” (p. 8) This expansion of the realm of tourism takes me back to Lucy Sprague Mitchell, because it suggests that “tourism” serves as a trope for understanding how human beings interact with their universe in a way strikingly similar to her depiction of her students as “geographers” who explore the world around them and can use the tools of her geography to understand its complexities, and their locations and roles within it, in a reflexive way.
Posted by BKG at 11:12 AM
September 25, 2005
Tourist Studies & the Ethnography of Modernity
“Tourism and revolution” Dean MacCannell explains, constitute “two opposing poles of modern consciousness –a willingness to accept, even venerate, things as they are on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other” (3). In this book, he in fact does succeed in establishing tourism as a worthy object of analysis.
In The Tourist, Dean MacCannell looks at tourism as a way of studying “Modernity.” He proposes that it not only reflects the ideological preoccupations of modernist thinking, but also that tourism spreads modern society. He proposes a fascinating method in which the subjects’ ethno- and/or meta-praxis informs the researcher’s. “The more I examined my data, the more inescapable became my conclusion that tourist attractions are an unplanned typology of structure that provides direct access to the modern consciousness of ‘world view,’ that tourist attractions are precisely analogous to the religious symbolism of primitive peoples” (2). By examining tourist activities, he explains, we can understand the taxonomies, values, ideologies, rituals, meaning systems, and differentiations of the modern world. The methodology becomes even more problematic as the culture he is exploring is “his own.”
The closest MacCannell comes to dealing with the subjectivities of the “tourees” is in his discussion of “Staged Authenticity” (91-107). The people who are part of the tourist spectacle mainly exist as symbols, as his description of semiotics reinforces (109-133). “The Ethnomethodology of Sightseers” (135-143). I agree with his contention that the international tourism industry does conventionally reproduce and reinforce the modernist ideological separation of the modern from the non-modern world (8). The non-modern exists as tourist attraction; ironically, when non-Western peoples begin to participate in tourist productions, they have begun to be incorporated into the ideologies and practices of capitalist modernity.
The strength of MacCannell’s analysis is his accurate description of this definitional game. As his goal is to study an aspect of Western Modernity through one of its institutions, this is an appropriate method. However, I find problematic the way in which he reproduces it’s logic in his analysis. MacCannell explicitly states his intention to consider the universalizing ideologies of both modernity and tourism. While acknowledging these to be characteristic of modernist thinking, he reproduces this logic by totalizing fashion. Tourism and Modernity appear as monolithic categories.
In “Performing Tourism; Staging Tourism,” Tim Edensor, expands on MacCannel’s notion of tourism as performance and in particular his idea of “stage” regions. Edensor, however, makes the intervention of treating the tourist as performers, instead of just the passive consumer of simulacra natives, and he treats the experience of the Western tourist as an active site of meaning-production. He approaches “tourism” as a creative space in which “performance” can create identities and contest meanings. This is his symbolic antidote to the “dystopian future for tourism where every potential space becomes intensively stage-managed and regulated as part of the commodification of everything”:
“While there is no doubting the power to define the normative which inheres in these modes of promoting space and culture, such strategies can never eclipse the potential for innovative performances. However, at the same time as this homogenizing process, this closing in, there is an unceasing proliferation of tourist spaces and practices which open up the world, invade the everyday, and expand the repertoire of performative options and the range of stages upon which tourists may perform” (Edensor 79). While I find the optimism of Edensor’s argument unconvincing, I think he is moving in the right direction.
The emphasis of Edensor’s approach on creativity, specificity, and performance, has some resonance with that advocated by Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang in “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory,” their introduction to this journal of Tourist Studies. In this article, Franklin and Crang offer a broader notion of the “touristic” a word coined by MacCannell himself in the mid-1970s. They reproduce MacCannell’s thesis that tourism is “a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized” and purport that Tourism Studies’ new agenda needs to reflect “this growing significance” (6-7). They propose 6 points of departure that foreground the global and local social contexts in which tourism takes place, the perspective of the tourees, and the creative, performative, emergent meanings made in the performance and interpretation of tourist productions. Like MacCannell, Franklin and Crang also look at tourism as a “total social fact,” but they define the social from a different perspective. Whereas MacCannel’s “universalizing” viewpoint has come to feel inadequate and ethnocentric in today’s world, their “globalizing” viewpoint, which sees a multiplicity of actors, agendas and subject positions, promises to make tourism an exciting object of study with the potential to illuminate the workings of “modernity” in the manner MaCannell intended.
Posted by Pilar Rau at 1:03 AM | TrackBack
September 18, 2005
Yochi Li's Response
I appreciated MacCannell’s effort in introducing tourism as a possible new theory in the 70’s. It suggested the possibility of valuing the modernity from the perspective of leisure by connecting tourism with different concepts and theories and analyzing the categorization of the attractions, the psychology of tourists and the approach of tourism. The notion of treating tourism outside daily life encountered challenge due to the globalization; tourism marched into a different domain, which indicates tourism is something carries the quality of quotidian.
Both Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang’s article, the Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory, and Tim Edensor’s article, Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism, they stated the phenomenon of tourism in the past decade, and the possibility of tourist studies. The cynical performance of the tourist in mentality, and the physical embodiment requests of the tourist reflected the demand of tourist changed dramatically after MacCannell’s introduction of tourism.
At the same moment of enjoying the reading, finding out most of the examples are appeared as the tourist form the western world to the eastern culture interests me. In Franklin and Crang’s article, they mentioned that “…that our understand of tourism has become fetishized as a thing, a product, a behavior – but in particular an economic thing. …” (6). Can tourism really sustain without fetishism? What is the personality of the tourist from eastern world when they encounter the western culture? While the superpower of the media still behold in the west, the mysterious veil is comparatively more translucent. Can tourist studies change not only with time, but also with space? I believe the answer to this question is positive, but if it is so, what would be the difference between the points of the West and the East?
Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 10:41 PM
Sarah Klein responds
MacCannell’s Marxist analysis of tourism places the tourist as the central figure in a uniquely alienated modernity. MacCannell’s tourist, in his or her ongoing search for experiences, is clearly looking for something that they cannot find in everyday life. However, the search for authentic experience elsewhere cannot help but perpetuate this rift between everyday life and “living” (authentic experience).
Tourism is the modern person’s way of coming to understand society. That it takes this form is no coincidence, argues MacCannell. That we are forced to with look at ourselves in each other is a symptom of a new relationship between work and leisure that has played out in late capitalism. That MacCannell considers a tourism where Westerners look at other Westerners and visit sights within their own countries is significant, and has relevant potential not only because it describes a phenomenon which happens, but also because it challenges the idea of the tourist as a person who goes somewhere else. While it is certainly important to consider the behaviour of (North American) tourists abroad, the recognition of tourist productions within our localities points to a deeper societal condition that MacCannell examines.
The ways that these places, both local and abroad are changed by their encounters with tourism, go largely undiscussed. As Franklin and Crang note, tourism does impact the everyday life of residents, as the industry produces more and various productions, people’s everyday lives are impacted by the presence of tourists, by the use of tourist sites in education, etc. Perhaps at the time that The Tourist was written the local economies and governments had not institutionalized tourism to such a degree - and yet there is still a sense in the book that tourism is a different mode of life than the everyday, which is somehow untouched by tourism. What about the everyday lives of the workers who are “on display”, whose “backstage regions” have been to some degree reconfigured as “front”? Or the lives of any people who live or work in a place which is also a tourist destination? Even when one is not obviously playing the tourist role, they are usually implicated in tourism. Some of these figures are discussed by MacCannell, but he is really concentrating on the tourist and his relationship to the sight. Today, however, considering the spread of tourism into more and more aspects of everyday life, it seems to be problematic to divide “everyday life” and “touristic experiences” in the way that MacCannell does, despite the fact that we are as alienated as ever.
