Seductions of Place

Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes

Carolyn Cartier, Alan A Lew, Carolyn Cartier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134651870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The seductiveness of touristed landscapes is simultaneously local and global, as travelled places are formed and reworked by the activities of diverse, mobile people, in their desires to experience situated, sensuous qualities of difference. Cartier and Lew's interesting and informative book explores contemporary issues in travel and tourism and human geography, and the complex cultural, political, and economic activities at stake in touristed landscapes as a result of globalization.

This book assesses travel and tourism as simultaneously cultural and economic processes, through ideas about place seduction and the formation of landscapes. Throughout, examples are given from urban and environmental touristed landscapes, from major world cities to tropical islands, and chapter contributions include:

• an analysis of the representational character of landscape and the built environment
• historic constructions of place seduction
• the importance of class, racial, and gender dimensions of place
• how mobility and the seduction of place orient identity formation
• the environmental impacts of tourism economies.

Broad in scope, this book is ideal for social scientists and humanists who are interested in contemporary debates about place studies, mobility, and the located realities of globalization.

1 Introduction

Touristed landscapes/seductions of place

Carolyn Cartier

Sometimes it seems like nearly any subject of difference or sensory distinction becomes the object of tourism. In Americus, Georgia, Habitat for Humanity International opened the Global Village and Discovery Center, featuring ‘authentic’ slum housing from around the world (except tents and shopping carts of the US homeless). In Newfoundland, Canada, local boat operators lobby to maintain iceberg tourism in the face of commercial ‘berg harvesters who make vodka from the frozen waters, claiming its purity moderates hangovers. China's Guangdong Province, historically famed for culinary indulgences, issued a ban on the leisure practice of eating exotic animals after the SARS epidemic. In the US Midwest, Europeans sign on for twister tours, pack into minivans and race hundreds of miles around the Plains states in hopes of catching sight of a class 5 tornado. Wired reports on

the hacker tourist [who] ventures forth across the wide... meatspace of three continents [encountering] the exotic manhole villagers of Thailand, the U-turn tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the cable nomads of Lan Tao Island, the slack control wizards of Chelmsford, and subterranean ex-telegraphers of Cornwall and other previously unknown and unchronicled folks, [all engaged in] laying the longest wire on earth.

(Stephenson 1996)

During the course of this project, we realized from reactions to its main title that people thought the book might be about such forms of extreme and unique tourism. Or that it would focus on places like the night markets of Bangkok, or the Rosse Buurt of Amsterdam. The subject is really more fundamental: what places, and formative processes of place, generate and sustain significant desire, what are their material landscape qualities, and how should we theorize and narrate their conditions? What we learned is that these places, their landscapes, and even their histories, are dynamic and contested, changing in relation to transformations in society and economy. These are places of complexity, in some cases landscape palimpsests of great historical depth, and whose draw owes to multiple sites of possible experience and sensory encounter.

The project's broad conceptual interest draws closer engagements between tourism studies and the heart of innovations in contemporary human geography. We are interested in lines of intersection between tourism and questions raised in the new cultural geography, and with a vision toward economic geography in its related ‘cultural turns.’ In the way that tourism, as a set of service industries, is the largest in the world economy, tourism implicates a full range of questions about culture and political economy in an era of globalization, and so must embrace issues beyond its traditionally more empirical areas of inquiry. Thus the wider ideational scope of the project explores questions at the crossroads of contemporary issues in cultural studies of travel as well as economies of tourism, theoretical currents as a consequence of the poststructural shift in social theory, and the complex cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions at stake in places as a result of processes of globalization. Situating the ideas in the larger arena of globalization reflects too the rise of so-called mass tourism with the restructuring of the world economy in the emergent period of late or disorganized capitalism, since the 1970s. In other words, we have also consciously written against the historical stereotypes that work on tourism geography generally has been less developed than other fields (perhaps because its conceptual orientation stopped short of giving full play to its array of contingent processual issues and complexities; or because its practitioners were accused of succumbing to the lure of travel!). Two central ideas orient the project and suggest these complexities: the touristeJ landscape and seductions of place. Landscape and place, two of geography's fundamental concepts, are closely interrelated and also carry their own contested intellectual histories.

