Seeing the Sites: Tourism as Perceptual Experience - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 174

Sightseeing as Imagination people's conversations and rememberings

about their tourist experiences and in popular
guides. Making tourism a visual event in this lit-
erature is therefore a means of maintaining the
construction of a cultural 'inner/outer' dualism
and the location of tourism within it.

Much of the tourist guide literature refers to
sightseeing and includes photographs of what
are presented as notable places to visit. There-
fore, the visual world for the tourist is a major
aspect of the holiday experience. Such sites
might include buildings, religious sites, natural
scenery and so on. Some may be listed as
'must-see' whilst others are included in terms of
a more leisurely or wider interest. Imagination is
therefore a key aspect of these guides in terms
of the presentation of photographs and descrip-
tions for the would-be tourist to project a mental
image of visiting a destination.
In other words, sightseeing as a form of
visual rhetoric is founded upon an association
between 'inner mind' and 'outer reality'. In this
way, a major dualism is maintained in the popu-
lar tourist literature: a mind that tries to appre-
hend, grasp, understand or make sense or an
experienced reality from page to place. This
kind of perceptual-cognitivism is a cultural com-
monplace, actively maintained in the accom-
plishment of a range of social practices.
Although much of psychology is based
upon a perceptual-cognitivist model of the per-
son, it can also be found in less explicit ways
within other, more unlikely, realms that accord
more theoretical weight to social practice. As
Potter and Edwards (2001) point out, the social
theorist Pierre Bourdieu may be considered an
unlikely advocate of cognitivism but his theori-
zation of habitus (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977, 1992)
trades on an unrefl exive 'inner/outer' dicho-
tomy. This presupposes the development of a
psychological system in which dispositions asso-
ciated with membership of social and cultural
groups come to generate practices, perceptions
and attitudes. This system is then able to pro-
duce 'meaning' (i.e. make sense), store and
process it. Now whilst Bourdieu gives more
precedence to social practice and culture than
that of cognitive psychology, he cannot rid him-
self of this 'inner/outer' dualism and the reifi ca-
tion of 'mind' as a perceptual system.
Whilst academic disciplines such as psy-
chology and sociology trade on this dualism it is
also, of course, constructed and maintained in
less formal academic ways as part-and-parcel of
everyday social practices, including tourism.
Much of this is accomplished discursively in

Anti-cognitivism and
Anti-foundationalism

In order to explore this issue, it would be unhelp-
ful to start from the assumption that such a
dualism exists, that there is a psychological sys-
tem that operates upon an external reality. For
one thing, such an assumption is not necessarily
a cultural universal, and for another people
themselves do not exclusively make reference to
such a dualism in terms of 'sense making' as
they engage in various social practices. This is
not to say that it does not exist but rather that
for the purpose of studying how people make
use of this dualism within the world of tourism,
we need not start from a cognitivist position.
But why? The reason for adopting a non-
cognitivist approach is that my focus is on how
this inner/outer dualism is pressed into service
as part of social practice that is constructed as
tourism, and specifi cally within popular tourism
literature. In other words, my focus will be on
reality construction as part of what people do as
tourists.
It would also be absurd to begin from a
point of doing what I intend to study, i.e. how
'reality' and 'mind' are associated in order to do
something or other. To take these as givens
would be to fall back on 'experiential reality' as
a 'bottom line' instead of examining what this
dualism is used to do. The analytical pay-off for
this is in terms of achieving a means of dealing
with its sheer pervasiveness as a means of
accomplishing a range of social practices. So
my starting point is to adopt an analytically
agnostic stance with regard to the 'inner mind'
and 'external reality' and instead adopt an epis-
temologically relativist, or anti-foundationalist,
position, i.e. to examine how versions of 'reality'
are produced as part of what people do, and in
particular as related to tourism.
This may all seem a bit abstract and part of
some philosophically arcane debate on how we