MacCannell’s assertion of the existence of ‘front and back spaces’ and his analysis of the semiotic of attractions are still very useful for coming to understand the psychology of the tourist, and the ways that tourist productions exploit it (reflexively or not). He suggests that the mere existence of a ‘backstage’ space fuels a desire for ‘real’, ‘intimate’ and ‘authentic’ experience. To what degree the exhibited ‘back’ region is actually staged may not really matter; it is the idea that such a region exists that is urgently important to the tourist. This betrays an obsession with authenticity that is based on an inflexible division between what is real and what is staged ... I also sense an anxiety about being duped (this sense comes as much from myself as from my impression of the tourists described in the reading). There is an interesting relationship between tourist/audience/consumer and production/performers/product here, in that on the one hand a tourist wants what they paid for, (a product) and on the other hand there is a resistance to experiencing something which was produced for the purpose of their consumption (a performance; inauthentic). His analysis of sights and markers and their seemingly infinite configurations is useful in thinking about context (markers) in any performance situation - but especially those situations where there is actually very little to look at or experience, but the marker (“Bonnie and Clyde shootout happened here”) in combination with the presence of the tourist at the sight ( or non-sight) is enough to constitute an experience and a performance that simply reading the information in a book - the marker totally removed from the site - would not afford.
The New Tourist Studies -
Franklin & Crang and Edensor - Response
The “New Tourist Studies” calls for a widening of the spectrum of what can be studied and a widening of the spectrum of methods and approaches. The inaugural issue of Tourist Studies states its mandate(s) very clearly, but within that mandate is the invitation to a complex multiplicity of approaches. It knows what it is not, and it has ideas about what it can be, but it is in no way a complete or prescriptive manifesto on how to study tourism. Franklin and Crang explain that the phenomenon of tourism has ballooned at such a rate (and) that tourism scholarship has not caught up. Tourism has changed - it really is everywhere now. It seems that the invitation to work on this largely untheorized area and the invitation to multiple approaches is a way of ensuring the continuation of this field of research. The more nodes, the more different they are in subject and approach, the less likely is the risk of stagnation. This is what Franklin and Crang feel is necessary to emerge from and they do not want to go back! They elaborate several areas where tourist studies has yet to fully explore: the ways in which tourism has impacted everyday life even for “non-tourists”, the ever increasing and changing nature of human mobility and the complexity of the relationships between those who travel and those who are visited, the tourist as embodied - both in pleasant and unpleasant ways - as a challenge to the (dominant) visual model of the tourist as a sightseer, and the complex ways that objects function within tourism. The analysis of tourism as performance is one method suggested among many (ethnographic, humanistic, qualitative (Franklin and Crang 20)), and is one taken up by Tim Edensor in the same issue of Tourist Studies. While there are aspects (seeds?) of a performance analysis of tourism in MacCannell’s book [discussion of back and front performance regions - tourists monitoring each others’ performances as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tourists - discussion of staged authenticity - the function of markers for defining or delineating a tourist “performance space” (my wording)] Edensor takes the analogy all the way, equating tourist sites as stages and objects as props, complete with sets, directors, etc. He notes the distinction between highly controlled/directed spaces (enclavic) and more loosely controlled spaces (heterogeneous) but argues that the performances of the tourist within any tourist environment contain tensions between the unreflexive, embodied ‘habitus’ of the tourist within that particular space and the possibilities of performing otherwise. To me, this is a really interesting way of bypassing the ‘bad faith’ view of tourism - by emphasizing the agency of the tourist*. This is not to condone exploitative tourist practices, but to expand the possibility of studying tourism beyond a condemning criticism. It seems that this is one of the main goals of the “New Tourist Studies” (and it was present in MacCannell too): that to simply criticize tourism as ‘bad’ is not productive enough especially as this huge industry has such an impact - though it may be invisible or extremely visible - on our day to day lives.
If I can make it happen, the project I am considering will involve visiting a historic recreation in Nova Scotia (which I have started researching and plan to go in early/mid october). The elements from the above readings that I think would be useful to me are the MacCannell’s notion of the function of markers, and how they function within something so complex as a historic simulation. Also, the habitual behaviours of tourists and the potential to act differently in this highly controlled (enclavic) context would be interesting to consider (and cross my fingers that some people behave unexpectedly. I definitely will be behaving in an unusual manner to the site, though it may not be obvious). I would also like to consider the ways in which the local community has been incorporated into this particular site. I would not be surprised if this were the only industry in the immediate area, and I know that tourism is one of the main industries in Cape Breton, since the steel and coal industries are both now dormant.
* I am aware that MacCannell has written a recent essay entitled “Tourist Agency” in Tourist Studies that I have yet to read, but I imagine it would inform my thinking on this topic.
Posted by Sarah Klein at 4:00 PM
Trouble with tourism and travel theory
In their article, The trouble with tourism and travel theory?, Franklin and Crang attempt to delineate the contours of modern tourism as well as signal anticipated directions of the ‘new’ tourist theory. Breaking away from the narrow, fetishized understanding of tourism with a theory tied to the pragmatic aspects of its industry, they expand the notion of modern tourism and situate it as “central part of the understanding of social (dis-) organization.”(7) Tourism is seen as a “a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized.”(6/7) Franklin and Crang see a clear move away from a tourist theory bound by marketing research on the one hand and a positivist obsession with taxonomy, classification, and labeling on the other (6) and envision a shift to a new tourism seen as a laboratory for the exploration of and experimentation with identity, social relations, and other devalued social practices such as daydreaming and mind-travelling.(7)
One of the new directions in tourism studies that Franklin and Crang gesture toward, is the enactment and performance of tourism. This movement seems to grow out of an endeavor to go beyond the consideration of the representational aspects of symbolic categories toward an exploration of the performative nature of semiosis.(17) Franklin and Crang identify, in particular, two pioneers in the emergent field of “tourism as a system of presencing and performance” as Tim Edensor and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.(17) Looking at tourism through a prism of performance may prove to be fertile to the field, particularly in regard to the way in which performance works to destabilize fixed notions and ideas, unreflexive behavior, and the coherence of self. Thus, the “transformation and transmutation of the performative” (18) may the be a contestation of the prescribed and normative behavior of the tourist as well as the refashioning of tourist studies.
Dean MacCannell’s, The Tourist, a classic sociological examination of tourism first published in 1976, is primarily concerned with the uncovering of the deep structure of post-industrial society obscured by “modernity constantly ‘shifting grounds.’”(x) MacCannell applies a modified version of Ervin Goffman’s model of the performance of everyday life, as point of departure in the examination of the structural features of society. MacCannell sees social space as inextricably entwined with tourist attitudes and practices.(105)
In Performing tourism, staging tourism, Tim Edensor follows suit with the Goffmanesque examination of tourism, which is highly informed by the “inherently dramatic nature of social life.” (60) Edensor’s essay centers around the role of the tourist as performer, framing the experiential and performative aspects of tourism with the elements of production that resemble the design, choreography, as well as other aspects and techniques of theatre. Edensor examines various tourist spaces which he roughly groups into two categories. The first he terms enclavic space, and describes as a strongly circumscribed space which imposes the adherence to rules and induces a conformity of behavior.(63) The second is a heterogeneous tourist space which is a ‘weakly classified’, contingent, multi-purpose space with blurred boundaries.(64)
Edensor’s emphasis and examination of tourist habitus as unreflexive, embodied, and encoded is fascinating and incites further exploration. His notions of identity-oriented, non-conformist, ironic, post-tourist, resistant, improvisational and involuntary tourist performance, paraded around as exciting slogans advertising an enthralling treatment of the dark underbelly of tourism, yet in the end proved to reveal only a superficial and fleeting glance at the exoticized ‘other’ of tourism.
Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 3:43 PM
The new tourism
MacCannell’s approach to tourist studies, as he suggests in the introduction, is not based entirely on theories. His personal observations of the tourist behavior and of the tourist phenomenon are also essential to the composition of his book. However, I personally find that MacCannell constantly reads tourist phenomenon in relation to theories; and cultural, social, as well as economic aspects. I would like to say that he is not obsessed with a particular theory, or clinging to the authority of the existing theories. By referring back to them, he sometimes reaffirms theories, or, in some cases, raises questions about the application of theories on tourism.
In chapter two, MacCannell analyzes the structure of tourist attractions and the construction of the attractions. He indicates that a site, or an object, has to go through several stages to be sacralized and become a must-see for tourists. I am personally concerned about the process of mythologization of attractions, and find MacCannell’s analysis useful. He explains structuality of sacralization as well as the structurality within attractions themselves (46). In addition, his analysis of itineraries’ structural elements, which I failed to notice, also interested me. I wonder whether the tours designed by travel agencies also reflect this kind of structuality of itineraries.
While reading MacCannell’s Tourist, I realized the necessity of adjusting my research approach. Honestly, I tend to cling to the authority offered by existing theories as well as well-established scholars. MacCannell’s approach reminds me of the importance of keen observations, and his critique of Levi-Strauss and Goffman makes me aware of my inadequacy of thinking critically in the process of doing a research.