The touristed landscape

The idea of landscape typically concerns visual qualities of landscapes and their representations, in designs, plans, paintings, and imaginaries about how landscapes should look (cf. Casey 2002, Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, Meinig 1979, Mitchell 2002, Rose 1993, Schama 1995), no less in the mind of the tourist. This project recognizes the significance of the visual, yet is more interested in uncovering its formative conditions and ways the visual can ‘mystify’ political ideologies and relations of production (Cosgrove 1984a). So we are not transfixed by the visual and, moreover, like David Crouch (1999b), see the need to move beyond emphasis on textual representations (e.g. Barnes and Duncan 1992, Duncan and Duncan 1988a, Duncan 1990, Duncan and Ley 1993) to favor more varied sensibilities in explaining emplaced experiences. We are interested in the complexity of landscape formation, in who designs landscape and why; in landscape experience as a multi-sensory, located subjectivity, including memories about it; and in impacts on landscape, understood through perspectives on nature—society relations.

This scope of interest points to examination of places whose larger, a priori significance arguably initiates desire to experience, tour, travel, and explore, rather than those where tourism economies have been explicitly created. Such touristeJ landscapes are found less in ‘tourist towns’, theme parks, and ‘holiday destinations’; their sites are more likely in cities and regions of diverse purposes and meanings, and natural environments, whose integrity, as beaches, mountains, rivers, and oceans, fundamentally orient their geographies. So we use ‘touristed’ to signal that tourists significantly patronize these landscapes but that their formation has not fundamentally owed to the culture and economy of those who pass through. In these ways, touristed landscapes, and as places, represent an array of experiences and goals acted out by diverse people in locales that are subject to tourism but which are also places of historic and integral meaning, where ‘leisure/tourism’ (Crouch 1999a) economies are also local economies, and where people are engaged in diverse aspects of daily life. In a move relatively uncommon in contemporary cultural geography (but see Olwing 2002), we include both urban and ‘natural’ environments in this project, suggesting that work on landscape, and especially the touristed landscape, reintegrate critically how nature—society relations, whether material or as geographical imaginaries, remain central to processes of landscape formation.

The idea of the touristeJ landscape then concerns the possibilities of understanding landscape as toured and lived, places visited by their own residents, the dialectic of moving in and out of ‘being a tourist.’ Touristed landscapes are about complexity of different people doing different things, locals and visitors, sojourners and residents, locals becoming visitors, sojourners becoming residents, residents ‘being tourists,’ travelers denying being tourists: resident part-time tourists, tourists working hard to fit in as if locals. These pivoting and juxtaposed positions take inspiration from Dean MacCannell's (1976a) recognition that “we are all tourists.” And so the project recognizes the messiness of tourism as category of activity, experience, and economy. In the touristed landscape people occupy simultaneous or sequential if sometimes conflicted positions of orientation toward landscape experience and place consumption. This kind of landscape necessarily reflects histories of travel and mobility, relations between local, national, and global economies, the possibilities for different identity positions, and the environmental contexts, built and natural, of places and sites. While landscape studies in the new cultural geography have taken account of different and contested identity dimensions in landscape formation as well as their representational qualities, including perspectives on race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, and sexuality (cf. Jackson 1989, D. Mitchell 2000), the touristed landscape consciously seeks to complicate these positions by signaling multiple and shifting points of view in the context of leisure economy production and consumption.

Landscape and place

In these landscapes, and the places they constitute and represent, interest in experiencing them reflects aspects of desire as well as multiple positions of sensory engagement, attraction, and legibility—ways in which landscapes can be read, imagined, and experienced, from diverse points of view and positions of orientation. As Lucy Lippard (1999: 52) has put it, “Finally, after the pictorial seduction, people flock to places not because of their beauty but because of their promise.” This landscape is the place where locals and visitors negotiate identity, seeking renewal or exploration, the possibilities of alterity and liminal identity shift. Understanding experiences and meanings of the touristed landscape depends in part, then, on understanding subject positions and subject formations of the touring, the toured, and those who would work at being both or neither, and from one moment or place to the next. In such contexts, ideas people hold about places substantially inform identity formation, human agency, and questions of subjectivity.

Our emphasis on the multiple conditions of landscape reflects the concept of place, and its different theorizations and intellectual lineages in social theory and phenomenological views. Where landscape concerns distinctive forms, features, and assemblages of natural and built environments, and their representations, the concept of place is differentiated space, broadly encompassing diverse aspects of locales (Agnew 1987). It sometimes stands in as a synonym for landscape, but is really the broader concept; landscape is also place, landscapes make up places, and places may include diverse landscapes. We focus on touristed landscapes because the mobile subject tends to seek particular scenes of leisure/tourism activity, while emphasis on place reflects geographical imaginaries, how people think about destinations, and from multiple points of perspective and distance.

