‘The original Tourist Gaze was a classic, marking out a new land to
study and appreciate. This new edition extends into fresh areas with the
same passion and insight of the object. Even more essential reading!’
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, Warwick University
This new edition of a seminal text restructures, reworks and remakes
the groundbreaking previous versions making this book even more
relevant for tourism students, researchers and designers. ‘The tourist
gaze’ remains an agenda setting theory. Packed full of fascinating
insights this major new edition intelligently broadens its theoretical
and geographical scope to provide an account which responds to
various critiques.
The Tourist Gaze 3.0
Theory, Culture & Society
‘Don’t leave home without the 3rd edition! With new chapters and
rigorous restructuring, this classic guide to critical tourism studies
becomes even more useful to scholars and students across the social
sciences and humanities.’
Caren Kaplan, Professor, Cultural Studies/Science and Technology
Studies, UC Davis
John Urry and Jonas Larsen
T C The Tourist Gaze 3.0
S
TC
S
All chapters have been significantly revised to include up-to-date
empirical data, new case studies and fresh concepts. Three new chapters
have been added which explore:
This book is essential reading for all involved in contemporary tourism,
leisure, cultural policy, design, economic regeneration, heritage and
the arts.
John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK.
Jonas Larsen is Lecturer, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial
Change, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Urry and Larsen
• photography and digitization
• embodied performances
• risks and alternative futures.
The Tourist
Gaze 3.0
Cover image © Jutta Klee/CORBIS
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‘Don’t leave home without the 3rd edition! With new chapters and
rigorous restructuring, this classic guide to critical tourism studies
becomes even more useful to scholars and students across the social
sciences and humanities. The Tourist Gaze 3.0 takes us on a detailed
tour of the major concepts and approaches to one of the world’s
largest culture industries. With fresh insights and new materials, this
collaboratively written revision will immediately become required
reading for those who pay attention to the world of travel, mobility,
and visual culture.’
Caren Kaplan, Professor, Cultural Studies/Science and Technology
Studies, UC Davis
‘The original Tourist Gaze was a classic, marking out a new land to
study and appreciate. This new edition extends into fresh areas with the
same passion and insight of the object. Even more essential reading!’
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, Warwick University
‘The first edition of The Tourist Gaze was a landmark in the theoretical
development of tourism studies, and it inspired waves of research
and often fierce debates that have reverberated over the following
two decades. This new edition of the book is not only thoroughly
revised but has also been given renewed cutting edge, particularly by
the addition of chapters on risk and on digital photography. At the
same time, our understanding of the tourist gaze has been reframed
and broadened by the infusion of ideas about mobility and embodiment, making this book an essential read for every tourism scholar.’
Allan Williams, Professor of Tourism Management, School of
Management, University of Surrey
‘A great classic remade to capture the lives of tourists in the 21st
century. For two decades The Tourist Gaze has been one of the
most influential books in tourist research. This new and thoroughly
reworked version meets the challenges of a changing world of tourism and engages the lively contemporary debates in the field.’
Orvar Löfgren, Professor of European Ethnology at the University
of Lund
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‘This thoroughly updated edition of John Urry’s seminal contribution to tourist studies will engage a whole new generation of scholars.
The extensive addition of new material absorbs and expands upon
new insights from within this shifting field of study to develop an
enhanced understanding of the tourist gaze. The fresh input of Jonas
Larsen adds a renewed vibrancy to the debates which are, as ever,
communicated in a brisk, inclusive and lucid fashion, and will ensure
that The Tourist Gaze book retains its relevance for students and academics across the world.’
Tim Edensor, Reader in Cultural Geography, Manchester Metropolitan
University
‘The Tourist Gaze has been the most influential book on tourism
in the last twenty years. This extensively revised edition serves to
remind us both why the original was so important and engages with
the massive developments in the literature it helped to spawn. The
impressive updating in response to theoretical debates is matched
only by the response to the profound shifts in tourism itself, its markets, technologies and organisation, which indicates how much value
still lies in the arguments made.’
Mike Crang, Reader in Geography, Durham University
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The Tourist Gaze 3.0
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Theory, Culture & Society
Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within
contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical
social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been
reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed
analyses of everyday life, popular culture and new intellectual movements.
EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University
SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD
Roy Boyne, University of Durham
Nicholas Gane, University of York
Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Roland Robertson, University of Aberdeen
Couze Venn, Nottingham Trent University
THE TCS CENTRE
The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and
Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduate programmes operate from the TCS Centre at NottinghamTrent University. For further details of the
TCS Centre’s activities please contact:
The TCS Centre
School of Arts and Humanities
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
e-mail: tcs@ntu.ac.uk
web: http://sagepub.net/tcs/
Recent volumes include:
Education and Cultural Citizenship
Nick Stevenson
Inhuman Nature
Nigel Clark
Race, Sport and Politics
Ben Carrington
Intensive Culture
Scott Lash
The Media City
Scott McQuire
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The Tourist Gaze 3.0
John Urry and Jonas Larsen
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© John Urry and Jonas Larsen 2011
First edition first published 1990
Second edition first published 2002 (reprinted 2002, 2003, 2005 twice, 2006, 2008,
2009 twice, 2010)
This edition published 2011
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private
study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the
prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of
reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning
reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP
SAGE Publications Inc.
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010940108
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84920-376-0
ISBN 978-1-84920-377-7 (pbk)
Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in India by Replika Press, Pvt, Ltd.
Printed on paper from sustainable resource
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Contents
List of Figures
viii
About the Authors
ix
Preface
x
Preface to the Second Edition
xi
Preface to 3.0
xii
1 Theories
1
2 Mass Tourism
31
3 Economies
49
4 Working under the Gaze
75
5 Changing Tourist Cultures
97
6 Places, Buildings and Design
119
7 Vision and Photography
155
8 Performances
189
9 Risks and Futures
217
Bibliography
241
Index
264
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List of Figures
1.1 The tourist gaze in Bali, Indonesia
1.2 Informal township, Soweto
1.3 1950s American cars re-forming the place-image of Cuba
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
The Venetian experience, Las Vegas
‘New Orleans’ at the Trafford Centre, Manchester
The Little Mermaid in Shanghai Expo 2010
The restoration of ‘colonial’ Havana
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, DC
9
26
27
121
131
134
136
138
7.1 Gazing on the screen
7.2 Mobile phone photography
182
183
8.1 Sightseeing and soundscapes
8.2 Performing the family gaze
8.3 The collective gaze performed on a guided tour
200
210
212
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About the Authors
John Urry graduated with a BA/MA in
Economics and a PhD in Sociology from
Cambridge. He has since worked at Lancaster
University where he has been Head of
Department, Founding Dean of the Social
Sciences Faculty and University Dean of
Research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Arts, Founding Academician, UK Academy
of Social Sciences, Member (1992) and
Chair RAE Panels (1996, 2001). He has published 40 books and
special issues his work is translated into 18 languages, and he has
lectured in 30 countries. He is currently Director of the Centre for
Mobilities Research at Lancaster. Recent books include: Mobilities
(Polity, 2007); After the Car (Polity, 2009); Mobile Lives (Routledge,
2010); Climate Change and Society (Polity, 2011) as well as The
Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Sage, 2011).
Jonas Larsen is a senior lecturer in Geography at
Roskilde University, Denmark. He is interested
in mobility, tourism and media. He has published
many articles in tourism, geography and mobility
journals and co-authored Performing Tourist
Places (Ashgate, 2004); Mobilities, Networks,
Geographies (Ashgate, 2006) and Tourism,
Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the
Orient (Routledge, 2010).
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Preface
I am very grateful for the advice, encouragement and assistance of
the following, especially those who have provided me with tourist
gems from around the world: Paul Bagguley, Nick Buck, Peter
Dickens, Paul Heelas, Mark Hilton, Scott Lash, Michelle Lowe, Celia
Lury, Jane Mark-Lawson, David Morgan, Ian Rickson, Chris Rojek,
Mary Rose, Peter Saunders, Dan Shapiro, Rob Shields, Hermann
Schwengel, John Towner, Sylvia Walby, John Walton and Alan Warde.
I am also grateful to professionals working in the tourism and hospitality industry who responded to my queries with much information
and advice. Some interviews reported here were conducted under
the auspices of the ESRC Initiative on the Changing Urban and
Regional System. I am grateful to that Initiative in first prompting
me to take holiday-making ‘seriously’.
John Urry
Lancaster, December 1989
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Preface to the Second Edition
This new edition has maintained the structure of the first edition
except for the addition of a new chapter (8) on ‘Globalising the
Gaze’. The other seven chapters have been updated in terms of data,
the incorporation of relevant new studies and some better illustrations. I am very grateful for the extensive research assistance and
informed expertise that has been provided by Viv Cuthill for this
new edition. I am also grateful to Mike Featherstone for originally
prompting a book on tourism, and Chris Rojek who suggested this
second edition as well as for collaboration on our co-edited Touring
Cultures.
Over the past decade I have supervised various PhDs at Lancaster
on issues of tourism, travel and mobility. I have learnt much from
these doctorates and especially from the conversations about the
ongoing work. I would especially like to thank the following, some of
whom commented very helpfully on Chapter 8: Alexandra Arellano,
Javier Caletrio, Viv Cuthill, Saolo Cwerner, Monica Degen, Tim
Edensor, Hernan Gutiérrez Sagastume, Juliet Jain, Jonas Larsen, Neil
Lewis, Chia-ling Lai, Richard Sharpley, Jo Stanley and Joyce Yeh. I
have also benefited from many discussions with the MA students
who have taken my ‘Tourist Gaze’ module over the past decade.