In Franklin and Crang’s “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory,” they indicate possibilities of various directions the investigation of tourism might go into as well as the insufficiency of the discipline, upon which the researchers should improve. In their article, they remind us of the problematic approach that reduces tourist phenomenon to “a set of economic activities.” Franklin and Crang suggest that the social and the cultural dimensions of tourism should not be overlooked.
I am especially interested in Franklin and Crang’s idea that tourism has developed into an interactive model in which tourists no longer passively observe the environment; instead, they actively participate in the activities taking place in the environment. As they mention in the article, “tourists are seeking to be doing something in the places they visit rather than being endlessly spectatorially passive.” The evolution of Japanese tourism is an example of such active participation in the surroundings.
Another point which I appreciate is that Franklin and Crang remind us of the necessity of researchers’ developing vocabulary to articulate the corporeal experience of tourism. The experience of taste, smell, and any other sensory experiences can be as proper as subjects that are traditionally considered serious and worthy of studies. Such idea is revolutionary to me, who originally came from the region where people downplay the sensory experiences and value the intellectuality. I realized that I have extremely small vocabulary, both in English and in Chinese, to describe the sensory experiences. I think that mainly because my unawareness of my cultural ambiance and my unwitting practice of the dichotomy of body and mind.
In “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism,” Edensor suggests that tourism is performative, and can be analogous to a stage performance. The idea resonates with Franklin and Crang’s description that tourist culture “is the preparation of people to see other places as objects of tourism, and the preparation of those people and places to be seen.” In his article, Edensor indicates how cultural performances are designed and presented in a way which serves the appetite of the tourists, who attend such performances with their expectation of observing exoticism of the native. This type of performances can not therefore be regarded as “authentic” representations of the native culture. Rather, they are constructed based on the projection of the tourists. It is not irrational to read these performances as the physicalization of the tourists’ stereotype of the culture and the people residing in such cultural milieu.
The reading assignment introduces me to various dimensions of tourism, which failed to notice. I have to admit that, like western tourists visiting the “primitive” and “exotic” places, I also have stereotype of New York City and the western world in general. As a tourist, I am disappointed or/and surprised when realizing the discrepancy between the way things actually are and the way I presumed them to be.
Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 2:53 PM
Erin Madorsky responds
Dean McCannell’s, The Tourist seeks to define modernity through a structural analysis of the modern phenomenon of tourism. Central to McCannell’s theory is that as modern man stopped organizing around work, he organized around leisure. Growth of the leisure activity of travel and tourism to mass proportions says something about modern man and a look at tourism using structural differentiation offers insight into modernity as well as diagnostics of modern illness like fragmentation, disorientation, and inauthenticity.
McCannell describes modern man’s rebellion against the dulled senses born of industrial society values. Modernity pushes to break the everyday, to experience further, to sense more. Rituals grew out of this desire to push the body into foreign realms and site icons as well as practices of location worship replaced traditional religious values. McCannell employs semiotics to understand the relationships of all the moving parts of tourism: marker, sight, tourist. He demonstrates how tourist values virally distribute themselves and what starts as a self contained point of interest that draws crowds, organically expands into a region with tourist value assigned down to the location markers for getting to the tourist site itself.
The extent to which humans travel, tour, move has drastically changed over the last twenty-nine years. Tourism has shifted to become “touristic culture.” An isolated act of choice has morphed into an entire culture characterized by its practice of touring. Like a garden of cross-cultural experiences, tourist studies more broadly looks at what happens when we all get a chance to confront each other within familiar and unfamiliar spaces only newly made possible by mass transit and communication technology developments. The extent to which McCannell’s theories still resonate is evidenced in the writings of new tourism theorists like Tim Edensor, Adrian Franklin, and Mike Crang. Franklin and Crang’s “The Trouble with Tourist and Travel Theory?” defines the faults with the discipline until 2001 and outlines the direction the field needs to go in to maintain relevance. McCannell is all over their mission describing tourism as emblematic of modern life: mobility, restlessness, and the search for authenticity. They define the need for research that is not born of the industry itself. The wrong people had been doing the research and social and cultural theorists need to replace the heavy influence of marketing on the topic. They demand a break from the mold of earlier formed ideas on the topic and urge for tourist studies to focus on tourism as a representation of cultural choice and social phenomena. Franklin and Crang bust the clichés inherent in tourist studies and question the overused established polarities of: home as female domain vs. away as male domain; exotic vs. banal, leisure vs. work, authentic vs. corrupted.
Definitive to the new new tourism studies outlined in Franklin and Crang is the debunking of previously held notions that tourism is a unique and exotic act limited within confined spaces. Referencing Rojek and Inglis, Franklin and Crang redefine tourism as an all encompassing act that is so normative it deserves labeling as ‘everyday.’ McCannell laid the groundwork for defining tourism as an everyday experience through his analysis of signs and labels. McCannell described the growth of perception of tourism away from a self contained site and towards an all encompassing event: the site, the site marker, the site reproduction, the site marker reproduction. Tourism penetrates beyond the moment of viewing a site and he wrote about the separation between the education of a future experience, the experience itself, and the memory of the experience. (The memory often more rich and favorable than the original act.) We assign value to an event or object in advance of the experience, based on how frequently that event or object has been reproduced and appeared in reproductions we’ve digested and been directed to. There is no doubt an affect on the experience of the object and therefore a relationship between the time of experiencing a tourist event in a tourist site and the time of viewing it in the everyday realm. This opens the door for tourist studies to examine the everyday.
The notion of tourism as an everyday event moves tourist studies into the territory of performance. Edensor describes in “Performing tourism, staging tourism” how everyday life is a role play incorporating various masks to meander through day-to-day life. Edensor hinges his tourism as performance metaphor on an interesting dynamic between everyday life and role playing. Performance transforms tourism from an isolated unique event to an everyday occurrence because although tourism implies the desire to escape, new socially coded roles of how to escape determine for the tourist how to behave and what role to play. Tourism by way of its being a role play becomes an every day act of performance. He describes the role of the tourist and the ability of a tourist to act in a prescribed fashion based on cultural and social queues. An interesting irony arises in that the role playing act of tourism involves removal of everyday masks but inherently puts on another mask. Edensor’s view of tourism as a performance opens as a very beautiful metaphor. He applies the language of theater to the act of tourism, for instance noting how guidebooks become scripts that direct tourist actors to areas of significance and tell tourists what they should value or not. (This too sounds McCannell.) Quickly though, Edensor loses his metaphor. Through examples, he becomes too literal, referring to actual theatrical arrangements that are categorized as tourist events.
Franklin and Crang connect tourism to performance on the grounds of the body. Understanding that tourism is not just a visual act, Franklin and Crang point to social desire for more, to digest more, to experience further, to move within, to act, to absorb, to sense. Here is the performance of tourism; not a visual show but an active participation, a visceral, bodily experience. Where tourism goes beyond the surface, it enters action and depth, involves the body and through the body becomes a performance.
My project will look at the cultural production of “Sepharad ’92.” In examining “Sepharad 92” as a tourist production I will be looking at how the events unfolded as a tourist act by incorporating McCannell’s categorization techniques. I will be more interested in the why it unfolded the way it did, to whose benefit, and to what effect? McCannell wrote that cultural productions establish models for copying and also offer new combinations for existing (McCannel, 26). Applying this to my topic, what values were cultivated and disseminated during the events of “Sepharad 92” and to whose benefit? How was the Jewish cultural community changed by such a production, and what happens in the space of an intra-communal tourist event (Jewish tourists touring themselves). My project will also incorporate questions of the exotic vs. the banal as dichotomized between Sephardic vs. Ashkenazic culture.
I want to end with a question. Were the needs to change tourist studies really born of changes in the industry itself or more as a survival tactic for an emerging academic discipline? The enlarged definition of tourism to the everyday seems a rather self conscious act to expand the repertoire through which tourist theorists could engage in dialogue. Where this becomes dangerous is that something all encompassing and ever expanding often becomes useless in itself. For example Edensor tends to define tourism in all dichotomies, it’s reflexive and unrelfexive it’s planned and spontaneous. Is tourism so amoebic in form that it can be described as anything and everything and as all sides of something and if so, doesn’t it become dulled through vagueness?
