Discourse, Communication and Tourism

Adam Jaworski, Annette Pritchard, Adam Jaworski, Annette Pritchard

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781845412944
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

For the first time ever, this book brings together an explicit linkage between empirical and theoretical perspectives on tourism and discourse. A broad social semiotic approach is adopted to analyze a range of spoken, written and visual texts providing a unique resource for researching and teaching tourism in the context of communication studies. Some of the key concepts explored in its chapters include space, representation, the tourist experience, identity, performance and authenticity, and the contributors are key sociologists of tourism as well as discourse analysts and sociolinguists.

Part 1

The Semiotics of Tourist Spaces, Landscapes and Destinations

Chapter 1

The ‘Consuming’ of Place

JOHN URRY

Wordsworth's The Brother ‘signifies the beginning of modernity … a time when one stops belonging to a culture and can only tour it’

(Buzard, 1993: 27)

‘A view? Oh a view! How delightful a view is!’

(Miss Bartlett, in A Room with a View; Forster, 1955 [1908]: 8).

Sharon Macdonald recounts a common story she heard told on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. ‘There was an old woman… living in township X. One day a couple of tourists come by and start asking her questions.
”Have you ever been outside this village?”…
”Well, yes. I was at my sisters in [neighbouring township]”…
”But you've never been off the island?”
”Well, I have, though not often I suppose.” “So, you've been to the mainland?” She nods. “So you found Inverness a big city then?””Well, not so big as Paris, New York or Sydney, of course…”’

(Macdonald, 1997: 155)

‘Wow, that's so postcard’ (visitor seeing Victoria Falls.

(Quoted in Osborne, 2000: 79).

Visual Consumption

For a decade or so I have been interested in how it is that visitors (and indeed local people) experience place. One way of formulating this is through the idea of Consuming Places (Urry, 1995), that visitors especially through a visual gaze or appropriation increasingly consume places. But what does this mean exactly, and what are the implications that places are visually consumed?

First, we should distinguish, loosely following Wordsworth, between land and landscape as distinct forms of belongingness to place (Milton, 1993). The former, land, involves conceptualising land as a physical, tangible resource that can be ploughed, sown, grazed and built upon. It is a place of work conceived functionally. As a tangible resource, land is bought and sold, inherited and especially left to children, either directly or through the rights established resulting from the use of land over lengthy periods of time. To dwell on a farm is to participate in a pattern of life where productive and unproductive activities resonate with each other and with very particular tracts of land, whose history and geography will often be known in intimate detail. There is a lack of distance between people and things.

The practice of land is quite different from that of landscape, with the latter entailing an intangible resource whose definitive feature is appearance or look (Milton, 1993). The notion of landscape emphasises leisure, relaxation and visual consumption by visitors. From the 18th century onwards a specialised visual sense developed – this was based upon the camera obscura, the claude glass, the use of guidebooks, the widespread knowledge of routes, the art of sketching, the balcony, photography and so on (Ousby, 1990). As a consequence of this specialised visual sense areas of wild, barren nature, once sources of sublime terror and fear, were transformed into what Raymond Williams terms ‘scenery, landscape, image, fresh air’, places waiting at a distance for visual consumption by those visiting from towns and cities of ‘dark satanic mills’ (1972: 160; Macnaghten & Urry, 1998). By 1844 Wordsworth was noting that the idea of landscape was only recently developed. So that by the mid-19th century houses were increasingly built with regard to their ‘prospects’ as though they were a kind of ‘camera’ (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998: 79). The language of views thus prescribed a particular visual structure to the very experience of place as land gave way to landscape (Green, 1990: 88). As Miss Bartlett declares in A Room with a View: ‘A view? Oh a view! How delightful a view is!’ (Forster, 1955 [1908]: 8).

Thus in the case of the English Lake District, there was a complex multi-layered making. A place of ‘land’, according to Daniel Defoe of inhospitable terror, came to be transformed into ‘landscape’, a place of beauty and desire (Urry, 1995). Similarly, even before the end of the 18th century the Alps had been regarded as mountains of immense inhospitality, ugliness and terror. But they too became ‘civilised’. Ring describes how the Alps ‘are not simply the Alps. They are a unique visual, cultural, geological and natural phenomenon, indissolubly wed to European history’ (2000: 9). And also by the end of the 18th century the land of ‘tropical nature’ of the Caribbean had been romanticised by European travellers who began to see the scenery as though it were a ‘painting’, as landscape (Sheller, 2003). And there are diverse other examples of how places of land became places of visual desire, as the inhospitable was turned into landscape, especially for rich (male) European visitors.