Lancaster colleagues with whom I have discussed these topics
(some also making very helpful comments on Chapter 8) include
Sara Ahmed, Gordon Clark, Carol Crawshaw, Bülent Diken, AnneMarie Fortier, Robin Grove-White, Kevin Hetherington, Vincent
Kaufmann, Phil Macnaghten, Colin Pooley, Katrin Schneeberger and
Mimi Sheller.
Working on graduate matters in the Sociology Department with
Pennie Drinkall and Claire O’Donnell has been a pleasure over the
past few years.
John Urry
Lancaster, April 2001
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Preface to 3.0
The world of tourism is in constant flux and tourism theory needs to
be on the move to capture such changes. This third edition of The
Tourist Gaze radically restructures, reworks and expands the two
first editions to make this book relevant for tourism researchers,
students, planners and designers in the twenty-first century. There
are many changes to the first two editions. Jonas Larsen, as co-author,
has brought fresh eyes on the book. The original chapters have been
thoroughly updated. Outdated data and studies have been deleted,
new studies and theoretical concepts have been incorporated and
the concept of the tourist gaze receives more theoretical consideration, including its ‘darker’ sides. Three new chapters examine the
tourist gaze in relation to photography and digitisation, recent analyses of embodied performances within tourism theory and research,
and the various risks of tourism, including global warming and peak
oil, that problematise the desirability and future of the globalising
tourist gaze.
We are very grateful for the inspiration, help and assistance in
producing this new edition of The Tourist Gaze. We would particularly like to thank Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher, Javier
Caletrio, Beckie Coleman, Anne Cronin, Viv Cuthill, Monica Degen,
Kingsley Dennis, Pennie Drinkall, Tim Edensor, Michael Haldrup,
Kevin Hannam, Allison Hui, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Juliet Jain,
Jennie Germann Molz, Mette Sandbye, Mimi Sheller, Rob Shields,
David Tyfield, Amy Urry, Tom Urry, Sylvia Walby and Laura Watts.
Photos were taken by Amy Urry and ourselves.
John Urry, Lancaster
Jonas Larsen, Roskilde
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‘To remain stationary in these times of change, when all the world is on
the move, would be a crime. Hurrah for the Trip – the cheap, cheap
Trip.’ (Thomas Cook in 1854, quoted in Brendon, 1991: 65)
‘A view? Oh a view! How delightful a view is!’ (Miss Bartlett, in
A Room with a View, Forster, 1955: 8, orig. 1908)
‘[T]he camera and tourism are two of the uniquely modern ways of
defining reality.’ (Horne, 1984: 21)
‘For the twentieth-century tourist, the world has become one large
department store of countrysides and cities.’ (Schivelbusch, 1986: 197)
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how every traveller is a tourist except one’s self?’
(an Edwardian skit, quoted in Brendon, 1991: 188)
‘Since Thomas Cook’s first excursion train it is as if a magician’s wand
had been passed over the face of the globe.’ (The Excursionist, June
1897, quoted in Ring, 2000: 83)
‘[The tourists] pay for their freedom; the right to disregard native concerns and feelings, the right to spin their own web of meanings. … The
world is the tourist’s oyster … to be lived pleasurably – and thus given
meaning.’ (Bauman, 1993: 241)
‘Going by railroad, I do not consider travelling at all; it is merely being
“sent” to a place, and no different from being a parcel.’ (John Ruskin,
quoted in Wang, 2000: 179)
‘Wow, that’s so postcard!’ (Visitor seeing Victoria Falls, quoted in
Osborne, 2000: 79)
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1
Theories
The Importance of Tourism
The clinic was probably the first attempt to order a science on the
exercise and decisions of the gaze … the medical gaze was also organized in a new way. First, it was no longer the gaze of any observer, but
that of a doctor supported and justified by an institution. … Moreover,
it was a gaze that was not bound by the narrow grid of structure … but
that could and should grasp colours, variations, tiny anomalies …
(Foucault, 1976: 89)
The subject of this book would appear to have nothing whatsoever
to do with the serious world of medicine and the medical gaze that
concerns Foucault. This is a book about pleasure, about holidays,
tourism and travel, about how and why for short periods people
leave their normal place of work and residence. It is about consuming goods and services which are in some sense unnecessary. They are
consumed because they supposedly generate pleasurable experiences which are different from those typically encountered in everyday life. And yet at least a part of that experience is to gaze upon or
view a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are
out of the ordinary. When we ‘go away’ we look at the environment
with interest and curiosity. It speaks to us in ways we appreciate, or
at least we anticipate that it will do so. In other words, we gaze at
what we encounter. This gaze is as socially organised and systematised, as is the gaze of the medic. Of course it is of a different order
in that it is not a gaze confined to professionals ‘supported and justified by an institution’. And yet even in the production of ‘unnecessary’ pleasure many professional experts help to construct and
develop one’s gaze as a tourist.
The concept of the gaze highlights that looking is a learned ability
and that the pure and innocent eye is a myth. What the medic gaze
saw, and made visible, was not a simple pre-existing reality simply
waiting ‘out there’ according to Foucault. Instead it was an epistemic
field, constructed linguistically as much as visually. Seeing is what
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The Tourist Gaze
the human eye does. Gazing refers to the ‘discursive determinations’,
of socially constructed seeing or ‘scopic regimes’. Foster refers to
‘how we are able to see, allowed or made to see, and how we see this
seeing or the unseen herein’ (1988: ix). To depict vision as natural or
the product of atomised individuals naturalises its social and historical
nature, and the power relations of looking.
Just like language, one’s eyes are socio-culturally framed and there
are various ‘ways of seeing’. ‘We never look just at one thing; we are
always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’ (Berger,
1972: 9). People gaze upon the world through a particular filter of
ideas, skills, desires and expectations, framed by social class, gender,
nationality, age and education. Gazing is a performance that orders,
shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world. Jenks maintains:
The world is not pre-formed, waiting to be ‘seen’ by the ‘extro-spection’
of the ‘naked eye’. There is nothing ‘out-there’ intrinsically formed,
interesting, good or beautiful, as our dominant cultural outlook would
suggest. Vision is skilled cultural practice. (1995: 10, our italics)
Gazing at particular sights is conditioned by personal experiences
and memories and framed by rules and styles, as well as by circulating
images and texts of this and other places. Such ‘frames’ are critical
resources, techniques, cultural lenses that potentially enable tourists
to see the physical forms and material spaces before their eyes as
‘interesting, good or beautiful’. They are not the property of mere
sight. And without these lenses the beautiful order found in nature
or the built world would be very different. These different ways of
seeing have many consequences for physical and built worlds.
This book, then, is about how in different societies and especially
within different social groups in diverse historical periods the tourist
gaze changes and develops. We elaborate on processes by which
the gaze is constructed and reinforced, and consider who or what
authorises it, what its consequences are for the ‘places’ which are its
object and how it interrelates with other social practices. The ‘tourist
gaze’ is not a matter of individual psychology but of socially patterned and learnt ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 1972). It is a vision
constructed through mobile images and representational technologies. Like the medical gaze, the power of the visual gaze within
modern tourism is tied into, and enabled by, various technologies,
including camcorders, film, TV, cameras and digital images.
There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social
group and by historical period. Such gazes are constructed through
2
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Theories
difference. By this we mean not merely that there is no universal
experience that is true for all tourists at all times. There are many
ways of gazing within tourism, and tourists look at ‘difference’ differently. This is in part because tourist gazes are structured according
to class, gender, ethnicity and age. Moreover, the gaze in any historical period is constructed in relationship to its opposite, to nontourist forms of social experience and consciousness. What makes a
particular tourist gaze depends upon what it is contrasted with; what
the forms of non-tourist experience happen to be. The gaze therefore presupposes a system of social activities and signs which locate
the particular tourist practices, not in terms of some intrinsic characteristics, but through the contrasts implied with non-tourist social
practices, particularly those based within home and paid work.
Tourism, holidaymaking and travel are more significant social phenomena than most commentators have considered. On the face of it
there could not be a more trivial subject for a book. And indeed since
social scientists have had plenty of difficulty in explaining weightier
topics, such as work or politics, it might be thought that they would
have great difficulties in accounting for more trivial phenomena such
as holiday-making. However, there are interesting parallels with the
study of deviance. This involves the investigation of bizarre and idiosyncratic social practices which happen to be defined as deviant in
some societies but not necessarily in others. The assumption is that
the investigation of deviance can reveal interesting and significant
aspects of ‘normal’ societies. Just why various activities are treated as
deviant can illuminate how societies operate more generally.
This book is based on a similar analysis applying to tourism. Such
practices involve the notion of ‘departure’, of a limited breaking with
established routines and practices of everyday life and allowing one’s
senses to engage with a set of stimuli that contrast with the everyday
and mundane. By considering the typical objects of the tourist gaze
one can use these to make sense of elements of the wider society
with which they are contrasted. In other words, to consider how
social groups construct their tourist gaze is a good way of getting at
just what is happening in the ‘normal society’. We can use the fact
of difference to interrogate the normal through investigating typical
forms of tourism. Thus rather than being a trivial subject, tourism is
significant in its ability to reveal aspects of normal practices which
might otherwise remain opaque. Opening up the workings of the
social world often requires the use of counter-intuitive and surprising
methodologies; as in this case the investigation of the ‘departures’
involved in the tourist gaze.
3
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The Tourist Gaze
Although we insist on the historical, geographical and sociological
variations in the gaze, there are some minimal characteristics of the
social practices which are conventionally described as ‘tourism’. We
set these out to provide a baseline for more historical, sociological,
and global analyses developed later.
l
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely
regulated and organised work. It is one manifestation of how work and
leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social practice
in ‘modern’ societies. Indeed, acting as a tourist is one of the defining
characteristics of being ‘modern’ and is bound up with major transformations in paid work. This has come to be organised within particular
places and to occur for regularised periods of time.
Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to, and their stay
in, various destinations. This necessarily involves some movement through
space, that is, the journeys and periods of stay in a new place or places.
The journey and stay are to, and in, sites outside the normal places of
residence and work. Periods of residence elsewhere are of a short-term
and temporary nature. There is intention to return ‘home’ within a
relatively short period of time.
The places gazed upon are for purposes not directly connected with
paid work and they normally offer some distinctive contrasts with work
(both paid and unpaid).
A substantial proportion of the population of modern societies engages
in such tourist practices; new socialised forms of provision are developed in order to cope with the mass character of the gaze of tourists (as
opposed to the individual character of ‘travel’).
Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a
different scale or involving different senses from those customarily
encountered. Such anticipation is constructed and sustained through a
variety of non-tourist technologies, such as film, TV, literature, magazines,
CDs, DVDs and videos, constructing and reinforcing the gaze.
The tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape
which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are
viewed because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary.
The viewing of such tourist sights often involves different forms of
social patterning, with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of
landscape or townscape than normally found in everyday life. People
linger over such a gaze, which is then often visually objectified or captured through photographs, postcards, films, models and so on. These
enable the gaze to be reproduced, recaptured and redistributed over
time and across space.
The gaze is constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs. When tourists see two people kissing in Paris what they
4
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Theories
capture in the gaze is ‘timeless romantic Paris’. When a small village in
England is seen, what they gaze upon is the ‘real olde England’. As
Culler argues: ‘the tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself. …
All over the world the unsung armies of semioticians, the tourists, are
fanning out in search of the signs of Frenchness, typical Italian behaviour, exemplary Oriental scenes, typical American thruways, traditional
English pubs’ (1981: 127).
9 An array of tourist professionals reproduce ever new objects of the tourist gaze. These objects are located in a complex and changing hierarchy.
This depends upon the interplay between, on the one hand, competition
between interests involved in providing such objects and, on the other
hand, changing class, gender and generational distinctions of taste among
potential visitors.
In this book we consider the development of, and historical transformations within, the tourist gaze. We mainly chart such changes in
the past couple of centuries; that is, in the period in which mass tourism became widespread within much of Europe, North America and
most other parts of the world. To be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the ‘modern’ experience. It has become a marker of status in
modern societies and is also thought to be necessary for good health
and a cosmopolitan outlook (see Feifer, 1985: 224; Urry, 2007).
There was organised travel in premodern societies, but it was very
much the preserve of elites (see Towner, 1988). In Imperial Rome
there was a fairly extensive pattern of elite travel for pleasure and
culture. A travel infrastructure developed, partly permitted by two
centuries of peace. It was possible to travel from Hadrian’s Wall to
the Euphrates without crossing a hostile border (Feifer, 1985: ch. l).
Seneca maintained that this permitted city-dwellers to seek ever
new sensations and pleasures. He said: ‘men [sic] travel widely to
different sorts of places seeking different distractions because they
are fickle, tired of soft living, and always seek after something which
eludes them’ (quoted in Feifer, 1985: 9).
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries pilgrimages had become
a widespread phenomenon ‘practicable and systematized, served by
a growing industry of networks of charitable hospices and massproduced indulgence handbooks’ (Feifer, 1985: 29; Eade and
Sallnow, 1991). Pilgrimages often included a mixture of religious
devotion and culture and pleasure. By the fifteenth century there
were regular organised tours from Venice to the Holy Land.
The Grand Tour had become firmly established by the end of the
seventeenth century for the sons of the aristocracy and the gentry, and
by the late eighteenth century for the sons of the professional middle
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The Tourist Gaze
class. Over this period, between 1600 and 1800, treatises on travel
shifted from a scholastic emphasis on touring as an opportunity for
discourse, to travel as eyewitness observation. There was a visualisation of the travel experience, or the development of the ‘gaze’, aided
and assisted by the growth of guidebooks which promoted new ways
of seeing (see Adler, 1989). The character of the tour itself shifted,
from the earlier ‘classical Grand Tour’ based on the emotionally neutral observation and recording of galleries, museums and high-cultural
artefacts, to the nineteenth-century ‘romantic Grand Tour’ which saw
the emergence of ‘scenic tourism’ and a much more private and passionate experience of beauty and the sublime (see Towner, 1985).
Travel was expected to play a key role in the cognitive and perceptual
education of the male English upper class (see Dent, 1975).
The eighteenth century had seen the development of a considerable tourist infrastructure in the form of spa towns throughout much
of Europe (Thompson, 1981: 11–12; Blackbourn, 2002). Myerscough
notes that the ‘whole apparatus of spa life with its balls, its promenades, libraries, masters of ceremonies was designed to provide a
concentrated urban experience of frenetic socialising for a dispersed
rural elite’ (1974: 5).
There have been periods in which much of the population engaged
in play or recreation. In the countryside, work and play were particularly intertwined in the case of village or town fairs. Most towns and
villages in England had at least one fair a year and many had more.
People would often travel considerable distances and fairs involved
a mixture of business and pleasure, normally especially centred
around the tavern. By the eighteenth century the public house had
become a major centre for public life in the community, providing
light, heat, cooking facilities, furniture, news, banking and travel
facilities, entertainment and sociability (Harrison, 1971; Clark, 1983).
But before the nineteenth century, few outside the upper classes
travelled to see objects unconnected with work or business. And it is
this which is the central characteristic of mass tourism in modern
societies, namely that much of the population in most years travels
somewhere else to gaze upon it and stay there for reasons basically
unconnected with work. Travel is thought to occupy 40 per cent of
available ‘free time’ in Britain (Williams and Shaw, 1988: 12). If
people do not travel, they lose status: travel is the marker of status.
It is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays
are necessary. ‘I need a holiday’ reflects a modern discourse based on
the idea that people’s physical and mental health will be restored if
only they can ‘get away’ from time to time.
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The importance of this can be seen in the scale of contemporary
travel. There are around 880 million international passenger arrivals
each year, compared with 25 million in 1950. It is predicted that this
figure will rise to 1.6 billion by 2020, although it dipped by over
4 per cent in 2009 (www.unwto.org/index.php; accessed 31.03.10).
At any one time there are 300,000 passengers in flight above the
USA, equivalent to a substantial city (Gottdiener, 2001: 1). Half a
million new hotel rooms are built annually, while there are 31 million
refugees across the globe (Papastergiadis, 2000: ch. 2). ‘Travel and
tourism’ is the largest industry in the world, accounting for 9.4 per
cent of world GDP and 8.2 per cent of all employment (www.wttc.
org/eng/Tourism_Research/Economic_Research/; accessed 31.03.10).
This travel occurs almost everywhere, with the World Tourism
Organization publishing tourism/travel statistics for 204 countries with
at least 70 countries receiving more than one million international tourist arrivals a year (www.unwto.org/index.php; accessed 31.03.10).
There is more or less no country in the world that is not a significant
receiver of visitors. However, the flows of such visitors originate very
unequally, with the 45 countries with ‘high’ human development
accounting for three-quarters of international tourism departures
(UNDP, 1999: 53–5). Such mobilities are enormously costly for the
environment (see many accounts in the journal Tourism in Focus and
Chapter 9 below). There is an astonishing tripling of world car travel
predicted between 1990 and 2050 (Hawken et al., 1999).
In the next section we consider some of the seminal theoretical contributions that have attempted to make sense of these extensive flows.
Theoretical Approaches
Making theoretical sense of ‘fun, pleasure and entertainment’ has
proved a difficult task for social scientists. In this section we summarise some of the seminal contributions to the sociology of tourism. They are not uninteresting, but they leave much work still to be
done. In the rest of the book we develop some of the notions relevant to theoretical understanding of tourist places and practices
(see Jamal and Robinson, 2009, and Hannam and Knox, 2010, for
state-of-the-art reviews).
One early formulation is Boorstin’s analysis of the ‘pseudo-event’
(1964). He argues that contemporary Americans cannot experience
‘reality’ directly but thrive on ‘pseudo-events’, with tourism being
the prime example (see Eco, 1986; Baudrillard, 1988). Isolated from
the host environment and the local people, mass tourists travel in
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guided groups and find pleasure in inauthentic contrived attractions,
gullibly enjoying ‘pseudo-events’ and disregarding the ‘real’ world
outside. As a result tourist entrepreneurs and the indigenous populations are induced to produce ever more extravagant displays for gullible observers who are thereby further removed from local people.
Over time, via advertising and the media, the images generated
through different tourist gazes come to constitute a closed selfperpetuating system of illusions which provide tourists with the
basis for selecting and evaluating potential places to visit. Such visits
are made, says Boorstin, within the ‘environmental bubble’ of familiar American-style hotels that insulates them from the strangeness of
the host environment.
A number of later writers develop and refine this relatively simple
thesis of a historical shift from the ‘individual traveller’ to the ‘mass
society tourist’. Turner and Ash’s The Golden Hordes (1975) fleshes
out the thesis about how the tourist is placed at the centre of a
strictly circumscribed world. Surrogate parents (travel agents, couriers, hotel managers) relieve the tourist of responsibility and protect
him/her from harsh reality. Their solicitude restricts the tourist to
the beach and certain approved objects of the tourist gaze (see
Edensor 1998, on package-holidaymakers at the Taj Mahal). In a
sense, Turner and Ash suggest, the tourists’ sensuality and aesthetic
sense are as restricted as they are in their home country. This is further heightened by the relatively superficial way in which indigenous
cultures are presented to the tourist. They note about Bali: ‘Many
aspects of Balinese culture and art are so bewilderingly complex and
alien to western modes that they do not lend themselves readily to
the process of over-simplification and mass production that converts
indigenous art forms into tourist kitsch’ (Turner and Ash, 1975: 159;
Bruner, 1995; and see Figure 1.1). The upshot is that in the search
for ever-new places to visit, what is constructed is a set of hotels and
tourist sights that are bland and lacking contradiction, ‘a small
monotonous world that everywhere shows us our own image … the
pursuit of the exotic and diverse ends in uniformity’ (Turner and
Ash, 1975: 292).