Posted by Erin Madorsky at 2:24 PM
Aniko Szucs responds
Dean MacCannell looks at tourism as one of the most important contemporary social phenomena, which is to be analyzed and systemized by the tools and methods of social sciences. What makes his book and approach unique is that the examination of tourism inevitably leads to the examination of society. In fact, he does not narrow his research to the field of tourism; he presents ‘the model of modern culture’ (145), where the act of sightseeing is the ‘formulated and refined representation of the true society’ (158). Therefore, the more thoroughly we analyze the dynamics of tourism, the better we understand the dynamics of society as well.
MacCannell’s investigation is two-directional: on one hand, he explores how society produces tourist attractions, the process, through which ‘sights’ are being ‘marked’ as attractions. In describing the social process of the production of social attractions, McCannell refers to Goffman’s differentiation between the ‘front’ and the ‘back’, and explores different ways societies and institutions make the ‘front’ or the ‘back’ accessible for the public. McCannell’s terminology of suggests that what we are in reality witnessing here is the formation of a cultural performance, in which performers (the attractions, or the society that establishes them), the audience (tourists), and the excluded (those who stay away) are all subject to analysis.
On the other hand, he seeks to understand what motivates tourists in seeking the ‘back’, ‘real truth’ and ‘authenticity’. He also poses the question: what characterizes the society, in which the act of traveling and experiencing other realities play such an important role? What kind of escape tourism might be?
The alpha and omega of MacCannell’s writing is man’s alienation in society. He starts his research by exploring how the industrial epoch alienated people from their work. At the end of his work, the idea of alienation returns as related to modernism; claiming that tourism is motivated by the modern man’s alienation from his everyday life, the search for other – more authentic – realities.
MacCannell’s approach to ‘authenticity’ is revolutionary in the field of tourist research, for it is not the inauthenticity of tourist productions MacCannell seeks to explore, but the inauthenticity that characterizes the everyday life of modern man: “authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those moderns who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to ‘live’” (159).
Therefore, the aim of tourism is to authenticate everyday life by experiencing other realities. In 1975, MacCannell is still convinced that the tourist’s experience on his/her journey can only be authentic. However, in 1998, after thirty years of commercialization of tourism, he feels the need to revise his earlier points in the Epilogue in 1998 by demonizing global corporations for poisoning the purity of tourism.
In my opinion, MacCannell’s earlier conclusions have never lost their validity and cannot (or should not) be refuted in this age of commercialized tourism either(1). Nevertheless, a slight modification needs to be done. MacCannell sees the experience of the other reality as the source of authenticity. At the same time, he implies that the act of traveling itself has the power to authenticate everyday life. To me, this is MacCannell’s ultimate conclusion, even if he never exposed it in an explicit way: it is the act of traveling, of leaving the accustomed everyday life behind that has the power of authentication.
I would like to refer to Tim Edensor’s article “Performing tourism, staging tourism” to support my thesis. Edensor looks at tourist productions as social performances. Following Goffman’s theory of “reproduced recognizable performative conventions’ and everyday performances, the author analyzes the schemes of performances in tourism. And what he finds is the same role-playing structure with the same participants and attitudes as what Goffman explored earlier in everyday life.
In consequence, touristic experience in reality is often very similar to everyday experience. Still, I do not think that its authenticity is to be questioned. For its authenticity lies in the act of traveling, of leaving the everyday life behind, in the mobilization, which is always an inherent part of the tourist experience.
Notes:
(1)The significance of MacCannell’s writing is conspicuous in Adrien Franklin’s and Mike Crang’s article, “The trouble with tourism and travel theory?”. Although the authors of the article does not explicitly refer to “The Tourist” in their investigation of the relationship between tourism and everyday life; traces of MacCannell’s work, his focus on everyday life in the analysis of tourism is to be recognized.
Posted by BKG at 1:51 PM
Points of contact
Dean MacCannell’s 1976 book The Tourist was a groundbreaking analysis of the social structure of tourism (the tourist site or attraction, the tourist producer, the tourist herself etc.), revealing tourism to be a major force in and expression of modern culture and society. The enduring strength of the book lies in MacCannell’s identification of a need to expand sociological methodology through engagement with both theoretical and empirical application.
Particularly, he presents a five-stage model of sight sacralisation (43-45), and extends Erving Goffman’s theory of front and back regions to a scale of six (ch. 2) in an effort to further understand a preoccupation with (staged) authenticity in tourist settings: “The empirical action in tourist settings is mainly confined to movement between areas decorated to look like back regions, and back regions into which tourists are allowed to peek.” (102) MacCannell goes on to engage his tourist study with semiotics, looking at the relationship of tourist “sight” to tourist “marker(s)”, and ethnomethodology.
Issues such as (in)authenticity in tourism are central – “The progress of modernity depends on its very sense of instability and inauthenticity.” (3) and “The expansion of alternative realities makes the dialectics of authenticity the key to the development of the modern world.” (145) – and become keys to thinking about modernity generally.
In terms of application to performance analyses, I am particularly taken with the front/back model of staged authenticity. Goffman’s original two regions have obvious direct correlation to the traditional theatre – backstage, front of house, and the liminal stage between – and I am interested in how MacCannell’s scale might elucidate nontraditional performance (eg. where the spectator is called on the perform as in Janet Cardiff’s audio tour) or performances not defined as such (eg. performances of the everyday). The global scale of tourism and the consequent confrontation of different cultural modes also seem important to test against the multinational nature of the performing arts (international arts festivals) and particularly intercultural performance’s collaborative processes.
The book’s over quarter-century old publication date becomes apparent in some obvious ways: there are references to countries that have altered their boundaries, had eruptions in national identity and makeup, or just plain do not exist anymore. And as MacCannell himself addresses in his new introduction, the book precedes major developments in feminist discourse (which might have deepened his reading of tourism in terms of hidden power structures) and the wave of forced migration of refugees that has so marked the last thirty years (important perhaps in its relationship to the mass movements of tourists across the globe). Somewhat in line with this, I find his concentration on the Western capitalist tourist problematic in the current time where mobility is not always reliant on affluence (eg. the refugee), and where greater affluence is creating more leisure time and desire for touristic experiences in places beyond the West, beyond capitalism and beyond the “developed” world (eg. China).
These ideas are very much picked up by the two articles from the first edition of Tourist Studies, in developing the “new” tourist studies begun by MacCannell in 1976. Key to the new program is a call for rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses; recognition of tourism on a transnational level, recognition of flow and movement in terms of tourism, the two-way street; the “enhanced spatial flows of people” (Franklin & Crang: 10) brought about by a routinisation of touristic sensibilities; tourism in the face of increased mediatisation; tourism as a system of performance rather than representation; self-reflexive awareness of the tourist, and importantly, an emphasis on the body, embodiment, the sensory, contact, the experience.
Franklin and Crang write, “tourism has broken away from its beginnings as a relatively minor and ephemeral ritual of modern national life to become a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized,” (7) and later,
Tourist studies have perhaps too readily colluded in writing the body out of tourism. As Johnston argues ‘Tourism studies, and most social research, tends to base its research on a universalised, contained, rational, and self-knowing subject.’ Echoing the brochure world where bodies are either perfect or invisible, we risk also downplaying tourism as actually involving fleshy, baggy bodies – that are tired, get ‘Delhi belly’, burn and peel, or otherwise intrude on the pristine representations of tourism. (14)
There are many points of similarity in thought between these two essays from 2001, and the beginnings of thoughts put down by MacCannell in 1976. Changes in the scale and nature of tourism and world travel in general are important and unavoidable here: the social world changes. And the field of tourist studies has made understandable advance so that we start to notice more and more different types of tourism. Edensor, in particular, in his application of performance studies theory to tourism seems to encompass a wider view. From clearly observable performances of actors in period dress to an important acknowledgement of the performances of normative and unreflexive tourist behaviour (and more self-reflexive and/or subversive ones), Edensor gets us thinking specifically about the breadth of possibilities available from looking at tourism in terms of performance while employing a traditional theatrical model and terminology (‘scenography’, ‘stage managers’ etc.), and important performance studies concepts (‘dark play’). In the sense that the “new” tourist studies centers around the experience of tourism, performance seems to have something interesting to say. Franklin and Crang write, “Performance tends to this work against ideas, fixity and stability – to have an ontology of doing and acting rather than being.” (18)
In my reading of these three texts, I was constantly aware of points of contact between the types of performance I am interested in – particularly ones in which the spectator and performer are one and the same – and questions that arise regarding tourism. It seems that in answer to performance analysis elucidating tourist study in interesting ways, I might be able to go back the other way.
Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 1:31 PM
Sarah Zoogman responds
While “old” tourist studies focused around an examination of the strange and exotic, the “new” tourist studies takes a much broader view of tourism characterized by a much more reflexive approach, that examines the hybrids (Franklin and Crang, 15) of the touristic experience. MacCannell was at the forefront of touristic studies; he mission was to do ethnography of modernity, to provide a framework to conceptualize the structures of modernity through tourism. He used a metacritical or anthropological approach. Because MacCannell had already provided a general structural framework from which to work off of, Franklin and Crang are free to advocate the study of both the everyday and the way the tourist mentality permeates into many aspects of life, both less traditional areas of inquiry in tourism studies. Edensor is interested in using the theoretical lens of performance; he is responding to the extremely orchestrated nature of modern tourist productions and is conceiving of ways to subvert those performances.
MacCannell in The Tourist envisions tourism as a performance in which the social structure of modernity is revealed; he found tourist attractions to be “an unplanned typology of structure that provides direct access to the modern consciousness or ‘world view.’” (2) For example, MacCannell looks at Paris at the turn of the 20th century as a case study of “when modern mass tourism and its support institutions were fully elaborated as we know them today.” (59) He examines how objects perform, looking specifically at guidebooks. He contrasts two guidebooks for Parisian tourists, one for the wealthy and one for those on a budget, in order to see how the constructions of the guidebook affect the touristic experience.
Franklin and Crang in “The trouble with tourism and travel theory,” envision tourism as a theater in which symbolic categories are “performed, repeated and changed through tourist practices.” (17) Tourist performances both strengthen existing symbolic categories and change then. Franklin and Crang advocate studying the everyday as a way to de-exoticize tourism (8).
In “Performing tourism, staging tourism,” Edensor applies the performance metaphor to the touristic experience to explore how set norms and customs can be strengthened or subverted. Just as MacCannell was interested in the construction of the modern subject, Edensor’s use of the metaphor of performance is apt because the modern subject is always in the process of “becoming” rather than “being.” Edensor looks at tourist stages as “stages of action,” regarding the subject as having a “becoming nature . . . rather than a stable masterful human subject,” having a “lightness of selfhood” (Franklin and Crang, 18). The touristic experience speaks to the self in modernity that is always searching for something or some experience that will better or complete oneself.
Specifically, Edensor examines the scripts and staging used by the tourists themselves. Edensor wants to look at the “unreflexive, habitual, unintended enaction of tourists” (60), and also how the everyday threatens these habits. (62) He uses the structural components of performance – directors, stage managers, cast members, sceneography and stage-design, rituals and dramas stages for tourists, mediated spaces – to explore how the tourist experience is mediated and how it can be subverted.
In large part, this broader approach to tourist studies is a response to globalization, in which there has been a rapidly expanding tourism market and the distinctions between tourist and non-tourist, leisure time and work time are becoming more and more unclear. Franklin and Crang articulate that in this post-Fordist economy there has been the proliferation of tourist attractions – everyone both lives in potential tourist attraction and is themselves a tourist. The permeation of “touristic sensibilities in everyday life” (Franklin and Crang, 10) is also the result of easier flows of people and goods; mobility is a highly accessible, normalized component of modern life.
New research is being called for that examines the everyday. Tourism is firmly rooted in the everyday as evinced by MacCannell description as a “skeptical second gaze” (Franklin and Crang, 12) of the more reflexive tourist, who is “interest[ed] in the minutiae of everyday life and often dismissive or scathing or touristic offerings.” (Franklin and Crang, 12) Whereas “Old” tourist studies focused primarily on the touristic gaze, MacCannell highlights that there are many different gazes at play.
Not only is studying the everyday called for, but also to examine the experiential aspects of tourism, especially an examination of the bodily pleasures of the touristic experience. (Franklin and Crang, 14) Tourists have recently demanded more that just an interesting viewing experience, but rather desire a sensorial and active interface with their environment. This sense of “kinesthetic sense and flow” (Franklin and Crang, 12) is something that could prove fruitful in my own research. Observational studies augmented with interviews would be helpful, in for example exploring the difference between those who take a traditional audio tour of Central Park versus taking a “touch tour” of the park. In addition, using by own bodily experience while taking these non-traditional tours will be helpful as a starting point in my research. For example, if I am exploring the Soundwalks and I take note of which sensorial stimuli I enjoyed and how they added to by experience I could then use those moments to spark theoretical inquiries into how pleasurable sensorial stimuli deepen the experience of guided tours in general.
Posted by BKG at 1:04 PM
The new tourist studies
Overall, I found Dean MacCannell’s book an interesting and pleasurable read. However, while MacCannell’s text serves well as an introduction to many of the key topics in tourist studies, I was left unsatisfied at numerous junctures by the superficiality with which he addressed (or failed to adequately address) a variety of topics. Perhaps the most salient example of this shortsightedness is MacCannell’s decidedly west-oriented approach to tourism. His working definition of a tourist appears to include being from North America or Europe, and the same can be said of the sites he addresses, with the exception of Disneyland Japan, though this is ultimately a western site imported from the U.S. to the east. Edensor is slightly better in this regard, including the Taj Mahal and some brief discussion of eastern tourists, but his perspective is still decidedly oriented towards the west.
Both MacCannell and Edensor’s neglect of the eastern tourist makes me wonder how touristic practices vary from culture to culture. MacCannell states in his introduction, “I do believe that all cultures are composed of the same elements in different combinations” (2). This may hold true, but even so, it makes me desirous of an exploration of these different combinations, and the varying modes of seeing and engaging with sites and other tourists that they would inevitably lead to.
I also experienced a similar yearning for more information stemming from MacCannell’s approach as a whole. He offers his book as an introduction to a “structural analysis of modern society” (3). However, only very briefly (in the epilogue) does he address the roots of the structures he describes. One could say that he focuses on the “what” and the “how” of tourism without addressing the “why.” When he does briefly address the “why” of the tourist, he assumes a desire for human solidarity. I question whether this assumption holds up. Might tourists travel not to commune with others societies, but to separate themselves from their own, both physically and in social status? Might they also visit tourist sights to reinforce their belief in the superiority of their home surroundings or conversely to challenge their habitus and that of others? Edensor certainly suggests the latter possibility stating, “the confrontation with difference that is part of tourism can facilitate improvisational performances… to force oneself to challenge habitual behaviour or… to try on unfamiliar roles” (76). It appears equally likely then, that the tourist’s motivation mightn’t be towards solidarity at all, but instead towards making separation from others and making her world appear strange.
Though Franklin and Crang do not address the above possibility, they raise numerous others, many of which I find totally fascinating and left unexplored by MacCannell. Three of these that I find the most interesting are the following, all of which involve a decided shift in perspective on the part of the researcher. First, I’m interested in turning my critical gaze away from the tourist, and towards members of the tourist industry. Aside from earning money, what are their motives? How do their visions of the tourist differ from someone like MacCannell’s? Second, I’m interested in shifting the gaze away from the tour itself, to how the tourist represents the tourist site and her trip in general. Franklin and Crang mention postcards and the notion of “doing Italy” (16). I’d like to pursue this area further, using tourists’ representations of their travels as a window into their motivations and their subjective engagement with the sites encountered. Third, I’m interested in alternative modes of tourism as raised by Franklin and Crang on page 11. How do the attitudes and interactions of refugees, immigrants, or “suburban gypsies” differ from those of MacCannell’s tourist?
In closing, I must say that this week's readings have whetted my appetite, leaving me hungry for more. Most of the questions that I have asked will require further reading to find sufficient answers. Thankfully, I look forward to carrying this reading out.
Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 12:29 PM
Lisa Reinke responds
The modern world is a confusing place, especially when the 6 train jumps to express for no apparent reason. Dean MacCannell posits in his book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, that tourism is a way for people to overcome these confusions. Presumably, at places like the Transit Museum, explanations for the subways’ mysteries might be explained. Tourism serves to demystify work [like the Paris sewers], a necessary function in a society where “extreme specialization and fragmentation of tasks in the industrial process . . . did not function to integrate its holder into a synthetic social perspective, a world view” (36). For the alienated modern person, tourism serves as a forge between one’s own work and one’s culture. Under a tourist’s gaze, elements of this world become compartmentalized. This facilitates in creating order within a seemingly highly disorganized society. The superficiality that people may experience in their everyday lives can be overcome by the observation of authentic experiences in places far from their homes. The experience of the “authentic” reassures the tourist that truth still exists in the world.
