Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
performances are enacted and constrained in 'enclavic' and 'heterogeneous' tourist spaces (see
also Larsen,
Chapter 8
and Edensor and Falconer,
Chapter 9 o
f this volume). Edensor (2001:
69) also develops the metaphor of 'performance' to examine the role of tourist workers at the
Taj Mahal, where 'stage management is the work of a host of workers from cleaning teams,
stonemasons, and other artisans, gatekeepers, police, gardener and guides who maintain its
upkeep'. Despite presenting a more nuanced picture of the interactions between the various
participants involved in tourist encounters and the useful highlighting of the performative
nature of tourist work (see P. Crang, 1997), such cultural analyses of service encounters and
tourist settings do little to reveal the antagonistic labour relations and structural alignments
of power in particular resort settings and hospitality environments (see Bianchi, 2000;
Madsen Camacho, 1996; Taylor, 2002; Wood, 2000).
Drawing also on the work of Saïd (1978), numerous authors have shown how discourses
reinforce dominant power relations in tourism. Foucauldian insights into the power relations
that permeate tourism have usefully challenged the idea that the discourses and representative
frameworks which shape tourism practices are either innocent, or else aligned along a binary/
uni-directional axis. Rather, it is argued, the social construction of places is constituted
through a range of contrasting and often confl icting representations which refl ect gendered,
ethnic, sexualised and (post)colonial tropes (Aitchison, 2001; Hollinshead, 1992; Morgan
and Pritchard, 1998; Pratt, 1992; Sheller, 2004). However, the exploration of discursive
power often falls short of a sustained analysis of how and why particular discourses become
more powerful than others or how they become institutionalised within specifi c historical-
geographic settings.
There are also echoes of Foucault's intrinsic functionalism in which the agency of subjects
is underplayed (see Foucault, 1980: 154-6; Graaff, 2006). For example, the notion that the
tourist gaze is characterised by an 'ahuman agency' in which 'received constructions of and
about culture, history, nature' are unwittingly incorporated (by subjects) into administrative
policy and praxis in tourism (Hollinshead, 1999: 14-16), leaves little room for the possibility
of resistance and adaptation of subjects to different forms of discursive power. Subjects are no
longer seen as partial creators of the discourses and institutions that entrap them; rather, they
unwittingly interiorise the 'powerful objectifying gaze of the tourist system' (Hollinshead,
1992: 43) to such an extent that there is no escape from its tentacles. The denial of any volun-
taristic dimension to tourist behaviour has also been commented upon by MacCannell, in
reference to
The Tourist Gaze
:
Urry's approach only seems to be getting us out of determinism while throwing us
more deeply into it.
(MacCannell, 2001: 24)
Clearly discourses play a highly signifi cant role in the constitution of power in tourism.
However, we
do
need to pay more attention to the actions and interactions between agency
and discourses, how particular tourism discourses articulate and congeal within particular
institutional settings, what resources are mobilised and by whom (cf. Mouzelis, 1995: 44-5).
Furthermore, we must also guard against the reiteration of what are essentially 'sociological
commonplaces . . . in a distinctively Foucauldian fashion' (Lukes, 2005: 97). The tendency to
resort to over-complex explanations and obfuscatory terminology often reveals less rather
than more regarding the alignments of power in tourism. However, such language is often
justifi ed by the need to transcend and/or challenge the limits of structuralist theorising in
tourism, to which the remainder of this chapter now turns.