Somewhat critical of this argument, Cohen maintains that there is
no single tourist as such but various tourist types or modes of tourist
experience (see 1972, 1979, 1988, mainly drawn from the sociology
of religion). What he terms as the ‘experiential’, the ‘experimental’
and the ‘existential’ do not rely on the environmental bubble of conventional tourist services. To varying degrees such tourist experiences
are based on rejecting such ways of organising tourist activity. Moreover,
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Figure 1.1 The tourist gaze in Bali, Indonesia
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The Tourist Gaze
one should also note that such bubbles permit many people to visit
places which otherwise they would not, and to have at least some
contact with the ‘strange’ places thereby encountered. Indeed, until
such places have developed a fully-fledged tourist infrastructure
much of the ‘strangeness’ of such destinations will be impossible to
hide and package within a complete array of pseudo-events.
The most significant challenge to Boorstin is MacCannell, who is
also concerned with the inauthenticity and superficiality of modern
life (1999; orig. 1976). He quotes Simmel on the nature of the sensory impressions experienced in the ‘metropolis’: ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a
single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’
(MacCannell, 1999: 49). He maintains these are symptomatic of the
tourist experience but disagrees with Boorstin’s account, which he
regards as reflecting a characteristically upper-class view that ‘other
people are tourists, while I am a traveller’ (MacCannell, 1999: 107;
see Buzard 1993, on this distinction).
All tourists, for MacCannell, embody a quest for authenticity, and
this quest is a modern version of the universal human concern with
the sacred. The tourist is a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking
authenticity in other ‘times’ and other ‘places’ away from that person’s
everyday life. Tourists show particular fascination in the ‘real lives’ of
others that somehow possess a reality that is hard to discover in their
own experiences. Modern society is therefore rapidly institutionalising
the rights of outsiders to look into its workings. ‘Institutions are fitted
with arenas, platforms and chambers set aside for the exclusive use of
tourists’ (MacCannell, 1999: 49). Almost any sort of work, even the
backbreaking toil of the Welsh miner or the unenviable work of those
employed in the Parisian sewer, can be the object of the tourist gaze.
MacCannell particularly examines the character of the social relations which emerge from this fascination people have in the work lives
of others. He notes that such ‘real lives’ can only be found backstage
and are not immediately evident to us. Hence, the gaze of the tourist
will involve an obvious intrusion into people’s lives, which would be
generally unacceptable. So the people being observed and local tourist
entrepreneurs gradually come to construct backstages in a contrived
and artificial manner. ‘Tourist spaces’ are thus organised around what
MacCannell calls ‘staged authenticity’ (1973). The development of the
constructed tourist attraction results from how those who are subject
to the tourist gaze respond, both to protect themselves from intrusions
into their lives backstage and to take advantage of the opportunities it
presents for profitable investment. By contrast, then, with Boorstin,
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MacCannell argues that ‘psuedo-events’ result from the social relations
of tourism and not from an individualistic search for the inauthentic.
Pearce and Moscardo further elaborate the notion of authenticity
(1986; Turner and Manning, 1988). They maintain it is necessary to
distinguish between the authenticity of the setting and the authenticity of the persons gazed upon; and to distinguish between the
diverse elements of the tourist experience of importance to the tourist in question. Crick, by contrast, points out that there is a sense in
which all cultures are ‘staged’ and inauthentic. Cultures are invented,
remade and the elements reorganised (Crick, 1988: 65–6). Hence, it
is not clear why the apparently inauthentic staging for the tourist is
so very different from the processes of cultural remaking that
happens in all cultures anyway (Rojek and Urry, 1997).
Based on research at New Salem, where Abraham Lincoln spent
some years in the 1830s, Bruner interestingly distinguishes conflicting
senses of what is meant by ‘authentic’ (1994; Wang, 2000). First,
there is the authentic in the sense of a small town that looks like it
has appropriately aged over the previous 170 years, whether the
buildings are actually that old or are newly, if sensitively, constructed.
Second, there is the town that appears as it would have looked in the
1830s, that is, mostly comprising in fact new buildings. Third, there is
authenticity in the sense of the buildings and artefacts that literally
date from the 1830s and have been there ever since. And fourth, there
are those buildings and artefacts that have been authorised as authentic by the Trust that oversees ‘heritage’ within the town. Holderness
similarly describes the processes in Stratford-upon-Avon by which
the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has come to exert a hegemonic role
in the town, determining which buildings, places and artefacts are
authentically part of ‘Shakespeare’s heritage’ and those which are not
so ‘authenticated’ (1988). Bruner also notes that New Salem now is
wholly different from the 1830s since in the previous period there
would not have been camera-waving tourists wandering about in
large numbers excitedly staring at actors dressed up as though they
are residents of a previous and long-since disappeared epoch.
MacCannell also notes that, unlike the religious pilgrim who pays
homage to a single sacred centre, the tourist pays homage to a large
array of centres and attractions. These include sites of industry and
work as work has become a mere attribute of society and not its
central feature (MacCannell, 1999: 58). MacCannell characterises
such an interest in work displays as ‘alienated leisure’. It is a perversion of the aim of leisure since it involves a return to the workplace
but now as leisure.
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He also notes how each centre of attraction involves complex
processes of production in order that regular, meaningful and profitable tourist gazes can be generated and sustained. Such gazes cannot
be left to chance. People have to learn how, when and where to
‘gaze’. Clear markers are provided and in some cases the object of the
gaze is merely the marker that indicates some event or experience
previously happened at that spot.
MacCannell maintains that there is normally a process of sacralisation that renders a particular natural or cultural artefact a sacred
object of the tourist ritual (1999: 42–8). A number of stages are
involved in this: naming the sight, framing and elevation, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction of the sacred object and social reproduction as new sights (or ‘sites’) name themselves after the famous.
It is also important to note that not only are there many attractions
to which to pay homage, but many attractions may only be gazed
upon once. In other words, the gaze of the tourist can be amazingly
fickle, searching out or anticipating something new or something different. MacCannell notes that ‘anything is potentially an attraction.
It simply awaits one person to take the trouble to point it out to
another as something noteworthy, or worth seeing’ (1999: 192).
The complex processes involved here are partly revealed in
Turner’s analysis of pilgrimage (1973, 1974). Important rites de passage are involved in the movement from one stage to another. There
are three such stages: first, social and spatial separation from the
normal place of residence and conventional social ties; second, liminality, where the individual finds him/herself in an ‘anti-structure …
out of time and place’ – conventional social ties are suspended, an
intensive bonding ‘communitas’ is experienced, and there is direct
experience of the sacred or supernatural; and third, reintegration,
where the individual is reintegrated with the previous social group,
usually at a higher social status.
Although this analysis is applied to pilgrimages, other writers have
drawn out its implications for tourism (see Cohen, 1988: 38–40;
Shields, 1990; Eade and Sallnow 1991). Like the pilgrim, the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to
the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist
‘worship’ shrines which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as
a result gain some kind of uplifting experience. In the case of tourists, Turner and Turner talk of ‘liminoid’ situations where everyday
obligations are suspended or inverted (1978). There is licence for
permissive and playful ‘non-serious’ behaviour and the encouragement of a relatively unconstrained ‘communitas’ or social togetherness.
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What is often involved is semi-routine action or a kind of routinised
non-routine.
One analysis of such a pilgrimage is Shields’ (1990) exploration of
the ‘honeymoon capital of the world’, Niagara Falls. Going on honeymoon to Niagara did indeed involve a pilgrimage, stepping out into an
experience of liminality in which the codes of normal social experience
are reversed. In particular, honeymooners find themselves historically
in a liminal zone where the strict social conventions of bourgeois
families were relaxed under the exigencies of travel and of a relative
anonymity and freedom from collective scrutiny. In a novel written in
1808, a character says of Niagara: ‘Elsewhere there are cares of business
and fashion, there are age, sorrow, and heartbreak; but here only youth,
faith, rapture’ (quoted in Shields, 1990). Shields also discusses how
Niagara, like Gretna Green in Scotland, has become a signifier now
more or less emptied of meaning, a commercialised cliché.
Some writers in this tradition argue that such playful or ‘ludic’
behaviour is restitutive or compensatory, revitalising the tourists for
their return to familiar places of home and work (see Lett, 1983 on
ludic charter-yacht tourism). Other writers argue that general
notions of liminality and inversion have to be given a more precise
content. It is necessary to investigate the nature of the social and
cultural patterns within the tourist’s day-to-day existence in order to
see just what is inverted and how the liminal experience works out.
Gottlieb argues, for example, that what is sought for in a vacation/
holiday is inversion of the everyday. The middle-class tourist will
seek to be a ‘peasant for a day’ while the lower middle-class tourist
will be ‘king/queen for a day’ (1982). Although these are hardly
profound examples, they do point to a crucial feature of tourism,
namely the distinction between the familiar and the faraway and
how such differences produce distinct kinds of liminal zones.
It therefore seems wrong to suggest that a search for authenticity is
the basis for the organisation of tourism. Rather, one key feature would
seem to be that there is a difference between one’s normal place of
residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze. Now it may be that
a seeking for what we take to be authentic elements is an important
component here, but that is only because there is in some sense a
contrast with everyday experiences. Furthermore, it has been argued
that some visitors – what Feifer (1985) terms ‘post-tourists’ – almost
delight in the inauthenticity of the normal tourist experience. ‘Posttourists’ find pleasure in the multiplicity of tourist games. They know
that there is no authentic tourist experience, that there are merely a
series of games or texts that can be played (see Chapter 5 later).
