In the Eye of the Beholder? Tourism and the Activist Academic - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 107

images they hold of each other rather than to
the actual opportunity for encounters.
Related to this imagery is the 'tourist gaze'
described by Urry (2002), which is not only
about the visual exploration of the objects of
the tourism encounter, but is also about a social
organization and systematization mediated by
'professional experts who help to construct and
develop our gaze as tourists' (Urry, 2002, p. 1).
As Morgan and Pritchard's (1998) work
argues, tourism images and representations are
about power and should be analysed for their
signifi cance.

Additionally, Hall made a recent contribu-
tion to a text on qualitative tourism research
which examined refl exivity in terms of 'situating
myself and/with others' (2004). Contextualizing
his discussion of academic refl exivity in the
changing environment presented by the post-
modern turn and within the crisis of capitalism,
Hall argues that we in the tourism discipline need
to engage with the personal perspectives and sto-
ries that we hold and refl ect on how they shape
our research. Hall (2004, pp. 139-140) states:

Accounts of any discipline and of research within
that fi eld of study are situated . That is, 'they
depend on the point of view of the author,
which in turn refl ects how he/she is positioned
intellectually, politically and socially' (Barnes
and Sheppard, 2000, p. 6). However, how often
does one read research which explicitly recognises
its situatedness in tourism? Despite the postmod-
ern recognition of the absence of absolutes, this
does not seem to have been widely translated
into the representation and reading of tourism
research and scholarship. Why?

At the dawn of the third millennium, images are
the currency of cultures, refl ecting and thereby
reinforcing particular shared meanings and
beliefs and particular value systems. Tourism
marketers through their marketing images
create identities which represent certain ways of
seeing reality, images which both refl ect and
reinforce particular relationships in societies.
These are relations which are grounded in
relations of power, dominance and subordina-
tion which characterise the global system.
(Morgan and Pritchard, 1998, p. 3)

A powerful example of the scholarly impact
such work can have is provided by David
Botterill in a journal article which provides an
'autoethnographic narrative on tourism research
epistemologies' (2003). This work will be dis-
cussed further later in this analysis.
These new avenues in tourism research
open up ways for us to rethink our positions on
tourism by examining our personal views and
experiences and refl ecting on the tourism
research agendas that germinate from such
seeds. However, before proceeding to my own
autoethnographic narrative, which models this,
it is fi rst useful to explore the dichotomy of views
evident in the early years of tourism academic
analysis, which greatly infl uenced the develop-
ment of tourism scholarship towards a social
scientifi c approach characterized as objective
and value-free.

It is important to remember that images have
consequences in this way and should be critically
examined within this context. What has been
little examined to date is the image/s of tourism
that tourism researchers hold in their mind's eye,
whether consciously or subconsciously. It is likely
that we all hold such images and their signifi -
cance may not be inconsequential.
There is, however, tourism literature that
moves us in such a direction and opens up the
possibility for such an investigation. For instance,
Nash commissioned some of the longest serving
and most renowned analysts of tourism to
recount their professional histories and thereby
shed light on the development of the tourism
discipline (2007). Using social action theory,
Nash suggests social action '. . . considers socially
situated actors to be thinking, and perhaps feel-
ing about their own actions as they pursue their
subjectively informed course of action' (2007,
p. 22). What we fi nd in these stories of some of
the most renowned thinkers in the tourism disci-
pline, such as Dean MacCannell, Malcolm Crick
and Graham Dann, is that their personal life
journeys profoundly infl uenced the way they
thought about and then researched tourism.

Historical Views of Tourism and
the Rise of the 'Scientifi cation' of
Tourism Scholarship

Dichotomous and opposing perspectives of tour-
ism have been a long-standing feature of tourism
discourse since Graburn described tourism as a