Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
adventure tourism. The performance of white-water rafting, they illustrate, connotes the
active body, heightened sensory experience, risk, adrenaline and skill (or failure).
Athinodoros Chronis (2005) combines the perspectives of landscape as text, the embodied
experience of landscape and performance theory in his studies of Gettysburg. He argues that
tourism sites, their narratives and tourist experiences are co-constructions. In tourism, prior
knowledge about a place, information learned while at the place, one's movement through
the space and the imagining of historical narratives all come together. Furthermore, thinking
of tourism in this manner illustrates the dynamic qualities of landscape and landscape theory.
While multiple levels of experience take place within tourism landscapes, the perspectives
used to understand these experiences blend easily with landscape theories. This is an example
of tourism theory enriching landscape theory.
Future trajectories of landscape in tourism geographies
Landscape perspectives on tourism geographies have proven so powerful because, in the idea
of landscape, geography has to a very large degree already worked out the issues presented by
space and place. In the push to develop a truly geographical theory of tourism it is rather
natural that geography should return to its core idea - landscape. But landscape is more than
a comfortable harbour. Landscapes, besides being material objects, are the intentional or
unintentional symbols of power relations and ideology from which locals and tourists seek to
make meaning wherein, in making, meaning those very same locals and tourists alter the
underlying power relations and ideologies. It is this co-constructional attribute of tourism
that a 'landscape approach' to tourism can capture.
While one could sketch a number of future trajectories for landscape-based research in
tourism geography, three appear most fruitful. First, there is a need to link interpretation and
embodied experience. While the idea of tourism as a performance has gained ground, much
of the detail about how tourism site and tourist experience is joined in this performance
remains unspecifi ed. Second, there is a need to bring to bear the theoretical insights afforded
by landscape to the processes by which tourism sites are chosen, cultivated and marketed.
In this regard, it is especially important that the relationship between the spaces of tourism
and the spaces of the everyday be explored. Finally, there is a need to understand in more
detail the ways in which landscape and material culture intersect with tourism.