Photography is central to this shift from land to landscape. Indeed tourism and photography could be said to commence in the ‘west’ in their modern form around 1840. Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot announced their somewhat different ‘inventions’ of the camera, in 1839 and 1840. 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, Cunard started the first ever ocean steamship service, and Wells Fargo, the forerunner of American Express, began stagecoach services across the American west (Lash & Urry, 1994: 261). The year 1840 then is that moment when the ‘tourist gaze’ emerges, involving the combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel, the techniques of photographic reproduction and the notion of landscape. As a visitor to Victoria Falls subsequently declared: ‘Wow, that's so postcard’ (quoted in Osborne, 2000: 79) as landscape rather than land is all the rage.

But while 1840 marks the beginning of the modern era in terms of landscape, of an endlessly devouring tourist gaze, there are some distinct variations in the consuming of place. There are varied tourist gazes (see Urry, 2002 [1990]). With the most powerful, romantic gaze, solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze are emphasised. Visitors 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 ever new objects of the solitary gaze, a process like the sorcerer's apprentice, consuming and then devouring the very places sought out for the romantic gaze.

By contrast 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 that are present can indicate that this is the place to be. These moving, viewing others are obligatory for the collective consumption of place, as with central London, Ibiza, Las Vegas, the Sydney Olympics, Hong Kong and so on. Baudelaire's notion of flânerie captures this well: ‘dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting’ (Tester, 1994: 2).

Analogously, 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 such as from a tourist bus window (Urry, 1995: 191).

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. Moslem visitors stop to scan and to concentrate their attention upon the mosque, the tombs and the Koranic script (Edensor, 1998: 127–8).

Likewise, an anthropological gaze describes how individual visitors scan a variety of sights/sites and is 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.

Somewhat related is the environmental gaze. This involves a scholarly or NGO-authorised discourse of scanning various tourist practices for their footprint upon the ‘environment’. On the basis of such reflexivity it is possible to choose that with the smallest footprint and then recommend that through various media to like-minded environmentalists (as with the UK-campaigning organisation, Tourism Concern; Urry, 1995: 191).

And finally, there is the mediatised gaze. This is a collective gaze where particular sites famous for their ‘mediated’ nature are viewed. Those gazing on the scene relive elements or aspects of the media event. Examples where such mediated gazes are found would include locations in Santa Monica and Venice Beach where many Hollywood films are set.

Consuming Objects and Services

I have so far talked about the consumption of place, and brought out the role of the visual and landscape within that consumption. However, two further points need to be noted. First, I show in this section how place is not an abstract Cartesian space, defined by various geometric coordinates. Rather place is a centre of many material activities, especially the production and consumption of specific and often distinct goods and services.

Second, in the next section I show how places are in a way themselves mobile, in a set of relationships with other places and this makes them move, nearer and farther in a system of differences. Places are only contingently fixed and stable destinations.

First, then, a huge array of places across the globe are being generally restructured as places of consumption, or what Fainstein and Judd term ‘places to play’ (1999). Place after place we might say are locations within which very many goods and services are compared, evaluated, purchased and used. Places to play are places involved in producing distinctions of taste resulting from consuming, and anticipating the consumption, of an incredible array of goods and services.

Especially significant here are consumer services which can be deemed central to particular places, such as art galleries in Paris, theatres in London, casinos in Las Vegas, Broadway shows in New York, skiing in the Alps, country house hotels in the English Lake District, exotic sex tourism in Thailand, water sports in the Caribbean and so on. Through the often active consuming of certain services the place itself comes to be consumed. The service in question is metonymic of the place, with the part, the service, standing for the whole.

The consuming of place involves the consumption of services and sometimes of goods that are deemed specific to that place, e.g. cheeses in France, malt whisky in Scotland, chardonnay in Australia and so on. But of course with goods, the growth of global markets has partly reduced this specificity of goods that are often now available across the world, especially in airport shops that have become a kind of ‘global supermarket’. Even so the marketing of place will still often invoke images of particular products, of popular music records in Liverpool, wine in the Loire, industrial museums in northern England, cream teas in Cornwall and so on. But even with the global marketplace there is still thought to be something authentic about consuming particular goods or services in specific places.

