Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
3. . . . addresses the
scripted
nature of performances and understands them in relation to
power. It builds upon Adler's argument that 'the traveller's body, as the literal vehicle of
travel art, has been subject to historical construction and stylistic constraint. The very
senses through which the traveller receives culturally valued experience have been
moulded by differing degrees of cultivation and, indeed, discipline' (Adler, 1989: 8).
Tourists are choreographed by guides and visible signs but also by absent or invisible
cultural codes, norms and etiquettes for how to perceive and value tourist places (Edensor,
2001: 71). Tourist performances are in part
pre
formed; they never are for the fi rst time,
because they require rehearsal, imitation of other performances and adjustment to norms
and expectations to such an extent that they appear natural and become taken-for-granted
rituals. Performances are largely habitual and unplanned. Edensor argues against the idea
that tourism represents a break from the everyday: '[R]ather than transcending the
mundane, most forms of tourism are fashioned by culturally coded escape attempts.
Moreover, although suffused with notions of escape from normativity, tourists carry
quotidian habits and responses with them: they are part of their baggage' (Edensor, 2001:
61). Tourists never just travel
to
places: their mindsets, habitual practices and social rela-
tions travel unrefl exively along
with
them (Larsen, 2008). Culturally coded patterns of
tourist behaviour revolve around class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and they generate
shared conventions about what should be seen and which actions are appropriate (Edensor,
2001: 60).
4. . . . is against portraying tourism as an over-determined space, erroneously suggesting that
tourists are fully compelled to follow pre-scripted routes and adhere to scripts, and that
standardised marketing yields standardise tourists. The performance turn avoids such
spatial determinism since it also uncovers creativity, detours and productive practices
(Edensor, 2000: 330).
Performative metaphors challenge ideas of complete standardisation and control and
stress the fl uidity and malleability of human activity as well as the manifold roles that can
be played (Weaver, 2005a: 6). As Foucault (1970, 1976) reminds us, power is distributed,
ubiquitous and not a property of a group. Power is everywhere and is exercised within
relations of networks - and this is true also of tourism (Cheong and Miller, 2000). Locals
and tourists also, from time to time, exercise power, performing and picturing against or
bending the 'scripts' of those of tourism organisations and wider discourses. Tourists' prac-
tices are never completely determined by their 'framing' since there are (on occasions at
least) unpredictability, creativity and embodied performances. Tourist bodies are simulta-
neously pre-formed
and
performing. Tourists are not just written upon; they also enact
and inscribe places with their own stories and can follow their own paths. Performances
are contingent processes and never simply determined by their choreography (Larsen,
2005). 'Performances can be generalised at the theoretical level of restoration of behav-
iour, but as embodied practices each and every performance is specifi c and different from
every other' (Schechner, 2006: 36-7). The point is that performances always have elements
of both ritual and play. Performance is seen as a form of playful ritualised behaviour: partly
constrained, partly innovative.
5. . . . spaces and places are conceived as non-stable and contingent enactments. While tourist
places are often presumed to be relatively fi xed, given, passive and separate from those
designing and especially touring them, the performance turn destabilises such static and
fi xed conceptions of places. Tourist places are constantly enacted through planners,
designers, stage managers
and
tourists and 'locals' and they enrol various non-humans,
stage props and technologies. Most tourist places are 'dead' until actors take the stage and