Comparative conceptualizations of place lend greater interpretive meaning to place/landscape desire and experience. Contemporary interpretations of place theorize it in the context of its processes of formation through social relations: how space is transformed by human activity and how those activities connect to diverse other places. The idea of place as “social relations stretched out” and the “spatial reach of social relations” (Massey 1994, 1995) is compelling in a contemporary world buffeted by global forces; place becomes dynamic, contested, and multiple in its symbolic qualities and representative identity positions. This view of place challenges traditional views that interpret place as simply fixed and located, and in relation primarily to humanistic ideas about sentiment, meaning, and place attachment, as in ‘sense of place.’ But such differing views may be reasonably transcended if we understand place through contemporary theory on the body in geography and philosophy.

Feminist geography has made the discipline's substantial contributions to theorizing the body, including the fundamentally emplaced conditions of embodiment (e.g. Duncan 1996, McDowell 1999, Nast and Pile 1998, Pile 1996) and how sensory positionality influences perceptions of landscape, through critiques of the male gaze (e.g. Nash 1996, Rose 1993). These issues have also been the subject of so-called representational geographies (Thrift 1996). Contemporary philosophers have developed the concept of place in relation to the body as the ontological basis of human existence (Casey 1996, 1997, Malpas 1999). For example, Malpas (1999: 176) finds identity formation and human subjectivity as “necessarily embedded in place, and in spatialised, embodied activity.” This view interrelates concepts of agency, spatiality, and experience, in which embodiment is “one's extended, differentiated location in space... [and] essential to the possibility of agency and so to experience and thought” (133). It follows that to be embodied is to be emplaced. Historically constituted, these relations are both phenomenological and material, embracing the spatial reach of social relations.

Seductions of place

Following our understanding of place, place seductions must be situated subjectivities and emplaced experiences, inviting encounters with touristed landscapes, scenes where people seek particular aspects of attraction, desire, and possibilities for liminal experience. Seductiveness of place differs for visitors and residents, across genders and sexualities, and so touristed landscapes are places simultaneously perceived, formed, and reworked by activities of diverse people and their uneven ties to arenas of the local/regional/national/global. The basis for seduction lies in multiple positions of legibility.

But the psychology of seduction is also about illegibility: mundus vult decipi (the world wants to be deceived). Sensory modes beyond the visual may be more elusive, qualities that are aural, haptic, flavorful, olfactory. What stimulates these senses may be fleeting; we might own the visual environment via the gaze, but sounds, tastes, smells have their temporal limits. Seduction's psychological orientation also asks us to consider contradictions of tourist imagining, anticipation, and memory, which suggest its tensions and illegibility. In the words of Jane Miller (1991: 21), “the word seduction presides somewhat willfully over chains and clusters of meanings which are contradictory, tautologically driven and embedded in and issuing out of a number of worlds and variegated accounts and visions of those worlds.” Seduction's tension works through discourses and their interpretations, and how we map them onto the material world of landscapes, in seeking access to desirable place characteristics. We might also treat seduction as a form of knowledge, as awareness or promise of the potential for experience. Tension is implicit in this potential. It is the seduction of place, implying the unknowns of the journey, embodied movement, to travel to a place, encounter its landscapes, and open up to its possibilities of experience.

In seduction. . .it is somehow the manifest discourse, the most ‘superficial’ aspect of discourse, which acts upon the underlying prohibition (conscious or unconscious) in order to nullify it and to substitute for it the charms and traps of appearances. Appearances, which are not at all frivolous, are the site of play and chance taking the site of a passion for diversion—to seduce signs is here far more important than the emergence of any truth.

(Baudrillard 1988c: 149)

Among contemporary social theorists, Jean Baudrillard substantially considers seduction and as a basis for his critiques of structural theory. Baudrillard's seduction engages the surface, highlighting the postmodern interpretation of visual spectacle and prefiguring his interest in the ‘hyperreal.’ As Norbert Bolz (1998: 1) writes, “bring on the beautiful illusions. Yet simulacra, as such would have it, don't actually deceive: they seduce.” And if seduction is a surface effect, the analytical complement is to “look for the meaning of the surface, as well as the meaning within the surface.” As if it is all surface. In Seduction, Baudrillard's (1990) central subjects are in some ways predictable, based in aspects of heterosexual attraction and desire and the male gaze. Critiques of the work have zeroed in on its patriarchal priorities and scopophilia, even “an attack on feminism” (Kellner 1989: 143). However, in the context of social relations, Baudrillard proposes seduction as a form of information and alternative to production and symbolic exchange as primary orienting social forces. We cull from such broader suggestions to pursue different ways seduction works out in sensory/embodied/emplaced possibilities.

