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sacred signifi cance and permitted only to initi-
ated men of the Mala group, many visitors to
Uluru still consider it a part of their tourist pilgrim-
age. Recent papers on the issue discuss the impor-
tance of representation for tourist decision-making
(James, 2007) and the complex ethical questions
involved in this decision, particularly for domestic
Australian tourists (Waitt
et al
., 2007). Aboriginal
political and cultural agency has an increasingly
signifi cant impact on the management of both
tourist behaviour and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta
National Park itself. Looking at representation and
tourist performance at Uluru, this chapter focuses
on the kind of experiences tourists can gain
through opening up to alternative perspectives
as offered by Aboriginal representation. The dis-
cussion then shows how Aboriginal management
of the tourist gaze can disrupt habitual Western
ways of seeing, encouraging tourists to engage
instead with 'other' ways of knowing place.
John Urry's metaphor of the tourist gaze
(2002) has become synonymous with the tour-
ist consumption of places and cultures, as it
conceptualizes the link between image and
imaginary. However, its limitations for an analy-
sis of the non-visual aspects of tourist practice
have been pointed out (Crang, 1997, 1999;
Crouch, 2000; Perkins and Thorns, 2001; Crouch
and Lübbren, 2003; Larsen, 2005). The one-
directional (tourist) gaze retains a range of power
relations at the core of the critical concept itself,
not least as it implies the Other as its passive and
immobile object. As feminist critique has pointed
out, denying the Other's independent subjectiv-
ity, the notion of the dichotomous gaze covertly
rewrites the power confi gurations of subject and
object, presence and absence (Veijola and Joki-
nen, 1997; Rose, 2004, 2007). It thus passes
over the possibility of a poly-dimensional space
of coequal histories and knowledges as the
ground for the coexistence of plural identities
(Massey, 1994, 2005). Landscapes and people
are turned into the blank slates of the Western
desire for exotic difference (Mitchell, 1994;
Schama, 1995; Urry, 2002). The concept itself
thus allows no space for the Other's answering
gaze nor for the consciously deviant tourist
resisting the prescriptions of the gaze. Again, in
this form of critical cultural enquiry it is 'the 'Us'
that is the hero of the story' (Rose, 2004, p. 20);
an approach that continues to neglect both the
power of Indigenous connection to land as well
as the human ability to form new and inter-
active grounds of shared place production
(Edensor, 1998, 2000; Baerenholdt
et al
., 2004;
Larsen, 2005). Therefore, in my examination of
Aboriginal knowledge in practice for the tourist
setting at Uluru, I not only ask 'How do 'they'
see 'us'?' (Evans-Prittchard, 1989) as it would
mean little more than the reversal of the gaze
from its self-appointed centre, but instead I ask
'How and what do Aboriginal people make 'us'
see in their country?' Indigenous ways of seeing
are often specifi cally linked to knowledge of
place and country. A multi-layered reading of
place acknowledges Indigenous presence and
accepts its ontological authority, emphasizing its
signifi cant consequences for the management
of tourism and tourist behaviour.
The theoretical prioritizing of the 'European
gaze' - one habitually adjusted to the passive
consumption of culture as imagery - further-
more neglects the gazing body's 'posture' in
space and the resulting implications for percep-
tion (Veijola and Jokinen, 1994, 1997, 2003;
Crang, 1999; Crouch, 2002). In the following
case study, I therefore understand the gaze as
embodied and spatially situated, working in
multiple directions, and breaking up the con-
ventional opposition of observer and observed.
Vision informs only fractions of the 'meaning-
making' self; knowledge of environment and
people enters mind and bodies in many ways.
Tourist and place identities, furthermore, are
formed in both material and discursive relation-
ships (Massey, 2004). While I consider the dis-
cursive involvements that shape the tourist
expectations, my emphasis is on the spatial and
representational structures that are active in the
experiential encounter. In acknowledging the
often unrepresented material agency of place,
my focus is on knowledges produced through
intercultural recognition and interaction in the
tourist moment.
2
Through an analysis of the
2
These knowledges in Central Australia have grown from the Indigenous connection to country over millen-
nia. Yet for too long they were considered invalid because they stand outside of the institutionalized knowl-
edge context, i.e. see Foucault (1972, 1973).
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