Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Seeing the Sites: Tourism as
Perceptual Experience
Introduction
and to gain some sort of benefi cial personal
'experience' from having seen. For most people,
this is associated with a holiday and therefore
what can be seen is often framed in terms of the
temporal nature of the tourist's stay, ranging
from the must-see short stay attractions to more
extensive longer stay touring.
Popular tourist literature therefore conveys
a sense of how other places can be experienced,
understood and seen. And within this context, it
is often framed in terms of seeing sites through
which personal enjoyment is an outcome that is
expected. This sense of enjoyment is related to
the notion of the psychology of the tourist as
visiting somewhere different in order to break
with routine life and gain some recreative expe-
rience by sightseeing. Therefore, there is an
underlying assumption of a psychology that
drives what the tourist industry and its associ-
ated literature is about. The assumption is made
that there are two realms: an external reality that
acts as 'raw material' and the 'input' for a psy-
chological system, which operates upon this in
some way to produce an 'output' such as a per-
ception or feeling which becomes treated as an
'experience' or memory to be drawn upon
translated into talk and text. This decoupling of
cognitive activity and social practices preserves
an ideology of tourism and an economy of tour-
ism as rooted in psychological discourse, and in
particular the notion of personal enjoyment
through sightseeing.
One of the defi ning aspects of tourism is that it
involves sightseeing and capturing images of
what has been seen. As John Urry points outs,
the tourist gaze is a 'strategy for the accumula-
tion of photographs' (1990, p. 139). This chap-
ter provides a social constructionist perspective
on the visuality of tourism and explores the
ways in which it is located within an inner/outer
dualism with respect to a mind that tries to
apprehend, grasp, understand or make sense of
sites that are visited. This kind of perceptual-
cognitivism is a cultural commonplace, actively
maintained in the accomplishment of a range of
social practices, including the construction of
tourism as one of visual encounter. However,
the tourist gaze is also borne out of a separation
between labour and leisure, one in which a view
of the world is literally framed through acting
out
being
a tourist (Osborne, 2000).
The advent of a mass tourist industry has
been accompanied by a burgeoning popular
tourist literature and media in the form of vari-
ous guides, brochures and websites that contain
a wealth of information about sightseeing.
These commonly provide the prospective tour-
ist with images that can be seen on-site in tourist
destinations. Within this literature is an over-
arching ideology of tourism as primarily a psy-
chological experience rooted in seeing. The
tourist travels to be somewhere else, to see it
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