Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Jonas Larsen
A performance turn is taking the main stage in much contemporary tourism theory. It
critiques in particular the 'tourist gaze' for reducing tourism to solely visual experiences -
sight
seeing
- and neglecting other senses and bodily experiences involved in these doings of
tourism (see also Edensor and Falconer,
Chapter 9 o
f this volume). The 'performance turn'
highlights how tourists experience places in more multi-sensory ways - touching, tasting,
smelling, hearing and so on - as well as the materiality of objects and places and not just
objects and places as signs. This chapter discusses the turns' main features in the context of
spatial and place-based studies of tourism, while reviewing some ethnographic studies of
tourism employing performative metaphors.
A performative 'turn' in tourism?
The performance turn:
1. . . . studies bodily doings and technical enactments, rather than being solely concerned
with representations and meanings. It privileges practices over texts and studies the 'liveli-
ness' of social life, by highlighting how tourists experience places in multi-sensory ways
that involve not only bodily sensations but also affect and various technologies. The
performance turn has emerged in opposition to the 'tourist gaze' and other representa-
tional approaches that privilege the eye, by arguing for 'new metaphors based more on
being, doing, touching and seeing rather than just 'seeing' (Perkins and Thorns, 2001: 189;
Edensor, 2006). It puts forward a
relational
approach that acknowledges the complex inter-
section of the senses in people's encounters with places.
2. . . . employs Goffmanian performative metaphors (Goffman, 1959; Larsen, 2010) to
conceptualise the themed and staged nature of tourist spaces and places, as well as the
scripted and theatrical corporealities and
embodied
actions of and interactions between
tourist workers, tourists and locals. It refers to improvising performers, actors, cast
members, places as stages, guides as directors, stage management and so on (Edensor,
1998, 2000, 2001). This is a perspective where situations, processes and performances are
everything: tourism
is
doing, something accomplished
through
performances.
