Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
These 'ethnographies' illustrate how the tourism economy is increasingly theatrical and
performative; they resemble real theatres as workers are 'cast members' wearing costumes and
trained to enact scripts and roles that fi t in with a theatrical themed environment. This
requires that one cares for the 'corporate brand', knows how to 'charm' through improvi-
sation and enjoys giving service to others, and this in part involves accepting that one is
'inferior' to the guest and never allowing the guest to lose face. They need to exhibit a will
to please within what Veijola and Valtonen term a 'servient economy' (2007: 17).
While service encounters are scripted by power relations (see also Gibson,
Chapter 6
in
this volume), we also need to explore how service workers bend scripts so as to restore some
autonomy and critique. Service work is not necessarily alienating. Refl ecting upon his time
working as a waiter, Crang argues: 'it never felt to me as if I were being alienated from my
emotions, my manners, or my leisure practices. I always felt that “I” was still there: I genu-
inely liked people who tipped me; I genuinely wanted to help; I genuinely had fun' (1994:
698). Other studies indicate that one pleasure of service work is the fl uid boundaries between
work and leisure (Weaver, 2005a: 10). This blurring is particularly evident with regard to
tour reps who work in the consumption spaces of tourists and who need to enact fun and to
party: 'the rep will have failed if she or he does not seem to be having fun and helping the
holidaymaker having fun' (Guerrier and Adib, 2003: 1402).
Nor is all service work completely choreographed or determined. There is always some
element of unpredictability and fl uidity to each 'moment of truth'. Cuthill maintains that:
'Service cultures are fl uid and performed. They alter and shift with different customer groups
and performances at different times of the day, week, or year, so that although a core service
culture is created, it mutates with different performances' (2007: 68).
Some literature examines how
tourists
are not only audiences but also performers within
complex networks of other tourists and tourism brokers. In his seminal study of 'Tourists at
the Taj', Edensor explores how tourists at the Taj Mahal perform walking, gazing, photo-
graphing and remembering (1998). He shows, for instance, how 'collective gazers' upon
package holidays and guided tours are subject to the disciplinary gaze of co-participants.
Others
restrict possible performances and show up conventions about 'appropriate' ways of
being a tourist. Key brokers include guides and tour reps who direct and frame gazes at sights:
they suggest photo opportunities, provide scripted commentary, choreograph movements
along prescribed paths and defi ne normalising behaviour (Edensor, 1998; Cheong and Miller,
2000). The 'total institutions', or 'enclavic spaces', of modern tourism are typifi ed by 'team
performance', which is: 'a highly directed operation, with guides and tour mangers acting as
choreographers and directors, the performance is repetitive, specifi able in movement, and
highly constrained by time (see Hottola,
Chapter 18
of this volume). Besides acting out their
own part in the drama by photographing, gazing and moving en masse according to well-
worn precedents, the group also absorb the soliloquies of the central actors - the guides - who
enact the same script at each performance' (Edensor, 1998: 65).
Yet tourists are not cultural dopes. Production (choreographing) and consumption (acting)
are interrelated and overlap in complex ways. 'Bodies are not only written upon but also write
their own meanings and feelings upon space in a continual process of continual remaking'
(Edensor, 2001: 100). The act of 'consumption' is simultaneously one of production, of
re-interpreting, re-forming, re-doing, of decoding the encoded in the present (du Gay
et al.
,
1997). Furthermore, tourists do not only decode past texts but are part of creating new ones
through ongoing interactions and performances with other tourists, non-tourists, guides,
discourses, buildings and objects. As Chronis concludes in his account of the co-construction
of the Gettysburg storyscape of the American civil war:
