Tourists, Signs and the City

The Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape

Michelle M. Metro-Roland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317009337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Drawing upon the literature of landscape geography, tourism studies, cultural studies, visual studies and philosophy, this book offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the interaction between urban environments and tourists. This is a necessary prerequisite for cities as they make themselves into enticing destinations and compete for tourists' attention. It argues that tourists make sense of, and draw meaningful conclusions about, the places in which they tour based upon the interpretation of the signs or elements encountered within the built environment, elements such as graffiti and lamp posts. The writings of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce on interpretation provide the theoretical model for explaining the way in which mind and world, or thoughts and objects, result in tourists interacting with place. This theoretical framework elucidates three applied studies undertaken with foreign visitors to the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Based upon extensive ethnographic field work, these studies focus on tourists' interpretation of the urban landscape, with particular attention paid to the encounters with national culture, the role of architecture and the importance of the prosaic in urban tourism.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Signs, Place and Meaning

In the Spring of 2006, the Budapest landscape underwent a tectonic shift as the city was invaded by cows. They came slowly at first, one here, one there, until by midsummer, wherever you turned you could not but bump into one of the recalcitrant ruminants. As part of Cowparade, the fiberglass sculptures have made their appearance throughout the world from Chicago to Bucharest. Local artists are charged with inscribing the blank canvas afforded by the cows’ bodies, painting, decorating, modifying and naming them. The cows which filled the Budapest streets present a puzzle for those encountering them because like the other elements which constitute the city, their relationship to Hungarian culture is a complex one to unravel.

Two examples should suffice. Across from the Vásárcsarnok, the Central Market Hall in Budapest, sat the “Package Cow,” painted to resemble the famous Hungarian Pick Salami. The wording, however, is in English and plays on the tension between the global and the local highlighted by the proximity of the Burger King, which the cow sits in front, and the city’s largest market hall which looms across the street. Then there is the “Magyar Narancs” [Hungarian Orange] cow, colored and textured to have the appearance of an orange. On first glance this might simply seem another food themed depiction analogous to the melting ice cream and the chocolate milk cow, but its significance goes much deeper.

One needs to know that one of the popular political and cultural weeklies is entitled Magyar Narancs. One also needs to know that the name refers to a scene from the movie A Tanú [The Witness], which offered a subtle but trenchant critique of socialism when it was finally released in Hungary in 1969. The film follows the missteps of József Pelikán, a dike keeper who bungles one after another of the tasks with which he is charged by the Party. One of those tasks is the cultivation of citrus fruits, which given the inappropriate climatic conditions is bound to elude even the most determined planning capabilities of the socialist government. The one orange that is produced is eaten just prior to the celebration and a lemon replaces the orange on the dais. When the general tastes it, unable to suppress a pained pucker of his lips, the reply of the hapless Comrade Pelikán “az uj Magyar narancs, kicsi sárgabb, kicsi savanyú, de a miénk,” “the new Hungarian orange, a little yellower, a little bitter, but ours,” entered the cultural lexicon, as a pithy critique about the lies and failures of real existing socialism. It is this scene from the film that inspired the liberal journal (one of the first to appear at the change of regime), and which was referenced in 1989 by the reform party Fidesz [the Young Democrats] when they handed out oranges to supporters and adopted a bright orange shade as their color. Their recent shift to the right of the political spectrum spurred the journal to change its colors from orange, to yellow, with the tag line “The Hungarian Orange is Not an Orange, and neither is the Color.” It is all of this which is embodied and referenced in the cow. That an orange, a so called “southern fruit,” foreign to the country and the culture, can attain such a level of signification is at heart a semiotic event.

As can be seen in this one example, the position of an object, in this case an orange fiberglass cow, in a larger meaning flow, is a complex one, based upon layers of meaning and signification which stand outside of the actual object. Thus a person unfamiliar with the history of the “Hungarian orange” sees simply a cow, a piece of public art, a pun on food types. And these are all correct. But because objects are not simply free floating entities unmoored from place and time, or if you like, geography and history, meaning accretes like dust, and bringing to bear the film, the phrase, the journal and the political party, the subsequent repudiation by the former of the latter turns this orange cow into a particularly Hungarian cultural object.

The meaning(s) of any object in the world is multivalent, richly contextual and our understanding and unraveling of these meanings is best explained by sign theory which treats explicitly the epistemological problem raised in cognition. This act of meaning making, the linkage between mind and world, and belief and action is the subject of this research which treats this process in the context of the tourist experience of culture within the urban landscape of Budapest.

This work makes several contributions towards the understanding of tourism. First it offers a theoretical framework for understanding the way in which meaning is educed from the built environment. This is not to say that landscapes are passive containers filled with significance or that they are simply “texts” to be read. Cognition is always an active endeavor which entails a give and take between object and interpreter as we will see. Secondly, it brings to bear core geographic understanding of landscape and place meaning to the interdisciplinary field of tourism studies in an investigation of tourism practices in urban areas. By privileging geographic thought this work adds to the growing sub-discipline of tourism landscape. Third, it offers insight into the ways in which the banal and the monumental, the quotidian and the touristic play out in the context of urban tourism by proposing the concept of the tourist prosaic, a hybrid understanding of the spaces in the city which matter to tourists. Lastly, it brings empirical research to the theorizing of landscape interpretation, uniting the analytical insights of the researcher with the lived experiences of non-specialists.

Applied Semiotics

Let us start with the last contribution first. This work is based on three applied studies undertaken with foreign visitors to the Hungarian capital of Budapest in 2005 and 2006 based upon extensive ethnographic field work. The focus of these studies was tourists’ interpretation of the urban landscape with particular attention paid to the encounters with national culture, specifically the rather vague notion of Hungarianess. This concept is an admittedly allusive one—Hungarian scholars have been debating the question What is Hungarian? [Mi A Magyar] (Szekfű 1939; Romsics and Szegedy-Maszák 2005) for the last century—but in the context of this research it has a dual role. On the one hand, tourism while we can debate the various aspects of what as a practice it actually entails, is at some level about encountering that which is other. Thus visitors to Hungary would be thinking about what made this particular place Hungarian at some point in their stay.

On the other hand it was also a proxy for placeness; how was this city different and unique from other cities. Puczkó, Rátz and Smith (2007) note that Americans especially find it difficult to distinguish between Prague, Vienna and Budapest. While Thomas Friedman (2005) declared the world flat as a result of globalization, Richard Florida (2005) argued that rather what we are seeing is a “spiky world” in which a few places stand out. Cities around the globe have sought to elevate themselves above the fray, turning to branding (Caldwell and Freire 2004; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005) in order to capture the lucrative capital streams which global tourism attracts (Blaine et al. 2005). At the heart of this is the question of the genius loci, or spirit of place, what makes a destination unique and marks a site as desirable and worthy of the tourists’ attention.

Participant observation was combined with interviews in order to investigate tourists’ experience with place and the attempts at creating meaning out of the built environment. Three different investigations were undertaken. In the first instance over 52 groups of tourists (103 people in all) were interviewed on the streets at key tourist sites throughout the Inner City, including the Parliament and the Castle District. In the second instance visitor employed photography was undertaken. Single use cameras were distributed to a different group of tourists, 30 in total, who were asked to capture their encounters with Hungarianess in the cityscape. 22 cameras were returned with a total of 357 exposures. Lastly, the study of tourists’ interpretations of culture was moved to a specific locale in the city the Central Market Hall. A busy meat and produce market and tourist attraction, it is a paradigmatic case of the tourist prosaic. Interviews were conducted with 53 groups (109 people in all) just outside the main doors of the market. The interviews and the photos paint a picture of tourists’ encounters with culture in the cityscape—touristscape nexus. As will be seen below this research was framed within the context of semiotics and landscape theory which both give explanatory power to the results of the applied research.

Towards a Theoretical Framework for Interpretation

Semiotics, or sign interpretation, dates back at least to the Ancient Greeks. The present work offers an introduction to the sign theory of the American Pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce who along with his contemporary the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is considered one of the founding fathers of modern sign theory. Outside of the fields of philosophy and semiotics his work is not well known. Unlike the linguistic model based on the lectures of Saussure, Peirce’s theory goes beyond simply explaining the way in which concepts are linked to language but rather treats the real world implications of interpretation that result in habit and action. Peirce’s writing on semiotics is grounded in a larger philosophical project which addresses epistemology, logic and metaphysics.

Saussure (1959) proposed a sign bifurcated between a signifier and signified, that is a sound (image accoustique) and a concept, privileging the arbitrary linkage between the two and the way in which meaning emerges from the structures of language. Peirce on the other hand proposed a tripartite sign consisting of object, representamen and interpretant. It is this last concept, that of interpretation, where Peirce’s theory advances our comprehension of the relationship between objects in the world and our understanding because interpretation is not just thought, but also resides in habit and action. This stems directly from Peirce’s foundational beliefs about pragmatism: “consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (EP 1.132). In other words, we act in the world based upon our beliefs, which are in turn shaped by our interactions with the world; hence most of us choose to walk through doorways rather than walls.

His theory is also better suited to dealing with “real” objects, rather than simply concepts, things which comprise landscapes from street cars to walkways. Nöth (1990) in his far reaching encyclopedic study of semiotics concludes, “Saussure’s contribution to a general theory of signs has been only minor. He had little to say about nonlinguistic signs and was not concerned with questions such as the general typology of signs” (63). Those following on Saussure have adopted a structuralist approach applying a model based in linguistics to nonlinguistic contexts. Studies such as Preziosi’s (1979) of architecture using terms borrowed from linguistics, such as phonemes and morphemes, fail to grasp the social meaning of architectural form. As Goss (1988) notes, in his call for an Architectural Geography, “to understand the meaning of the built environment is not to retreat into obscure analyses of the deep structural grammar of architecture. We must realize the complexity of a multi-coded space and study it in its everyday usage (through interviews, literary and historic texts, or events) by everyday people” (398). The difficulty of imposing a structuralist model based in the system of language upon nonlinguistic cases has meant that many studies which claim to employ semiotics, including much of the work in tourism (Culler 1981; Davis 2005; Frow 1991; Gaffey 2004; Jaworski and Pritchard 2005; Nelson 2005; Smith 2005) offer a diluted theoretical application which assumes that semiotic is simply interchangeable with symbolic, producing studies which tell us a great deal about how signs are symbols of other things. They do not go beyond signs that are not mere symbols, they do not show us the means by which we know the world through signs, and they do not explain how we interpret the meaning which signs have.

These weaknesses are the exact strengths that one finds in Peirce’s theory, a theory which not only treats explicitly the way in which meaning is educed from objects—things which are constituent of landscapes such as lampposts and street signs—but also moves us beyond simply talking about symbolic meaning and thinking to understand the way in which interpretation compels us to action.

Landscapes, Cityscapes and Touristscapes

In the multifaceted environment of cities what constitutes sense of place and how place is experienced is a vitally important question not just for tourism boards, but also for urban planners, preservationists, local governments, community activists and residents. Geographers with their disciplinary interest in landscape bring an ideal set of tools with which to approach the role that place plays in urban tourism, a topic which has received less attention than one might think. In his recent comprehensive look at urban tourism Martin Selby (2004: 125) notes “there are relatively few contemporary studies of urban tourism which use an experiential approach concerned with the knowledge, meanings, emotions and memories of urban tourists or residents.”

Cities offer a beguiling array of possibilities for the tourist from theaters to museums, from parks to palaces. They are the ideal locus for the provision of entertainment and dinning, and the presentation of culture. Capital cities in particular are replete with cultural meaning, since it is here that the nation is reified in material form, through government buildings, monuments and museums (van der Wusten 2000).

Cities are not simply open air museums, repositories of art and heritage, but are the sites of home and work for the large populations that reside there or in the surrounding suburbs. Cities accommodate industry, offices, stores, residences, hospitals, places of worship, and all the infrastructural trappings from waste disposal to satellite towers that make life possible in the contemporary city. They can be cacophonous, claustrophobic, liberating and overwhelming. The functional aspect of cities makes touring a complex endeavor that entails the tourist to be able to make sense of the landscape.

Kevin Lynch’s (1960) classic work on city image offers some insight into the way in which this is accomplished. He writes:

In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual.

Obviously a clear image enables one to move about more easily and quickly: to find a friend’s house or a policeman or a button store. But an ordered environment can do more than this; it may serve as a broad frame of reference an organizer of activity or belief or knowledge. On the basis of a structural understanding of Manhattan, for example, one can order a substantial quantity of facts and fancies about the nature of the world we live in. Like any good framework, such a structure gives the individual a possibility of choice and a starting-point for the acquisition of further information. A clear image of the surroundings is thus a useful basis for individual growth (4).

Lynch’s account of the role of the image is remarkably similar to Peirce’s conceptions about semiosis. For one thing the image of the city forming from both “immediate sensation” and the memory of past experience resembles Peirce’s claims about the role of collateral knowledge, the satchel of previously gained information we bring to every semiotic encounter. Secondly, the image which is the result of both the present and the past is a kind of representamen, which is then interpreted as informative at the same time it guides behavior. This sounds remarkably similar to an interpretant.

The passage, while not directly referring to tourism, nevertheless has much to say about the path that tourists take in urban settings. Even for those who are not themselves urban dwellers, literature, film and other mass media entities ensure that cities, as an idea, are well understood. As Donald and Gammack (2007: 4) quip “everyone who sees films knows, or thinks they do, what a US, city looks like … [and] Europe also has its cinematic cities.” But even with regional and cultural differences, urban areas around the world share morphological similarities in the constituent elements that give them shape.

Lynch’s argument about the image of the city bears thinking about because it highlights a very important but often neglected idea about urban tourism, and that is that the city, as opposed to the “tourist site” matters. Cartier and Lew’s (2005) speak of “touristed landscapes” as places which get large numbers of tourists but which, are in the end, lived spaces which carry on other functions, tourism being only one (see also Ringer 2002). The present work assumes a symbiotic relationship between the cityscape and the touristscape. The former term encompasses the landscape that is a part of the functional and cultural city of residents and workers, whereas the latter term represents the landscape that is considered part of the tourist city, including cultural sites, restaurants and hotels, souvenir shops and specific tourist districts (the places in which no local wants to be caught, except when forced to entertain out of town guests). The idea that the tourist bubble or the tourist layer exists is not new (Wolfel 2008; Hayllar, Griffin and Edwards 2008). The premise behind most of the alternative guidebooks is that they will lead you off the beaten path into the “real” city (Stewart 2005), and tourism studies has been debating the relationship of the tourist to the “real” for decades (MacCannel 1976, 1999; Boorstin 1964).

The present work contends that at the intersection of the two concepts of cityscape and touristscape lies the tourist prosaic. Based on the empirical studies undertaken with tourists in the Hungarian capital, the experiences of the city that they were talking about were not synonymous with the experiences of either the touristscape or the cityscape but instead were a blending and a sampling. There are of course areas of overlap between the two realms, restaurants, museums and even entertainment districts immediately come to mind, things that would have obvious appeal to both locals and visitors alike. The tourists were also seeing things that were part of the quotidian landscape of the city, like manhole covers and buses, people walking their dogs and graffiti, things which many locals have ceased to notice long ago, and which the tourists themselves back in their home communities probably took little heed of. The role of architecture is characteristic of the quality of the tourist prosaic. The buildings and their varied architectural styles offered not just a backdrop for the experience of culture, but were a critical component of that experience. But in interviews time and again the discussion of buildings foundered upon any detailed discussion of particular styles or buildings. Instead what mattered was the atmosphere a kind of architexturality that developed from the mix of façades. The critical ingredient was the general “oldness” of the building. This sense of engagement with the cityscape it is argued is a function of the tourist prosaic where the banal aspects of the everyday become noteworthy.

But the tourist prosaic also carries another sense, the one that aligns more closely with the touristscape of the city. If we take the prosaic to represent the everyday and the ordinary within the course of being on tour, what constitutes the everyday shifts to include hotels, tour buses and guides, souvenir stands and cafés aimed solely at the tourist with mediocre, overpriced food, and menus in English. Also included here would be the heritage sites that also have resonance for the local population but which on a daily basis are mainly given over to the tourist.

The advantage of such an elastic concept as the tourist prosaic resolves one of the biggest dilemmas in addressing what it is that tourists do when on tour, and whether they seek “authenticity” or not. The argument put forth here is that tourists do both, they move through the “tourist bubble” where they can perform as tourists, pulling out their cameras an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Peirce, Signs and Interpretation
• 3 Landscape and Tourism
• 4 The City—A Brief Introduction
• 5 Tourists in the City—Means and Methods
• 6 Signs in the City
• 7 Markets and Culture
• 8 Conclusions and Implications
• Appendices
• References
• Index