Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with nature among four-wheel-drive tourists in the remote Kimberley region of outback
Australia. In another study from the same part of the world, White and White (2008: 42)
explored how isolation and transience combined to catalyse new social relationships, as
encounters with strangers 'offered comfort and companionship in what they perceived to be
a hostile and alien environment'. In neighbouring New Zealand, a new wedding tourism
industry relied on 'pure' landscapes of snow-capped mountains, glaciers and forests, in turn
naturalising and romanticising heterosexuality - landscape and bodies entwined (L. Johnston,
2006). In Borneo, humans simply 'got in the way' of enjoyment of nature, as boundaries were
made between tourists and wild nature (Markwell, 2001).
Spaces of encounter, spaces of politics
Analysis of tourism's encounters is now more attentive to how bodies and materials interact
in fl uid, complicated ways - and the spaces in which these encounters take place. For me, a
litmus test is how such work contributes to ongoing critical research agendas. The danger is
that with a highly nuanced description of how bodies, materials and 'nature' are brought
together in tourism encounters, the exercise of power is relegated to background status
Dikeç (2005: 172) argued, 'space becomes political in that it becomes the polemical place
where a wrong can be addressed and equality can be demonstrated. It becomes an integral
element of the interruption of the “natural” (or better yet, naturalised) order of domination
through the constitution of a place of encounter by those that have no part in that order'. The
political, Dikeç (2005: 172) argues, 'is signalled by this encounter as a moment of interrup-
tion, and not by the mere presence of power relations and competing interests'.
So there is much value in an ability to locate precisely the agents, moments and techniques
of the exercise of power in tourism encounters. How then might future geographical research
on tourism encounters further contribute to critical political agendas through such a lens?
Signposts in recent research include using concepts of embodiment and affect to trace an
anatomy of power in the spaces of tourism encounter - whether planned or 'serendipitous'
(Shaw, 2010) - to highlight collisions of class, gender, race and identity (Saldanha, 2005).
Researchers are increasingly turning to such considerations, to examine how trust operates in
the micro-spaces of encounter (Lynch
et al.
, 2007), and conversely to identify the intimate
mechanics of discrimination, as in Tomsen and Markwell's (2007) analysis of hostility and
violence at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Similarly, much work remains to be
done in thinking through conceptually, as well as documenting empirically, the detrimental
elements (or otherwise) of human-nature interactions in tourism - from feeding bottle-
nosed dolphins (Smith
et al.
, 2008) to whale-watching (Hughes
et al.
, 2006).
Encounters elicit emotional responses of guilt, shame and concern - all potentially produc-
tive (if complex) responses (Waitt
et al.
, 2007). How are ethical dilemmas confronted in
encounters, and resolutions to them rehearsed? Alongside the pervasive danger of exploita-
tion and environmental damage are possibilities in the moments of encounter to learn, to
address wrongs and to demonstrate commitment to equality - to extend 'relations of care'
(Miller, 1998; Dikeç, 2005). What moral gateways are opened (or closed) by the 'embodied
knowledge derived from travelling, witnessing, climbing, walking, touching and being
touched' (Waitt
et al.
, 2007: 248) - given the possibility to interrupt dominance is ever-
present? Tourism's encounters alert us to the very desires that underpin travel - and in among
t he s e a r e mot iva t ion s b e yond me r e conque s t or a cc u mu l a t ion of c u lt u r a l c a pit a l . We e ncou nt e r
other places, landscapes and peoples possessing varying geographical resources and spatial
