Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Perkins and Thorns, 2001). They argue for a sensuous analysis of tourism and look at the
relationship between the normally dominant visualism of the tourist gaze and other senses. In
almost all situations different senses are interconnected with each other to produce a sensed
environment of people and objects distributed across time and space. The gaze cannot be
separated from examining the body that moves and touches the ground. They highlight how:
the 'performed' tourist gaze involves other sense-scapes; gazing is multimodal; people are
never disembodied travelling eyes; gazing depends upon people's bodily well-being; gazees
often have a burning desire to touch, stroke, walk or climb upon and even collect the animals,
plants, ruins, buildings and art objects that they lay their eyes upon; and most people perform
gazing in the company of signifi cant others, and the social composition of one's 'team' affords
some ways of seeing more than others. Gazing is an interactive, communal game where indi-
vidual gazes are mediated and affected by the presence and gazes of others.
Tourist performances are thus not separate from the places where they contingently
happen; they are not taking place in inert, fi xed cartographically coordinated spaces. They
are performances
of
place. The performance turn seems particularly apt at studying how
tourist places are contingently
enacted
in an ongoing, complex processes involving 'produc-
tion' performances of scripting, designing, building and story-telling and tourists that are
placed
on such designed stages, and yet these designed stages only come to life when tourists
'consume' them; and in this process they may displace meanings and create alternative 'places'.