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We argue in this book for the fundamentally visual nature of
many tourism experiences. Gazes organise the encounters of visitors
with the ‘other’, providing some sense of competence, pleasure and
structure to those experiences. The gaze demarcates an array of pleasurable qualities to be generated within particular times and spaces. It
is the gaze that orders and regulates the relationships between the
various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually
out-of-ordinary, what are relevant differences and what is ‘other’.
We can date the birth of the tourist gaze in the west to around 1840.
This is the moment when the ‘tourist gaze’, that peculiar combining
together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel and the
techniques of photographic reproduction, becomes a core component
of western modernity. As we show in Chapter 7, photography is central within the modern tourist gaze. Tourism and photography
commenced in the west in 1840, as Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot
announced their somewhat different ‘inventions’ of the camera (in
1839 and 1840 respectively). In 1841, Thomas Cook organised what
is now regarded as the first packaged ‘tour’; the first railway hotel was
opened in York just before the 1840s railway mania; the first national
railway timetable, Bradshaws, appeared in 1839; Cunard started the
first ever Ocean steamship service; and Wells Fargo, the forerunner of
American Express, began stagecoach services across the American
west (Urry, 2007: 14). Also in 1840, Dr Arnold, the famous Headmaster
of Rugby School, declared that ‘Switzerland is to England … the general summer touring place’ (quoted Ring, 2000: 25). 1840, then, is one
of those remarkable moments when the world seems to shift and new
patterns of relationships become irreversibly established.
Recent literature has, however, critiqued this notion of the ‘tourist
gaze’ for reducing tourism to visual experiences – sightseeing – and
neglecting other senses and bodily experiences involved in these
doings of tourism. A so-called ‘performance turn’ within tourist studies highlights that tourists experience places in more multi-sensuous
ways, touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and so on, as well as the
materiality of objects and places and not just objects and places
viewed as signs. With inspiration from Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical sociology and Thrift’s (2008) non-representational theory, this
performative turn conceptualises the corporeality of tourist bodies
and the embodied actions of, and interactions between, tourist workers, tourists and locals. It has been suggested that it is necessary to
choose between gazing and performing as the tourism paradigm
(Perkins and Thorns, 2001). But The Tourist Gaze 3.0 rethinks the
concept of the tourist gaze as performative, embodied practices,
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highlighting how each gaze depends upon practices and material
relations as upon discourses and signs. What is distinct is the emphasis upon embodied and ‘hybrid’ performances of gazing and photographing and the various materialities and technologies constituting
each way of seeing (see particularly Chapters 8 and 9). Moreover,
while sightseeing is crucial, seeing is not the only practice and sense
that tourists engage in and activate. There are limits on how much
vision can explain. And yet the tourist gaze is always present within
tourism performances, as hiking, sunbathing, whitewater rafting and
so on are of importance in part through their location within distinct
visual environments. Also The Tourist Gaze 3.0 illuminates some
darker sides of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1992; Hollingshead, 1999;
Morgan and Pritchard, 2005; Elliott and Urry, 2010). We subsequently
discuss power relations between gazer and gazee within tourism performances, different forms of photographic surveillance and the
changing climates that the global tourist gaze seems to generate.
For the moment, though, it is necessary to consider just what produces a distinct tourist gaze. Minimally, there must be certain aspects
of the place to be visited which distinguish it from what is conventionally encountered in everyday life. Tourism results from a basic
binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary.
Tourist experiences involve some aspect or element that induces
pleasurable experiences which, by comparison with the everyday,
are out of the ordinary. This is not to say that other elements of the
production of the tourist experience will not make the typical tourist feel that he or she is ‘home from home’, not too much ‘out of
place’. But potential objects of the tourist gaze must be different in
some way or other. They must be out of the ordinary. People must
experience particularly distinct pleasures which involve different
senses or are on a different scale from those typically encountered in
everyday life. There are, however, many different ways in which such
a division between the ordinary and the visually extraordinary become
established and sustained.
First, there is seeing a unique object, such as the Forbidden City
in Beijing, the Eiffel Tower, Ground Zero, Buckingham Palace, the
Grand Canyon, or the spot in the tunnel in Paris where Princess
Diana fatally crashed. These are absolutely distinct objects to be
gazed upon which everyone knows about. They are famous for being
famous, although such places may have lost the basis of their fame,
such as the Empire State Building in New York. Most people living
in the ‘west’ would hope to see some of these objects during their
lifetime. They entail a kind of pilgrimage to a sacred centre, often a
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capital city, a major city or the site of a unique global event (Roche,
2000; Winter, Teo and Chang, 2009, on examples in the ‘east’).
Then there is the seeing of particular signs, such as the typical
American skyscraper, Japanese garden, French château, Norwegian
fjord and so on. This mode of gazing shows how tourists are in a way
semioticians, reading the landscape for signifiers of certain preestablished notions or signs derived from discourses of travel and
tourism (Culler, 1981: 128).
Third, there is seeing unfamiliar aspects of what had previously
been thought of as familiar. One example is visiting museums which
show representations of the lives of ordinary people, revealing their
cultural artefacts. Often these are set out in a ‘realistic’ setting to
demonstrate what houses, workshops and factories had been like.
Visitors thus see unfamiliar elements of other people’s lives which
had been presumed familiar.
Then there is the seeing of ordinary aspects of social life being
undertaken by people in unusual contexts. Some tourism in evidentially poor countries has been of this sort. Visitors have found it
particularly interesting to gaze upon the carrying out of domestic
tasks, and hence to see how the routines of life are surprisingly not
that unfamiliar.
Finally, there is the seeing of particular signs that indicate that a
certain other object is indeed extraordinary, even though it does not
seem to be so. A good example is moon rock, which appears unremarkable. The attraction is not the object itself but the sign referring to it
that marks it out as distinctive. Thus the marker becomes the distinctive sight (Culler, 1981: 139). A similar seeing occurs in art galleries
when part of what is gazed at is the name of the artist, ‘Rembrandt’
say, as much as the painting itself which may be difficult for those with
limited cultural capital to distinguish from others in the same gallery.
Heidegger captures something of the visual puzzlement involved
in being a tourist, in his case while cruising down the Adriatic. He
particularly emphasises the tourist gaze, that is how experiences of
other places are transformed into ‘an object ready-at-hand for the
viewer’ (Heidegger, 2005: 42). He goes on to complain, like countless
other ‘tourists’ before and after, when his cabin ‘did not offer much
of a view, since it was blocked by the lifeboats’ (2005: 7). But he
subsequently gets a better view and gazes upon ‘Greece’. Heidegger’s
problem then is that it does not look like ‘Greece’. Is it really ‘Greece’?
He asks: ‘Was this, though, already Greece? What I had sensed and
expected did not appear…. Everything more looked like an Italian
landscape’ (2005: 8). He proceeds to worry that ‘what was missing
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was the presence of that Greek element’, again something that countless
other tourists worry about when looking at the relatively unfamiliar,
when it does not look as it should look (2005: 11). And when
Heidegger gets to Olympia, the original place of festival of the ancient
and modern Olympic Games, ‘we found just a plain village disfigured
even more by the unfinished new buildings [to become] hotels for the
American tourists’ (2005: 12). What should thus be gazed upon?
Thus there is no simple relationship between what is directly seen
and what this signifies. We do not literally ‘see’ things. Particularly as
tourists, we see objects and especially buildings in part constituted as
signs. They stand for something else. When we gaze as tourists what
we see are various signs or tourist clichés. Some such signs function
metaphorically. A pretty English village can be read as representing
the continuities and traditions of England from the Middle Ages to
the present day. Other signs, such as lovers in Paris, function metonymically. Here what happens is the substitution of some feature or
effect or cause of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself. The
ex-miner, now employed at the former coalmine to show tourists
around, is a metonym for the structural change in the economy from
one based on heavy industry to one based on tourist services. The
development of the industrial museum in an old mill is a metonymic
sign of the development of a post-industrial society (see Chapter 6).
MacCannell describes the complex relations involved in developing and reproducing ‘attractions’. These relations occur over time
between a ‘marker’, the ‘sight’ and the ‘tourist’ (1999: 41). Gazing is
not merely seeing, but involves cognitive work of interpreting, evaluating, drawing comparisons and making mental connections between
signs and their referents, and capturing signs photographically.
Gazing is a set of practices. Individual performances of gazing at a
particular sight are framed by cultural styles, circulating images and
texts of this and other places, as well as personal experiences and
memories. Moreover, gazing involves cultural skills of daydreaming
and mind travelling (Löfgren, 1999). ‘The extraordinary’, as Rojek
says, ‘spontaneously invites speculation, reverie, mind-voyaging and
a variety of other acts of imagination’ (1997: 53).
The notion of the tourist gaze is not meant to account for why
specific individuals are motivated to travel. Rather we emphasise the
systematic and regularised nature of various gazes, each of which
depends upon social discourses and practices, as well as aspects of
building, design and restoration that foster the necessary ‘look’ of a
place or an environment. Such gazes implicate both the gazer and the
gazee in an ongoing and systematic set of social and physical relations.
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These relations are discursively organised by many professionals:
photographers, writers of travel books, blogs and guides, local councils,
experts in the ‘heritage industry’, travel agents, hotel owners, designers, tour operators, TV travel programmes, tourism development officers,
architects, planners, tourism academics and so on. In contemporary
tourism, these technical, semiotic and organisational discourses are
combined to ‘construct’ visitor attractions, or what Heidegger describes
as an alien power which enforces ‘its own commands and regulations’,
in his case over Greece on his attempted ‘sojourn’ (2005: 55–6).