MacCannell provides an extensive look at tourism’s role in society. Yet the applications he proposes to his theory are a bit problematic. His solution to the problem of unequal tourist distribution is “to increase the number of marked attractions and support facilities for tourists on a worldwide base” (167). Yet, earlier in his work, he defines genuine attractions as those that “must always appear as if they would continue to exist without the help of sightseers” (156). An important distinction for him is between the genuine attraction that exists without having the tourist expressly pay for it, and the fake attraction, such as Disneyland, in which the tourist must pay for what she/he sees. To increase the number of attractions, it would seem necessary, for the most part, to increase the number of fake attractions, rather than genuine attractions that exist already. Granted, there are, probably, still genuine attractions that have yet to be touted as tourist destinations, but these must be “discovered.” The quality of a genuine attraction seems to be its non-orchestrated marker creation. Markers must accrue accidentally, by chance or by nature’s machinations, not by the hands of man. Humankind cannot, therefore, increase genuine sights. It can only purposefully increase fake attractions. Considering MacCannell’s negative stance towards Disney, it is hard to believe he would endorse further creations of this nature. In his epilogue, he further examines the sheer power of commercialism, which he did not initially perceive. He remarks that genuine attractions apparently can be bought and sold, indicating that, perhaps, his original distinction between fake and genuine is not as solid as originally thought.
Nevertheless, the foundation that MacCannell lays allows others to continue an in-depth look at tourism. For MacCannell, “the postindustrial or modern society is the coming to consciousness of industrial society, the result of industrial society’s turning in on itself, searching of its own strengths and weaknesses and elaborating itself internally” (182). Tim Edensor describes the ironic and cynical “post-tourist.” To be a “post-tourist” one must turn in on oneself and point the “artificiality and staging of much tourism” (75), including ones own implication in the act. Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang seek to expand, not only upon MacCannell’s work, but also on the collective work of tourism studies worldwide.
Works Cited
Edensor, Tim. Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism. Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59-81.
MacCannell, Dean. 1999 [1976]. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Posted by BKG at 12:26 PM
Sandra Carla Rozental responds
In The Tourist, MacCannell’s main contribution is to shift the locus of tourism studies away from the realm of the cultural criticism approach that saw tourism as a social ill, a degenerate spillover of modernity, to a more productive approach that understands tourism as an integral part of modernity, an expression of what makes modernity modern, and thus, a perfect place to study its inner workings. According to MacCannell, tourism (or mass leisure) is what gives modernity cohesion, where consensus in this new type of society is formed, a new religion of sorts that ties modern society together. As he states, “sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiations of society.
Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for the transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into a unified experience” (13). Perhaps this understanding of tourism as a unifying social force is also why MacCannell pinpoints the middle class as the main participants/ initiators of the tourist phenomenon. The class struggle of industrial capitalism described in Marxist theory appears to give way to a new system where the players are no longer the capitalists and the working class. In MacCannell’s eyes, this seems to have to do with the birth of a new system of value where value is no longer a function of labor, but of experience (23). This is perhaps most clearly explained in his example of the Parisian printing office where what matters is how work is represented (the experience of work) rather than work itself (68).
MacCannell is especially successful in treating his subject of study, tourists, with respect. He manages to escape the easy critical approach of looking at tourists with scorn, as lost individuals easily ridiculed for their conformism and uncritical gaze, and manages to understand them “ethnographically” as links within a larger chain, a structural part of the chain of modernity. He goes even further by showing that the disdain for tourists expressed both in mainstream society and in the early literature on tourism is intrinsic to the way tourism and modernity work (10). Although this might seem obvious to us now, I imagine that in 1976 (and given the quotes from Boorstin cited in the readings) this was rather groundbreaking.
What I found most useful from MacCannell’s book is that he provides us with a certain vocabulary to study tourism in fruitful ways, a taxonomy if you will to classify and discuss the different elements involved in a tourist production and experience. The most interesting of these terms in my eyes are the definitions and discussions he provides on “attraction” (41, 48-56, 77-89), “cultural production” (24-29), “sight sacralization” (43-45), “tourist districts” (50) “staged authenticity” (98) “markers” (131-2), “sight and marker involvement” (112-117) “truth markers”(137-9), “front and back regions” (93-94, 105) and “spurious vs. genuine structure” (158). MacCannell’s categories are perhaps far from perfect, but they useful as ideal types that can be applied to the study of any tourist production or experience.
As an anthropologist in training, I was also very impressed by how MacCannell placed ethnography and anthropology very much at the center of the discussion. This is all the more evident since many of the voices that he seems to be conversing with in the book are the totemic ancestors of this particular discipline: Levi Strauss, Redfield, Kroeber, Sapir, Mauss, Mead, White, to name only a few. Although he mentions ethnographers as potential tourists and tourists as potential ethnographers, he seems to have a hard time defining precisely where the limit lies, although he clearly does see a difference. Is the line also drawn by the commercial? I would be interested to know how other theorists on tourism have thought about this thin line.
Where I think MacCannell is flawed, in addition to the incredibly strange last chapter on applying tourism theory to policy, is in the complete lack of evidence and data to support his arguments. I get no sense from the book of how he came to his conclusions. He states that he conducted fieldwork in Paris and made interviews with random samples, but there is no explicit reference to this data in the book. In fact, many of his examples seem to be drawn from personal experience… or that of his aunts and cousins! This is at least what I think is criticizable of a book written in 1976. Where he falls short is less due to his theses, but to his démodé structural approach to culture, despite his efforts in the 1989 introduction to frame his book as postmodern avant la lettre.
Indeed, MacCannell fails to see the unforeseen effects, the gaps and the slips of tourism. He separates tourism from everyday experience and creates a realm where it only exists in sites, sights and other tourist spaces. He splits the cultural producers from the cultural consumers and simply does not deal with how tourism as a mass phenomenon, but more accurately as a culture, influences daily life through dreams, imagination, desire, etc. This shortsightedness is precisely what the most recent scholarship (and the Tourist Studies journal) is hoping to vanquish. In their editorial, Franklin and Crang make an initial call to extract tourism studies from its traditional stomping grounds: the realm of the extraordinary, the realm of the powerful tourists exploiting the powerless attractions, and the realm of the visual. Their first and most important point is that tourism needs to be seen within the scope of everyday life, to “de-exoticize the activity from what other people do when they are somewhere else” (8). They also attempt to debunk old notions of tourism as a victim/perpetrator relationship as they show the presence of more nuanced positions where power relations can be reversed or at least challenged (9). In their understanding of tourism, less as a phenomenon than as a culture, the unforeseen consequences are as important, in fact, perhaps more important, windows through which to understand its inner workings. Finally, they show that tourism has been viewed primordially as a visual experience, as a traveling and hungry gaze, but that other sensual/body experiences have largely been ignored (13). The image of the Japanese tourists seeking to “participate in their own skins” (13) could not be a better illustration to show the embodied nature of the tourist experience.
Although Tim Edensor’s article is less of a manifesto as to where tourism studies should be heading and more of a direct attempt to tackle some of the issues pending, his ideas on the metaphor of performance as a productive way to look at tourism can easily be interpreted as where he thinks the field should be going. Although MacCannell had already sowed the seeds of this parallel by using Goffman to discuss front and back regions, and by looking at concepts such as staged authenticity, audience, production, etc., Edensor takes the image a step further by looking at tourism as a performative process, “a process which involves the ongoing (re)construction of praxis and space in shared contexts” (60). In such a process, culture, habit, repetition and signification are not fixed, but subject to change. Following Derrida and Butler, Edensor looks at the potential for disruption by looking at the different players involved in the tourist performance: the directors and stage managers, the performers, the intermediaries and how each of their roles can be acted out or challenged within the actual performance in unforeseeable ways. Despite the existence of scripts, no performance (read tourist experience) is every played out according to a plan.
There is always the possibility for productive change. These possibilities are what Edensor seems to be placing at the center for analyzing tourism. Thus, irony, mistakes or involuntary performances, humor, etc. are key places to look in order to better understand how tourism really works. Edensor provides us again with a new taxonomy: “enclavic touristic space”, “incorporating rituals”, “pleasurable carnivals”, “tourism sceneography and set design”, all of the key workers mentioned above, and my personal favorite “the post-tourist”.