Baudrillard's apparent preferred sense of seduction is nostalgic, before the era of the hyperreal and the simulacrum, i.e. “the aura of secrecy produced by weightless, artificial signs.” We know that the built environment at the basis of his signs is Las Vegas:

No charm, no seduction in all this. Seduction is elsewhere, in Italy, in certain landscapes that have become paintings, as culturalized and refined in their design as the cities and museums that house them. Circumscribed, traced-out, highly seductive spaces where meaning, at these heights of luxury, has finally become adornment. It is exactly the reverse here: there is no seduction, but there is absolute fascination—the fascination of the very disappearance of the aesthetic and critical forms of life in the irradiation of the objectless neutrality.

(Baudrillard 1988a: 124)

Here, Baudrillard himself appears seduced by imaginations of authenticity, constructed memories of a sensory historic culture, before the industrial era compelled regimented social time, before hyperreal surfaces subsumed refined substance. Claudio Minca's essay on the ‘two Bellagios’ demonstrates how Italian landscapes continue to convey this kind of ‘traditional’ seduction for the global professional class. But such nostalgia for past regimes can neither define seduction nor claim its authenticity; seduction must be continually constituted, socially, spatially, and discursively, reflecting transformative changes in culture, society, and economy.

Among a wider range of subjects, Baudrillard (1990) agrees that the symbolic elements of seduction must vary broadly. These include wealth and power, and imaginations about them, in political space: “Since Machiavelli politicians have perhaps always known that the mastery of a simulated space is the source of power, that the political is not a real activity or space, but a simulation model, whose manifestations are simply achieved effects” (Baudrillard 1988c: 158). Among the essays, those by Margaret Byrne Swain and Trevor Sofield and Sarah Fung Mei Li both show how the state in China reworks representations of touristed, symbolic space in order to support state ideological perspectives on national identity and nation-building.

We can map diverse touristed landscapes onto Baudrillard's (1990) themes. Symbolic elements of seduction are also to be found in places that represent luck, fortune, and speculation (from temples to gambling houses), landscapes that challenge (‘natural’ environments, for urbanites; Everest as tourism) as well as in sites that are new and spectacular (the ‘Bilbao effect’). Such places present to visitors the lure of potential, the tension of possible outcomes. Secrets and enigmatic places are seductive too: archaeological landscapes from the edges of history, the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan capitals, the mounds of imperial graves that mark China's millennial history, still unopened, too many to excavate. Baudrillard also finds seduction in the symbolic order of things, collections and their arrangement (but not in collecting itself—the antithesis of seduction), implicating museums, libraries, and archives of all types. This is a concentration effect, which only urban institutions can produce and accommodate. The seduction of technology is “cool seduction,” “the ‘narcissistic’ spell of electronic and information systems, the cold attraction of the terminals and mediums that we have become, surrounded as we are by consoles, isolated and seduced by their manipulation” (162). Here too tension locates, in what MacCannell (this volume) identifies as “the triangle. . .that connects keyboard, eyes, and monitor,” “the most meaningful space in Silicon Valley.” The Ecstasy of Communication (Baudrillard 1988b) continues the theme of cool seduction, in how we surrender to the seductive power of mass media, whether via the TV, the movie screen, the computer monitor—the full range of surfaces.

In The Consumer Society, seduction finds its extended role in the continued growth of services, which results not only in ever increasing specialization but in increasing personalization. We find this “smallest margin of difference” (Baudrillard 1998: 87–98) commonly in leisure/tourism services, such as in an advertising campaign for Princess Cruises—“personal choice cruising”—in which the female voice-over on the TV commercial begins line after line with, “I want...,” concluding with “I want personal choice cruising.” This logic of personalization “ushers in the reign of differentiation” (89, italics in original) in which products of mass consumption are apparently tailored for the individual, thereby encouraging endless seduction for limitless consumption. This strategy is working for the cruise industry, which, as Janet Momsen reports in her essay on the Caribbean, is distinctively increasing capacity.

The consumer society's increasing individualization takes especially embodied forms, in all the ways that personalization implies. But “The narcissism of the individual in consumer society is not an enjoyment of singularity; it is a refraction of collective features” (Baudrillard 1998: 95). So we learn, as Ginger Smith's essay shows, that international body-oriented tourism is one of the fastest growing nich...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Seductions of Place
• CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Touristed landscapes/seductions of place
• PART I Interventions
• PART II The city
• PART III The beach
• PART IV ‘The Orient’
• Bibliography
• Index