Focusing on the gaze brings out how the organising sense in tourism
is visual. And this mirrors the general privileging of the eye within the
history of western societies. Sight was long viewed as the noblest of
the senses, the most discriminating and reliable of the sensuous mediators between humans and their physical environment. This emphasis
on sight is present within western epistemology, within religious and
other symbolisms and within notions of how society should be visible,
made transparent, to government (Urry, 2000: ch. 4).
At the same time as this visual proliferation, so the visual is commonly denigrated within many discourses of travel (Buzard, 1993)
and more generally (Jay, 1993). The person who only lets the sense
of sight have free rein is ridiculed. Such sightseers, especially with a
camera draped around their neck, are conventionally taken to be
superficial in their appreciation of environments, peoples and places.
Martin Parr’s photographic collection Small Worlds reveals and
exposes such a denigration of the (normally male) camera-wearing
tourist (1995; Osborne, 2000: ch. 7).
There can be an acute embarrassment about mere sightseeing.
Sight may be viewed as the most superficial of the senses, getting in
the way of real experiences that should involve other senses and
necessitate long periods of time in order for proper immersion.
Famously, Wordsworth argued that the Lake District demands a different eye, one that is not threatened or frightened by the relatively
wild and untamed nature. It requires ‘a slow and gradual process of
culture’ (Wordsworth, 1984: 193). This criticism of the mere sightseeing tourist is taken to the extreme with the critique of the ‘hyperreal’, simulated designed places that have the appearance of being
more ‘real’ than the original (Baudrillard, 1983, 1988; see Chapter 5).
With hyper-reality the sense of vision is said to be reduced to a limited array of visible features. It is then exaggerated and dominates
the other senses. Hyper-real places are characterised by surface
appearances. The sense of sight is condensed to the most immediate
and visible aspects of the scene, such as the seductive façades of
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Main Street in Disneyland or the ocean-liner environment at
Manchester’s Trafford Centre, although such places can of course be
performed in different ways (see Chapters 6 and 8; Bryman, 1995;
see also Fjellman, 1992, on Disney, the ‘authentic’ theme park!).
However, although the tourist gaze emerges in this general sense,
there are different kinds of gaze authorised by various discourses.
These discourses include education, as with the eighteenth-century
European Grand Tour and with many current study-tour programmes; health, as with tourism designed to ‘restore’ the individual
to healthy functioning often through staying in particular sites of
bodily restoration (such as the Swiss Alps or Rotarua in New
Zealand); group solidarity, as with much Japanese or Taiwanese tourism (as at Niagara Falls: Shields, 1990); pleasure and play, as with
‘ludic’ tourism within all-inclusive Caribbean resorts only available
for those who happen to be aged 18–30; heritage and memory, as with
the development of indigenous histories, museums, re-created festivals, feasts, dances and so on (see Arellano, 2004, on Inca heritage);
and nation, as with the increasingly profitable and autonomous
notion of Scotland – the brand (McCrone et al., 1995).
Moreover, different discourses imply different socialities. With
what we call the romantic gaze, solitude, privacy and a personal, semispiritual relationship with the object of the gaze are emphasised. In
such cases, tourists expect to look at the object privately or at least
only with ‘significant others’. Large numbers of strangers visiting, as
at the Taj Mahal, intrude upon and spoil that lonely contemplation
desired by western visitors (famously seen in the Princess Diana shot
at the Taj; Edensor, 1998: 121–3). The romantic gaze involves further
quests for new objects of the solitary gaze, the deserted beach, the
empty hilltop, the uninhabited forest, the uncontaminated mountain
stream and so on. Notions of the romantic gaze are endlessly used in
marketing and advertising tourist sites, especially within the ‘west’.
By contrast, what we call the collective tourist gaze involves conviviality. Other people also viewing the site are necessary to give liveliness
or a sense of carnival or movement. Large numbers of people indicate
that this is the place to be. These moving, viewing others are obligatory
for the collective consumption of place, as with Barcelona, Ibiza, Las
Vegas, the Beijing Olympics, Hong Kong and so on. Baudelaire relatedly describes the notion of flânerie: ‘dwelling in the throng, in the ebb
and flo, the bustle, the fleeting’ (quoted in Tester, 1994: 2). Indian visitors
to the Taj Mahal are implicated in a communal witnessing with family
and friends of a national monument (Edensor, 1998: 126), whereas
many seaside resorts in northern Europe and North America have lost
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the crowds necessary for the collective gaze – they have become sites
of a kind of lost collective gaze (Walton, 2000).
Beyond these two forms of the gaze, various writers have shown
other gazes, other ways in which places get visually consumed both
while people are stationary and through movement. These vary in
terms of the socialities involved, the lengths of time taken and the
character of visual appreciation. Thus first, there is the spectatorial
gaze that involves the collective glancing at and collecting of different
signs that have been very briefly seen in passing at a glance. Examples
of this would be the collecting of glances as from a tourist bus window
(Larsen, 2001) or from Norwegian cruise ships or ferries that enable
visitors to see ‘Norway in a Nutshell’. Then there is the notion of the
reverential gaze used to describe how, for example, Muslims spiritually
consume the sacred site of the Taj Mahal. Muslim visitors stop to scan
and to concentrate their attention upon the mosque, the tombs and
the Koranic script (Edensor, 1998: 127–8). The anthropological gaze
describes how individual visitors scan a variety of sights/sites and are
able to locate them interpretatively within a historical array of meanings and symbols. Some tour guides may themselves provide accounts
that interpret sights/sites historically and inter-culturally (as with Bali:
see Bruner, 1995, on the anthropologist as tour guide).
Related to this is the environmental gaze. This involves a scholarly
or NGO-authorised discourse of scanning various tourist practices to
determine their footprint upon the ‘environment’. On the basis of
such reflexivity it is then possible to choose that with the smallest
footprint and then recommend through various media to like-minded
environmentalists (as with the UK-campaigning organisation Tourism
Concern: Urry, 1995a: 191). Then there is the mediatised gaze. This is
a collective gaze where particular sites famous for their ‘mediated’
nature are viewed. This is the gaze of so-called movie-induced tourism (see Chapter 5). Those gazing on the scene relive elements or
aspects of the media event. Examples of such mediated gazes include
locations in Santa Monica and Venice Beach where many Hollywood
films are set, the village of Avoca in County Wicklow now overrun
by Ballykissangel tourists and the Taj Mahal which is a setting for various ‘masala’ movies where particular scenes can be relived (Edensor,
1998: 127). Finally, there is the family gaze. Haldrup and Larsen suggest how much tourist photography revolves around producing loving
family photographs set within distinct visual environments (2003;
see Chapters 7 and 8).
As discussed in detail in Chapter 8, gazing is an embodied social
practice that involves senses beyond sight. At times we refer to travel
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as corporeal travel. This is to emphasise something so obvious that it
has often been forgotten (especially according to Veijola and Jokinen,
1994, by most male theorists!). It is that tourists moving from place
to place comprise lumpy, fragile, aged, gendered, racialised bodies.
Such bodies encounter other bodies, objects and the physical world
multi-sensuously. Tourism involves corporeal movement and forms of
pleasure and these are central to any study of diverse tourisms. In
that sense, the tourist gaze involves relations between bodies that are
themselves in at least intermittent movement.
This corporeality of movement produces intermittent moments of
physical proximity, to be bodily in the same space as some landscape
or townscape, or at a live event or with one’s friends, family, colleagues, partner or indeed in the company of desired ‘strangers’ (all
skiers, or all aged 18–30 and single, or all bridge players). Much travel
results from a powerful ‘compulsion to proximity’ that makes the
travel seem absolutely necessary (Boden and Molotch, 1994; Urry,
2007). Much work and social life entail travel because of the importance of connection, of needing to meet, to encourage others, to
sustain one’s networks (Larsen et al., 2006). To be there oneself is
what is crucial in most tourism, whether this place occupies a key
location within the global tourist industry or is merely somewhere
that one has been told about by a friend. Places need to be seen ‘for
oneself’ and experienced directly: to meet at a particular house of
one’s childhood or visit a particular restaurant or walk along a certain
river valley or energetically climb a particular hill or capture a good
photograph oneself. Co-presence, then, involves seeing or touching
or hearing or smelling or tasting a particular place (see Rodaway,
1994; Urry, 2000, on the multiple senses involved).
A further kind of travel occurs where a ‘live’ event is to be seen, an
event programmed to happen at a specific moment. Examples
include political, artistic, celebratory and sporting occasions, the last
are especially ‘live’ since the outcome (and even the length) may be
unknown. Each of these generates intense moments of co-presence,
whether for Princess Diana’s funeral, the Shanghai World Expo,
Glastonbury Festival, or the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Each
of these cannot be missed and they produce enormous movements
of people at very specific moments in ‘global cities’ in order to ‘catch’
that particular live mega-event. Roche describes the planned megaevents as ‘social spatio-temporal “hubs” and “switches” that … channel,
mix and re-route global flows’ (2000: 199). Such events are spatiotemporal moments of global condensation, involving the peculiarly
intense ‘localisation’ of such global events within ‘unique places due
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to the fact that they staged unique events’. These places therefore
have the ‘power to transform themselves from being mundane places …
into being these special “host city” sites’ that come to occupy distinct
niches within global tourism (Roche, 2000: 224; see Chapter 6).
Such co-presence nearly always involves travel over, and beyond,
other places, to get to those visually distinct sites to watch a live
event, to climb a particular rock-face, to wander ‘lonely as a cloud’,
to go white-water rafting, to bungee jump and so on. These corporeally defined practices are found in specific, specialised ‘leisure
spaces’, geographically and ontologically distant from work and
domestic sites. Indeed, part of the attraction of these places, where
bodies can be corporeally alive, apparently ‘natural’ or rejuvenated,
is that they are sensuously ‘other’ to everyday routines and places.