Regardless of the advances in new new tourist studies, and the initial and ahead of their time (although not quite postmodern) contributions of MacCannell, I still have many questions and doubts. Where are the people? Who are they? How are they different in Malawi and in London? Is there a way to know how real people experience this tourism culture? How can one study a culture where everyone in the world is involved (are we all tourists?) but that is experienced so differently by a Zapotec rug making community in Oaxaca and a group of French tourists in Rome? How can such a huge and yet dynamic “community” be understood? Is there a tourist community? How can we look at the influence of tourism on other forms of mobility (migration, refuge, fieldwork) without classifying these communities or individuals all under the same rubric as tourists?
Posted by BKG at 12:19 PM
Structuralism v. Postmodernism
Dean McCannell’s The Tourist is a good foundational text for the study of tourism because it offers a typological approach and an efficient theoretical framework. But at the same time, its structuralist perspective, along with the Cold War context in which it was written, and the focus on Western tourism to Western destinations make this work in urgent need of an update.
McCannell takes tourism to offer “a kind of ethnographic report on modern society” (XV), and his method could seem quite innovative 30 years ago. It also sets the ground for more sophisticated theories, such as the ones developed by Edensor with the concepts of performance, behavior, regulation, embodiment, repertoire and commodity.
The body—this is an example of the gap between both studies. McCannell focuses on one sense, sight, and barely explores movement. Edensor is much more inclusive and addresses culinary tourism, sex tourism and other interactive forms of tourism that involve smell, touch, movement to name a few. McCannell writes at a time when the multiple directions and roles of sight have not yet been complicated by Foucault and others. Nowadays, tourism studies can’t avoid addressing the notions of voyeurism, and of self-conscious staging, for example.
Another issue that has evolved since McCannell’s first edition is the tension between (behavioral) guidelines and blurred functions of a tourism site, somehow another way of opposing structuralism to postmodernism. Guidelines or rules of behavior are clearly borrowed from religion, and include a ritual of visit (imposed by the guide or tourism authority), the sacralization of a site and an expected respectful behavior from the visitor. But contemporary reality erases such clear-cut patterns or comparisons. Edensor expands the comparison of tourism productions to performance (which includes religious or quasi religious rituals) while at the same time making the notion of guidelines and behavior relative. In a time of blurred lines between the tourist-performer and the site-performer, between the new and various functions assigned to touristic sites (entertainment, education, remembrance, political statement, to name a few), and between adventure and framed tourism (or between freedom and surveillance), McCannell’s typologies can’t contain the postmodern and globalized expressions of tourism. Edensor tries to create new typologies that would include these new occurrences, but he must also conclude, “most stages are ambiguous, sites for different performances” (64). This is a fascinating aspect of tourism to me, as I study memorials and the tension between expected and actual behavior of visitors in a site commemorating the murder of millions of people. What is acceptable, and what rules are established? What is actually being done by visitors that is considered (dis)respectful and why? Do memorials need explicit rules of conduct, or should they intrinsically inspire a certain behavior?
McCannell’s chapter 3 offers an inspiring use of old guidebooks to understand the evolution of tourism in a site, which is absent from Edensor’s focus on lived experience and embodied practice. For my research, guidebooks are definitely worth looking into, as they indicate when Holocaust memorials have been incorporated in sightseeing tours of Berlin, how they are described and, more generally, how dark tourism has been included in contemporary tourism. McCannell’s analysis should be expanded, though, as it is too much limited to the contents of a site (whether museum, park or memorial) and not at all to the functions. The political situation has also changed since McCannell’s time: the Cold War is over; new countries have become tourism destinations (Burma, Mongolia, Libya…); the “first world” shows traces of pauperization and countries formerly known as “third world” or “developing” send tourists abroad (China, Brazil, Poland, etc.). “Off the beaten track” tourism has to enter new unexplored grounds, while other natural sites have become so domesticated that they look fake (Niagara Falls, Gizeh pyramids).
Modern tourism has also seen the commodification of tourism, from the ubiquity of gift stores, to mass production of souvenirs, to settings allowing visits en mass (parking lots, cafeteria, multiple ticket counters, expanded visiting hours, etc.). On the tourist’s end, visiting a city or a country equals checking items from a to-do-list and digest as much as possible in the shortest period of time. Franklin and Crang address statements such as “we did Italy and France last year, we are doing Costa Rica this week” and other judgmental expressions. They also offer an inspiring look into virtual tourism, and the displacement from “I was here” to “I wish you were here”, and the shift from the actual touristic site to representation of the sites that gain in authenticity (souvenirs, photos, stories). In other words, a photo of a street sign that says “Broadway” gains more authenticity and significance than a photo of Broadway itself.
As for McCannell’s usefulness for my own project, his classical structuralist sources such as Goffman, de Saussure and Levi-Strauss should be kept in mind. I could extend his application of the concepts of “signifier”, “signified” and ‘sign” to my sites, and move from the descriptive to the interrogative: how many signified [functions] have been attributed to one signifier (memorial)? How different are contemporary signs (sites) of memory from the first half of the century? He doesn’t spend any time on dark tourism and memorials, which is probably also a sign of time.
In general, I think that McCannell offers a good starting basis that needs to be expanded with more sophisticated concepts that take into account the hybrid nature of tourism productions, embodied practices and issues of regulations and authenticity. Franklin and Crang open more doors of study, while Edensor offers performance-based extension to McCannell’s, from a theoretical perspective, and leads us into a touristic maze worth exploring. His study could be well complemented by ethnographic observation and practical examples. Tourism is rooted in lived experience after all…
Posted by Brigitte Sion at 11:54 AM
Andrew Friedenthal responds
MacCannell's book, The Tourist, as BKG said in class, very much seems to be a product of its times, a late-70's Cold War mentality where the entire world was in the thrall of the grand modernist narrative of capitalism/socialism. At first I found it jarring to find that the two names most invoked and quoted from by MacCannell were Erving Goffman (understandable) and Karl Marx (what the--!?). As I read further into the book, though, I realized just how much MacCannell, even if he disagreed with some of Marx' theories, was intrigued by a liberal/socialist view of the world and its labor/ product values. To a large degree, particularly in his preliminary focus on work displays as the primary mode of tourism (I couldn't help but feel a it shocked, from my own touristic experiences, that he put work displays above such sites as museums and national parks), he seemed to focus on tourism as a commodity, which, in hindsight, certainly fits in with his examination of the tourist as a member of the "leisure class," as the subtitle of the book so clearly points out.
As BKG said in class, though, the simple truth about tourism DOES mean that "the tourist" (who, throughout the majority of The Tourist, would seem to be a white, heterosexual male body viewing the rest of the "exotic" world out there) is of a certain class and economic stature that allows him/her to travel and actually engage in the tourism experience.
Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang's introduction to the TOURIST STUDIES journal, on the other hand, seems to be a sort of state-of-the-discipline address, almost thirty years after MacCannell's writing and publication. With the advent of post-modernism, and the breakdown of the grand modernist narratives, MacCannell's analyses, in many eyes (including his own, to read his new introduction to the book), no longer hold up. Franklin and Crang, indeed, call attention to the very problems of tourist studies as it now stands, which to a large degree seems to be that it is stuck in an outdated mode of thinking, ignoring the complications of an increasingly disjointed and, paradoxically, globalized world, which effects the experience of that world through the eyes of the tourist. As they point out, "tourism is entirely populated by hybrids, and future investigations will need to enumerate and analyse their potencies," an investigative and analytical calling that they enumerate in the journals mission statement at the end of the article.
Edensor's article, then, in the same issue of that journal (the inaugural issue), is an example of this "new" tourist studies, viewing tourism as performance. Edensor seems to draw upon a more theatrically-grounded view of performance, using definitions of directors," "actors," and even "stage managers," than MacCannell did. MacCannell, using Goffman, looked at the performance of everyday life, the acting out and presentation of the self, and applied that to both the tourist industry performing for the tourist, and, at the same time, the tourist performing for himself/herself, or other tourists, and even for those whom he/she is "observing." Edensor, on the other hand, draws upon a more "Performance Studies" approach, looking at tourist productions as a SELF-CONSCIOUSLY theatrical/performative mode - in his eyes, the tourist industry has grown more complex, and, crucially, more SELF-AWARE, and is now CREATING its own performances, whereas MacCannell looked at it as an industry that performed without necessarily knowing it was performing.
