Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Preface
Jeremy Boissevain
Chapter 1. Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory
Simon Coleman and Mike Crang
THE PLACE OF NATURE
Chapter 2. Chapter 3. The Accelerated Sublime: Thrill-seeking Adventure Heroes in the Commodified Landscape
Claudia Bell and John Lyall
Chapter 3. Making the Scene: The Poetics and Performances of Displacement at the Grand Canyon
Mark Neumann
Chapter 4. The Scottish Highlands as Spectacle
Fraser MacDonald
BACK TO THE CITY
Chapter 5. Acing Local: Two Performances in Northern Italy
Paola Filippucci
Chapter 6. "Cose Paesane": Enacting Ambivalent Identities in the Italian Alps
Keith Ridler
Chapter 7. Go Athens: A Journey to the Centre of the City
Penny Travlou
Chapter 8. Adventure Tourists and Locals in a Global City: Resisting Tourist Performances in London's 'East End'
John Eade
DISTANCIATED PLACES
Chapter 9. Welcome to Flintstones-Land: Contesting Place and Identity in Goreme, Central Turkey
Hazel Tucker
Chapter 10. Performing Place: A Hyperbolic Drugstore in Wall, South Dakota
Eve Melzer
Chapter 11. Farming, Dreaming and Playing in Iowa: Japanese Mythopoetics and Agrarian Utopia
Charles Fruehling Springwood
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
Chapter 12. The Power of Metaphors in Tourism Theory
David Chaney
Chapter 13. Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters
David Crouch
References
Index