Ring interestingly describes how during the nineteenth century the
Alps were developed into such a specialised space where the English
gentleman could apparently feel properly alive (2000).
Such places involve ‘adventure’, islands of life resulting from
intense bodily arousal, from bodies in motion, finding their complex
way in time and space (see Frisby and Featherstone, 1997; and Lewis,
2000, on the rock-climbing ‘adventurer’). Some social practices
involve bodily resistance where the body physicalises its relationship
with the external world. In the late eighteenth-century development
of walking as resistance, the ‘freedom’ of the road and the development of leisurely walking were modest acts of rebellion against established social hierarchy (Jarvis, 1997). Similarly, extreme ‘adventure
tourism’ demonstrates forms of physical resistance to work and
the everyday (Perkins and Thorns, 2001). The hedonistic desire to
acquire a bronzed body developed through resistance to the Protestant
Ethic, women’s domesticity and ‘rational recreation’ (see Ahmed,
2000). A similar resistance to the embodiment of the ‘Protestant
Ethic’ can be seen in the growth of health-spa travel where the body
stays still and is subjected to exotic, pampered luxury treatments.
So far we have regarded the body from the viewpoint of the tourist. But tourism is often about the body-as-seen, displaying, performing and seducing visitors with skill, charm, strength, sexuality and so
on (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, we have so far considered the gaze
from the perspective of the gazer. However, much tourism research
concerns the consequences of being gazed upon, with working
within a ‘tourist honeypot’ and subject to a gaze somewhat similar
to being within a panopticon, for example (Urry, 1992). Staged
authenticity may have the effect of keeping out what may be
deemed the intrusive eye while providing visitors with what seems
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properly ‘authenticated’. However, whether this is possible depends
upon various determinants such as the relations of power within the
‘host’ community, the time-space characteristics of visitors and
the kinds of gaze involved. For example, the least intrusive gaze may
be the spectatorial since it is likely to be mobile and will soon pass
by (although the endlessly anonymous traffic may itself be overwhelming). The anthropological gaze can be the most intrusive since
tourists will insist on staying for lengthy periods within the host
community in order to get to know it ‘authentically’.
But tourists not only gaze but are also gazed upon by staff and
‘locals’. Locals gaze upon tourists’ practices, clothes, bodies and cameras and find them amusing, disgusting, curious or attractive. Maoz
speaks of a ‘mutual gaze’ to highlight how tourists too can become
the mad ones behind bars, watched by locals (2006; see Chapter 8).
Mobile Worlds
In 1990, when the first edition of this book was published, it was
unclear how significant the processes we now call ‘globalisation’
would become. Indeed, the internet had only just been invented and
there was no indication how it would transform countless aspects of
social life, being taken up more rapidly than any previous technology.
And no sooner had the internet appeared than another ‘mobile technology’, the mobile phone, transformed communications practices on
the move. Overall the last two decades have seen remarkable ‘timespace compression’ as people across the globe have been brought
closer through various technologically assisted developments. There is
increasingly what Bauman describes as the shift from a solid, fixed
modernity to a more fluid and speeded-up ‘liquid modernity’ (2000).
And part of this sense of compression of space has stemmed from
the rapid flows of travellers and tourists physically moving from
place to place, and especially from hub airport to hub airport.
Elsewhere we distinguish between virtual travel through the internet, imaginative travel through phone, radio and TV, and corporeal
travel along the infrastructures of the global travel industry (Urry,
2007; also see Cresswell, 2006). The amount of ‘traffic’ along all
these has magnified over this last decade or so and there is no evidence that virtual and imaginative travel is replacing corporeal
travel, but there are complex intersections between these different
modes of travel that are increasingly de-differentiated from one
another. As Microsoft asks, ‘Where do you want to go today?’ And
there are many different ways of getting ‘there’.
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The Tourist Gaze
What we call corporeal travel has taken on immense dimensions
and comprises the largest ever movement of people across national
borders. Because of these liquidities the relations between almost all
societies across the globe are mediated by flows of tourists, as place
after place is reconfigured as a recipient of such flows. There is an
omnivorous producing and ‘consuming [of] places’ around the globe
(see Urry, 1995a). Core components of contemporary global culture
now include the hotel buffet, the pool, the cocktail, the beach
(Lencek and Bosker, 1998), the airport lounge (Cwerner, Kesselring
and Urry, 2009) and the bronzed tan (Ahmed, 2000).
This omnivorousness presupposes the growth of ‘tourism reflexivity’, the set of disciplines, procedures and criteria that enable each
(and every?) place to monitor, evaluate and develop its tourism
potential within the emerging patterns of global tourism. This reflexivity is concerned with identifying a particular place’s location
within the contours of geography, history and culture that swirl the
globe, and in particular identifying that place’s actual and potential
material and semiotic resources. One element in this ‘tourism reflexivity’ is the very institutionalisation of tourism studies, of new monographs, textbooks, exotic conferences, departments and journals (see
The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies: Jamal and Robinson, 2009).
There are also many consultancy firms interlinked with local, national
and international states, companies, voluntary associations and
NGOs. The emergence of this ‘tourism industry’ is captured in the
figure of Rupert Sheldrake, an anthropologist of tourism, in David
Lodge’s Paradise News (1991).
This reflexivity is not simply a matter of individuals and their lifepossibilities but of sets of systematic, regularised and evaluative
procedures that enable places to monitor, modify and maximise their
location within the turbulent global order. Such procedures ‘invent’,
produce, market and circulate, especially through global TV and the
internet, new or different or repackaged or niche-dependent places
and their corresponding visual images. And the circulating of such
images develops further the very idea of the globe itself seen, as it
were, from afar (see Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000).
Of course not all members of the world community are equal
participants within global tourism. Side by side with global tourists
and travellers within many of those ‘empty meeting places’ or ‘nonplaces’ of modernity, such as the airport lounge, the coach station,
the railway terminus, the motorway service stations, docks and so on,
are countless global exiles (Augé, 1995). Such exiles are fleeing from
famine, war, changing climates, torture, persecution and genocide, as
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economic and social inequalities and the consequential displacements
of population that have magnified in recent years and forced mobility upon many. The recent growth of ‘people smuggling’ has generated a multi-billion pound industry with millions in transit across the
world at any time.
Significantly for the ‘tourist gaze’, many developments are taking
‘tourism’ from the margins of the global order, and indeed of the
academy, to almost the centre of this emergent mobile world of
‘liquid modernity’. First, tourism infrastructures have been constructed in what would have been thought of as the unlikeliest of
places. While clearly most people across the world are not global
tourists qua visitors, this does not mean that the places that they live
in and the associated images of nature, nation, colonialism, sacrifice,
community, heritage and so on are not powerful constituents of a
rapacious global tourism. Some destinations that are now significantly
included in the patterns of global tourism comprise Alaska, Antarctica,
Nazi-occupation sites in the Channel Islands, extinct coal mines,
Ground Zero, Iceland, Mongolia, Mount Everest, Northern Ireland,
Northern Cyprus under Turkish ‘occupation’, Pearl Harbor, postcommunist Russia, the Soweto township in South Africa (see Figure
1.2), outer space, the Titanic, Vietnam and so on.
In certain cases becoming a tourist destination is part of a reflexive process by which societies and places come to enter the global
order, or to ‘re-enter’ as in the cases of China after 1978 or Cuba
during the 1990s, in part using pre-communist American cars in its
place-marketing; see Figure 1.3.
Further, there are large increases in tourists emanating from many
very different countries, especially those of the ‘Orient’, which once
were places mainly visited and consumed by those from the west.
Now rising incomes for an Asian middle class (as well as the student
study tour and ‘backpacker tourism’) have generated a strong desire
to see those places of the west that appear to define global culture.
The development of a huge middle-class tourist demand from mainland China is a major new development. Hendry, however, describes
how various theme parks full of exotic features of ‘westernness’ are
established within various Asian countries (2000). She describes this
as The Orient Strikes Back, the putting on display of many features
of western culture for Asians to view, to wonder at and to exoticise,
without leaving their home country (more generally, see Winter, Teo
and Chang, on Asia on Tour, 2009).
Moreover, many types of work are now found within these circuits
of global tourism and so it is difficult not to be implicated within, or
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Informal township, Soweto
Figure 1.2
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Figure 1.3
1950s American cars re-forming the place-image of Cuba
The Tourist Gaze
affected by, one or more of these circuits that increasingly overlap with
a more general ‘economy of signs’ spreading across multiple spaces of
consumption (Lash and Urry, 1994; see Chapter 4). Such forms of
work include transportation, hospitality, travel, design and consultancy; the producing of ‘images’ of global tourist sites, global icons (the
Eiffel Tower), iconic types (the global beach) and vernacular icons
(Balinese dances); the mediatising and circulating of images through
print, TV, news, internet and so on; and the organising through politics
and protest campaigns for or against the construction or development
of tourist infrastructures. And it involves the almost ubiquitous sextourism industries (Clift and Carter, 2000; see Chapter 3).
Also, increasingly, roaming the globe are powerful and ubiquitous
global brands or logos (Klein, 2000). Their fluid-like power stems from
how the most successful corporations over the last two decades have
shifted from the manufacture of products to become brand producers,
with enormous marketing, design, sponsorship, public relations and
advertising expenditures. Such brand companies include many
involved in travel and leisure: Nike, Gap, easyJet, Body Shop, Hilton,
Virgin, Club Med, Sandals, Starbucks and so on produce ‘concepts’ or
‘lifestyles’. They are ‘liberated from the real-world burdens of stores
and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the
dissemination of goods and services than as collective hallucinations’
(Klein, 2000: 22). Klein brings out the importance in this of the ‘global
teen market’, with about one billion young people disproportionately
consuming similar consumer brands across the globe (2000: 118–21).