It is here, with my interest in kitch, theme parks, and rides, that these readings intersect with my own project. Theme parks, especially, and to a certain extent kitch, as well, are EXTREMELY self-aware of their performative value, to the point that Disney theme park employees are even referred to as "cast members." They have become the type of tourist production that Edensor describes, and, in this respect, I am personally a bit more interested in further examining Edensor's work, and returning to his article, than I am in going back to MacCannel.
The "new" tourist studies, the more self-aware and self-reflexive tourism, is what interests me, and I am becoming more and more intrigued by the idea of how a site, such as Disney World, can literally invent itself, turning a muggy swamp into a tourist spot of the first degree, all through public relations, advertising, and, as MacCannell tends to put it, extreme "hype."
Posted by BKG at 11:15 AM
Siobhan M. Robinson responds
I strongly agree with the fact that tourism and travel theory have become monotonous in identifying the problem within. I think it is safe to say that the problem with tourism is evident, and if it weren’t, there are a plethora of research articles and theories in tourism studies that have redundantly reiterated these problems. I appreciated the fact that the assigned readings offered a new approach to studying tourism. That is, not just identifying the problem, but studying tourism from a different angle, another theoretical perspective, specifically referring to performance studies.
Tourism can be viewed as a theatrical production. The language that is sometimes associated with tourism, such as actors, directors, set, and stage, indicates that of a performance. I have been in the midst of such performances when I unfortunately found myself as a tourist. For example, the readings discussed “directors” of tourism as those people who dictate what the tourists are seeing and experiencing rather than letting them experience for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
In Ghana, West Africa I traveled to the Cape Coast and encountered Elmina. Elmina is a slave dungeon that imprisoned thousands of Africans. There, I had a tour guide who took us through the dungeons where men were held, the dungeons where women were held, and the many dungeons where Africans were raped, brutalized, and eventually led to the awaiting ships. Throughout the experience the guide or “director” explained everything we were seeing from the historical aspect to what the Africans were experiencing emotionally, physically, and mentally in each dungeon. I wanted to draw on some of those experiences myself rather than someone else making those conclusions for me. Like Muslims who consider the Taj Mahal a holy place instead of a touristic site, I saw Elmina as sacred space, a space where people should recognize the atrocities that occurred caused by the prejudice of an “elitist” group. I did not want anyone telling me what I should be seeing. I wanted to see it for myself. Furthermore, I was enraged by people on the tour who were calling Elmina a beautiful castle. One man was actually slapped across the face by a woman who took offence to such an asinine comment. Later, I learned that these people were familiar with Elmina because of Sankofa, a film about a young African woman urged to never forget her past by reliving the pain of slavery. The beginning of the film takes place at Elmina, and so, Elmina became a mediatized space, a “memory bank” for tourists based from a particular film.
I have to say this is one of my issues with tourism. Although Sankofa is one of my favorite films, I feel that sometimes films reduce sacred spaces to a money-making attraction. I wish I could offer a solution to rectify this problem but I cannot. People visit touristic sites for various reasons. To some it is a pilgrimage to a sacred place and to others it is a time to enjoy and relax. I do however, appreciate that about tourism as a performance. People go to various performances to enjoy and learn and on a positive note, I believe that is what performance tourism does for most of us.
Posted by BKG at 11:12 AM
Cassandra Michelle Brown responds
New tourism studies engender new paradigms to be birthed in the womb of the performance studies discipline, illuminating implications for the concept of tourism in the sphere of the every-day. In the realm of the every-day, tourists may place emphasis on the mundane and banal nature of tourism reflected in Franklin and Crang’s article "The trouble with tourism and travel theory?".
This article challenges the exoticizing and fetishizing that lies at the heart of the tourist experience. By emphasizing the performativity of the extraordinary in the every-day, tourist studies can begin to “de-exoticize the activity from what other people do when they are somewhere else” (Franklin & Crang, 8).
MacCannell’s assertion of tourists as social scientists offers one approach to the performative nature of the every-day in tourism. Perhaps, as social scientists, tourists may explore the tourism in the perfunctory, in a world distanced from the “visiting outsider.” With this tourism can be viewed as any site where observation takes place, escaping its former straitjacket (Edensor, 59).
By staging tourism in the sphere of the every-day, one recognizes that we are often tourists most of the time, highlighting the idea of the extraordinary and the ordinary having a blurred distinction. This is further supported by Edensor’s assertion in his article Performing toursim, staging tourism that “tourism is never entirely separate from the habits of everyday life, since they are unreflexively embodied in the tourist” (61). This constructed unreflexive behavior opens a realm of potentiality for tourist studies and its implications for cultural studies. The emphasis of the every-day suggests a positivity for the future of tourism, where it does not have to be chic to deride tourists (MacCannell, 9). One does not have to go far to be a tourist. Tourism of the every-day occurs anywhere and everywhere.
Posted by BKG at 11:08 AM
Sentienla Toy responds
My memories of Agra as a child (where my parents took us to ‘point’ to the world famous Taj Mahal) is dominated by images of the Elvis imitator in sequined clothes and big side-burns that entertained us over dinner at the hotel. I was fascinated by him and his gyrating performance. The images of the Taj Mahal and Elvis juxtaposed against each other in my memory are revitalized as I read this week’s readings. This memory symbolizes for me quite aptly what Edensor exemplifies as the many ways that tourism can be staged and performed.
What he points out to me importantly is that tourism is not just about an experience and a ‘change of scene’ for the ‘visiting’ tourist but it is as much about an experience and an ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ experience and performance for the ‘host’, that we are talking about a two-way street, as well like Franklin and Crang points out, it is the tourists that can often be the object of the ‘gaze’and the object of desire. F & C articulates for me that tourism is as much about the creation of new social relations, new transnational communities, new forms of consumption and leisure and aesthetics, always changing and recreating itself. This is the ‘new’ tourist studies. MacCannel's early observations of 1976 (some of them written even earlier in bits) on tourism looks at it as a way of understanding social phenomenon, particularly modern society, as a way of making sense of and structuring an analysis of modern consciousness and social structure. The ‘new’ tourist studies takes this original observation further and says ‘but tourism is social life itself, it is the everyday, it is the embodied habits that people enact all the time establishing community, it is not necessarily the obvious ‘touristic’ performance, it is an everyday disposition’. I am thoroughly interested in the tension between unreflexive and reflexive disposition that Edensor raises in his discussion. The idea of Bakhtin’s carniveleque resounds when Edensor cites MacCannell - that ‘authentic’ selves are discarded and everyday masks are discarded (60), yet at the same time these are reflexive habits inasmuch as they are identifiable codes and embodied habits. For me particularly, with my interest in musical research, how do I distinguish ‘resident’ listeners from ‘tourist’ listeners, or how do I begin to examine how performances that ‘residents’ produce start to become the ‘real’ living culture, the unreflexive culture as it were becoming the reflexive….how does the ‘front region’ start blending into the ‘back region’ or does it…the idea of a spurious society with a spurious culture being left behind to take in some ‘real’ culture that MacCannell discusses leads me to reflect over the ‘spurious’ culture that is constantly in the making at the ‘mercy’ of these very same tourists…. I hope to be able to articulate better on this!
I think Mac Cannell’s book is revolutionary particularly because he stretched established theoretical ideas of institutions like Marx and Strauss beyond what people had come to believe, redefining the concept of value as not simply based on labor but on the experience, and finding and identifying a coherent framework by which to analyze a seemingly ‘unanalyzable’ modern chaotic society. His semiotic analysis was definitely beneficial but did not reveal or stretch that concept further for me – I 'm not sure how I would try to further that thought and how crucial that would be for my research – I would love to delve more or hear more on that. For my research I believe I will begin by looking at the ‘intentional’ tourist and the ‘intentional’ tourist productions of art and culture (old tourist studies? going backwards am I? oops) and so it is extremely useful for me to see how MacCannell has a structural approach at looking at the collective experience of social groups. For I want to look at how a collective genre of music gets recreated in different ways, in style, delivery and ‘feel’. It is an interesting place for me to start as I try to develop these ideas. Tourism seems like a subversive way of expressing and maintaining difference, and a way of fulfilling both the needs and imagination of the hosts and the tourists as I ponder over Naga music and its direction. I daresay that for me, music might well be what will articulate these ground-breaking concepts and ideas in the field of tourism....I think I'm over 2 pages now: )
Posted by BKG at 11:00 AM