Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
6
GEOGRAPHIES OF TOURISM
Space, ethics and encounter
Chris Gibson
Introduction
At the heart of tourism is
encounter
- perhaps its defi ning, distinguishing feature (Crouch
et al.
, 2001). We travel to encounter other places, landscapes, people, sights, weather. While
the tourism industry relies on all manner of material commodities to turn a profi t (hotel beds,
postcards, luggage, etc.), and has been incorporated into a symbolic economy of marketing
representations, its most cherished, commodifi ed, essential element is encounter.
Tourism encounters are immediate, embodied and geographical; everyone with suffi cient
means to travel experiences them. Although tourism feeds off the 'desire for distraction from
the demands and drudgery of everyday routines' (Britton, 1991: 452-3), the fl ip-side is that
tourism also relies on bodily displacement and immersion in unfamiliar environments.
Despite a propensity to
avoid
encounter on holiday (in favour of the poolside or the view from
the bus), most tourism arises from the simple human need for social interaction, the 'need to
be with others' and to 'regress into childhood in order to play' (Ryan, 2002: 28; 33). Tourism
is more than escapism, evidenced by continued growth in niche travel, educational tours,
working holidays and sex tourism - all of which involve leaving the 'safety bubble' of the tour
bus or hotel, to be '
doing something
in the places they visit rather than being endlessly specta-
torially passive' (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 13). Tourists are consumers, translators, collec-
tors, detectives - everyday cultural and political geographers (Crouch, 2000) - seeking to
make sense of the world and their place in it. It makes sense, then, to focus this chapter on
encounter, a notion explored in tourism research some time ago (e.g. Karch and Dann, 1981)
but now increasingly relevant across geography (see for example, Valentine, 2008).
What kinds of encounter?
Tourism has a visual preoccupation - indeed, an ocular epistemology came to shape the early
practice of tourism research, a 'looking glass' approach to the phenomenon of encounter
(Picken, 2006). Thus John Urry's (1990)
The Tourist Gaze
has been particularly infl uential; a
book 'focused upon tourists' ways of seeing, the power inherent in their gaze upon attractions
as well as the power inherent in the manipulation of tourism representations and experiences'
(Hannam, 2002: 229). Tourism brings consumers within visible proximity of workers in