There are thus many ways in which huge numbers of people and
places are caught up within the swirling vortex of global tourism.
There are not two separate entities, the ‘global’ and ‘tourism’ bearing
some external connections with each other. Rather they are part and
parcel of the same set of complex and interconnected processes.
Moreover, such assembled infrastructures, flows of images and of
people, and the emerging practices of ‘tourist reflexivity’ should be
conceptualised as a ‘global hybrid’ (Urry, 2003). It is hybrid because
it is made up of an assemblage of technologies, texts, images, social
practices and so on, that together enable it to expand and to reproduce itself across the globe. This is analogous to the mobilities of
other global hybrids, such as the internet, automobility, global
finance and so on, that spread across the globe and reshape and
re-perform what is the ‘global’.
For Bauman, the vagabond and the tourist are plausible metaphors
for postmodern times: the vagabond, he says, is a pilgrim without a
destination, a nomad without an itinerary; while the ‘world is the
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tourist’s oyster … to be lived pleasurably’ (Bauman, 1993: 241).
Both vagabonds and tourists move through other people’s spaces,
they both separate physical closeness from moral proximity, and
both set standards for happiness and the good life. According to
Bauman, the good life has come to be thought of as akin to a ‘continuous holiday’ (1993: 243). There is thus no separate tourist gaze
since, according to Bauman, this is simply how life is lived at least for
the prosperous one-third within the new global order.
Feminist analysts criticise the masculinist character of these metaphors that imply that there really can be ungrounded and unbounded
movement. Yet different people have very different access to being
‘on the road’, literally or metaphorically (Wolff, 1993). Moreover,
Jokinen and Veijola demonstrate the deficiency of many nomadic
metaphors that are ‘masculinist’ (1997). If these metaphors are
re-coded as paparazzi, homeless drunk, sex-tourist and womaniser,
then they lose the positive valuation that they enjoyed within masculinist nomadic theory. Indeed, the mobilities of some always
presuppose the immobilities of others. The mobile tourist gaze
presupposes immobile bodies (normally female) servicing and
displaying their bodies for those who are mobile and passing by.
So Morris recommends the metaphor of the motel for the nature
of contemporary mobile life (1988). The motel possesses no real
lobby, it is tied into the network of highways, it functions to relay
people rather than to provide settings for coherent human subjects,
it is consecrated to circulation and movement, and it demolishes the
particular sense of place and locale. Motels ‘memorialize only movement, speed, and perpetual circulation’ – they ‘can never be a true
place’ and each is only distinguished from the other in ‘a high-speed,
empiricist flash’ (Morris, 1988: 3, 5). The motel, like the airport transit lounge or the coach station, represents neither arrival nor departure. It represents the ‘pause’ before tourists move on to the next
stopping-point along the extraordinary routeways of a ‘liquid modernity’, leaving behind of course those immobilised bodies subject
to high-speed passing glances (such as the 50,000 employees at
Chicago’s O’Hare airport: Gottdiener, 2001: 23).
The analysis of globalisation has thus ushered in some momentous
reconfigurations of the tourist gaze, both for the ever-mobile bodies
intermittently pausing and for the immobilised bodies that meet in
some of these ‘strange encounters’ of the new world order. Such
encounters involve exceptional levels of ‘non-interaction’, or urban
anonymity especially within the ‘walled cities’ or camps known as
airports (Cwerner, Kesselring and Urry, 2009; Adey, 2006, 2010).
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The Tourist Gaze
There has thus been a major shift from a limited range of tourist
gazes in the nineteenth century to the proliferation of discourses,
forms and embodiments of tourist gazes now. In a simple sense, we
can talk of the globalising of the tourist gaze, as multiple gazes have
become core to global culture sweeping up almost everywhere in
their awesome wake. There is much less ‘tourism’ per se that occurs
within specific and distinct kinds of time-space; there is the ‘end of
tourism’ within the more general ‘economy of signs’. There are countless mobilities, physical, imaginative and virtual, voluntary and
coerced as well as increasing similarities between behaviours that are
‘home’ and ‘away’ (Shaw et al., 2000: 282; Urry, 2007; Haldrup and
Larsen, 2010). Tourist sites proliferate across the globe as tourism has
become massively mediatised, while everyday sites of activity get
redesigned in ‘tourist’ mode, as with many themed environments.
Mobility is increasingly central to the identities of many young people,
to those who are members of diasporas and to relatively wealthy
retired people who can live on the move or spend much time in their
cottage or holiday flat (Urry, 2007). And ‘tourism reflexivity’ leads
almost every place – however apparently boring – to develop some
niche location within the swirling contours of the emergent order (see
Martin Parr’s collection of Boring Postcards, 1999).
Elsewhere it is seen how notions of chaos and complexity can help
to illuminate the unexpected, far-from equilibrium movements of
social and physical processes that rage across the globe (Urry, 2003).
These movements have unpredictably elevated ‘tourism’, even as it
de-differentiates from leisure, shopping, art, culture, history, the body,
sport and so on, from the very margins to a central place within this
emergent global order. And as it does so here and there pockets of
disorder remain, of openings and gaps, memories and fantasies, movements and margins. (MacCannell, 2001, argues something similar in
his notion of the ‘second gaze’.) One thing that is sure about the
emergent global order is that it is only at best a contingent and temporary ordering that generates its massive and complex disordering.
In the next chapter we go back to the origins of this mass mobile
world and examine some of the processes that engendered the
exceptionally distinct mass tourism by the sea for the first industrial
working class, which developed in the north of England.
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2
Mass Tourism
Introduction
The first example of mass tourism occurred among the industrial
working class in Britain. The mass tourist gaze was initiated in the
backstreets of the industrial towns and cities in the north of England.
This chapter is devoted to examining why this industrial working
class came to think that going away for short periods to other places
was an appropriate form of social activity. Why did the tourist gaze
develop among this industrial working class in the north of England?
What revolution in experience, thinking and perception led to such
novel and momentous modes of social practice?
The growth of such tourism represents a kind of ‘democratisation’
of travel. We have seen that travel had been enormously socially
selective. It had been available for a relatively limited elite and was
a marker of social status. But in the second half of the nineteenth
century there was an extensive development in Europe of mass travel
by train. Status distinctions then came to be drawn between different classes of traveller, but less between those who could and those
could not travel. We noted above how 1840 is one of those remarkable moments when the world seems to shift and new patterns of
social relations become established. This is when the ‘tourist gaze’,
that combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire
for travel and the techniques of photographic reproduction, becomes
a core component of western modernity.
We consider later how in the twentieth century the car and the
aeroplane have further democratised geographical movement. As
travel became democratised so extensive distinctions of taste came
to be established between the different places to which people travelled, which became markers of social ‘distinction’. The tourist
gaze came to have a different importance in one place rather than
another. A resort ‘hierarchy’ developed and certain places were viewed
as embodiments of mass tourism, to be despised and ridiculed. Major
differences of ‘social tone’ were established between otherwise similar
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places. And some such places, these new working-class resorts, quickly
developed as symbols of ‘mass tourism’, as places of inferiority
which stood for everything that dominant social classes held to be
tasteless, common and vulgar.
Explanations of the tourist gaze, of the discourses which established and sustained mass tourism for the industrial working class
in the nineteenth century, tend to be over-general. Such developments are normally explained in terms of ‘nineteenth-century
industrialisation’ (Myerscough, 1974). In identifying more precisely
those aspects of such industrialisation that were especially important, attention will be paid here to seaside resorts whose development
was by no means inevitable. Their growth stemmed from certain features of nineteenth-century industrialisation in Britain and the
growth of new modes by which pleasure was organised and structured in a society based upon an emergent, organised and large-scale
working class. We examine their development because this was the
first mass tourism to occur.
The Growth of the British Seaside Resort
Throughout Europe a number of spa towns developed in the eighteenth century. Their original purpose was medicinal: they provided
mineral water used for bathing in and drinking. It is not clear exactly
how and why people came to believe in these medicinal properties.
The first spa in England appears to have been in Scarborough and
dates from 1626 when a Mrs Farrow noticed a spring on the beach
(see Hern, 1967: 2–3; Blackbourn, 2002). Within a few decades the
medical profession began to advocate the desirable effects of taking
the waters, or taking the ‘Cure’. Various other spas developed, in
Bath, Buxton, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and so on. An amazing
range of disorders were supposedly improved by both swallowing
the waters and by bathing in them.
Scarborough, though, was distinctive since it was not only a major
spa but was also by the sea. A Dr Wittie began to advocate both
drinking the sea water and bathing in the sea. During the eighteenth
century there was a considerable increase in sea bathing as the developing merchant and professional classes began to believe in its
medicinal properties as a general pick-me-up. At that stage it was
advocated for adults and there was little association between seasides and children. Indeed, the point of bathing in the sea was to do
one good and this was often done in winter, involving ‘immersion’
and not what is now understood as swimming (Hern, 1967: 21).
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Mass Tourism
These dips in the sea were structured and ritualised and prescribed
to treat serious medical conditions. Bathing was only to be undertaken ‘after due preparation and advice’ as the historian Gibbon put
it (Shields, 1990), and was also normally undertaken naked. The
beach was a place of ‘medicine’ rather than ‘pleasure’.
Spa towns remained relatively socially restrictive. Access was only
possible for those who could own or rent accommodation in the
particular town. Younger summarises how: ‘life in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century watering-places resembled in many ways life
on a cruise or in a small winter sports hotel, where the company ...
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