Also images of place are fundamental to the symbolic branding of many goods and services. So the background of major cities (e.g. Rome, London, New York, Paris) is used to imply a cosmopolitan product, the background of the countryside a natural product, the background of mountains a pure product, the background of former industrial area a heritage product and so on.

Two further points need to be noted. First, there is often a contradiction between the consumption of place and the consumption of specific goods and services. Thus the items of consumption may not be available, or the services have become too commercial, or the service delivery has become too expensive or too low quality, or the shops have turned into souvenir shops. There are many ways in which the consuming of place is contradicted by the actual consumption possibilities within that place, especially since commercially oriented companies pursuing short-term goals will often be providing such consumption possibilities. Such companies may be poor at ensuring the appropriate quality of the service delivery, or of attracting a suitable set of other consumers that are consistent with that place's marketing. So consuming place through consuming certain kinds of goods and services is shot through with contradiction and ambiguity (see Urry, 2002: Chapter 4).

Second, services for visitors are increasingly generated not by commerce but by collective enthusiasts. Especially in the UK, many groups of enthusiasts have documented, laid out for display, and sought to bring in visitors to see, touch, hear and remember ‘their memories’. Raphael Samuel writes of how:

the ‘heritage’ which conservationists fight to preserve and retrieval projects to unearth, and which the holiday public or museum visitors are invited to ‘experience’ – is in many ways a novel one. Though indubitably British… It has little to do with the continuities of monarchy, parliament or British national institutions… It is the little platoons, rather than the great society, which command attention in this new version of the national past. (Samuel, 1994: 158)

One interesting ‘little platoon’ established the Aros Heritage Centre on the Isle of Skye in Scotland (see Macdonald, 1997; Dicks, 2000). Its two founders thought that establishing such a commercially oriented Centre would help to strengthen Gaelic language and culture. But Aros possesses few ‘authentic’ exhibits to be put into a museum. Aros mostly consists of ‘reproductions’ since Gaelic culture was a poor culture with few physical remains.

Also the ‘story’ that it tells links together the decline of Gaelic culture with the history of resistance of the people both to the English and to Scottish clan chiefs. The Gaelic heritage story does not presuppose a pristine, untouched and authentic culture. Gaelic heritage is rather a story of contact and relations with numerous outsiders – and such a story highlights resilience, resistance and the appropriation of elements from beyond Gaelic culture. Thus Gaelic heritage is a hybrid and did not exist in some authentic state before visitors began to arrive. Gaelic places are thus places of movement and both visitors and locals have made Aros for visual consumption.

Mobile Places

Hetherington develops this notion of place as a ‘place of movement’. Imagine, he says, that places are metaphorically like ships (Hetherington, 1997: 185–9). They are not something that stays in one place but move around within networks of agents, both humans and non-humans. As noted in the case of Gaelic heritage, places are about relationships, about the placings of materials and the system of difference that they perform. Places should be thought of as being located in relation to sets of objects rather than being fixed through subjects and their uniquely human meanings and interactions.

And places even based upon a high degree of geographical propinquity normally depend upon mobilities. There are countless ways of a sense of dwelling being reinforced through movement within a place's boundaries, such as walking along well-worn paths. But any such community is also interconnected to many other places through movement. Raymond Williams in the novel Border Country is ‘fascinated by the networks men and women set up, the trails and territorial structures they make as they move across a region, and the ways these interact or interfere with each other’ (Pinkney, 1991: 49; Williams, 1988).

Some of this movement of place itself can be seen in the history of the English Lake District (see Urry, 1995: Chapter 13). This area in the northwest of England only really became part of England when many visitors, particularly artists and writers, began to travel to it especially from the metropolitan centre at the end of the 18th century and especially in the 19th century. These visitors moved the landscape of the Lake District closer to the centre of England through the concepts of the picturesque and the sublime that came to structure the very experience of place. Land got changed into landscape because of the artists and writers who moved the Lake counties into English culture.

Many of the key writers were deemed to be local, from that place, and bec...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: Discourse, Communication and Tourism Dialogues
• Part 1: The Semiotics of Tourist Spaces, Landscapes and Destinations
• Part 2: The Discursive Construction and Representation of the Tourist Experience
• Part 3: Identities on the Move
• Part 4: Performance and Authenticity
• Index