Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
3
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES OR
Where the bloody hell are we?
Richard W. Butler
Introduction
In an age of refl exivity, it is perhaps appropriate to begin by stating that as a now retired white
male, educated in geography some forty-odd years ago when analysis involved a knitting
needle and punch cards, and one who has a somewhat jaundiced view of many recent academic
developments, I might not be suitable to comment on recent and possible future trends in
geography and tourism. However, as someone nearing the end of their career, I am not
limited by the fear of what wrath my comments might provoke, nor of implications for
promotion, government research assessment designation or research grant success in the
future. That does not make my comments any the more meaningful but it does free them of
the need for caution, except, of course, that I do not wish to be taken as someone totally out
of touch with reality (perhaps unfortunately for the subject, other geographers in tourism
appear to have similar feelings, as recorded in Smith, 2010b).
Like a growing number of tourism geographers (Smith, 2010b), I left geography (after
spending three decades teaching and researching in a geography department at a Canadian
university) and from 1997 to 2009 I was based in schools of business and management. During
that time, I obviously have spent much of my time reading the tourism literature rather than
the geographical literature (although little of the business literature, which perhaps says some-
thing else). One realises how quickly one gets out of touch with what is regarded as essential
current thought, although it is a salutary and disturbing lesson to come back to one's parent
discipline and discover that much of what is being published in the key journals is now of
relatively little interest and often seems both un-geographical and even somewhat un-academic.
To someone now outside geography in terms of one's home base, some of the papers appear
banal, unnecessarily vague or complex and read a little like the fable of 'The Emperor's New
Clothes'. However, more on that later, and I am sure many of those deep in postmodern
geography would regard some of my work in the same vein.
I have been fortunate enough to have had a number of articles published in
Tour ism G eographies
(Butler, R.W., 1999, 2000, 2004) and none of them gave me undue cause for concern about the
reaction to them. I enjoyed preparing and writing them and they seem to have been accepted,
at least to the extent that there have not been any indignant rebuttals from 'Spatially Offended
in Tunbridge Wells' or similar. I have the feeling that this is more because they will only have
