Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Studies of the sensual experience in tourism have until recently been predominantly concerned
with the visual, as epitomised by John Urry's (1990) concept of 'the tourist gaze', which it is
argued shapes tourist practice and experience, and embodies a Foucauldian power to gaze
upon others. This ocularcentric approach resounds in Judith Adler's (1989) assertion that
the practice of Western sightseeing emerged as the eye gained ascendancy over the ear, giving
rise to the pursuit of 'picturesque' and 'sublime' views and hierarchical sensual understandings
that 'privilege vision and consider touch and taste as bestial and base' (Paterson, 2009: 767).
Urry continues to insist that 'the organising sense within the typical tourist experience is
visual' (2001: 146). However, we question whether in a world of proliferating tourist practices
and destinations there can be any 'typical' tourist experience. For while modes of sightseeing
are important to certain tourist endeavours in particular circumstances, numerous other
sensory experiences experienced by tourists challenge this insistence on the pre-eminence of
vision (see also Larsen
, Chapter 8
of this volume).
Despite foregrounding the 'romantic' sightseeing, solitar y gaze as most prevalent, Ur r y has
expanded the kinds of tourist gaze, identifying the 'collective' gaze and the 'anthropological'
gaze, for instance. Discussion about the varieties of gazing practices have been extended by
Jordan and Aitchison (2008), who point out that the tourist gaze is frequently gendered and
sexualised, embodying an expression of power, although Maoz's (2006) concept of 'the
mutual gaze' involves a more nuanced relationality whereby the 'local gaze' generates a
particular touristic way of gazing and this in turn is apt to reshape the local gaze.
Before developing our argument that there is no reason to privilege the sense of vision
within tourist experience, we fi rstly interrogate the pervasive notion that the gaze acts as a
distancing procedure through which the onlooker becomes detached from a passive world
open to inspection. This disembodied understanding misrepresents the gaze as a separate
sensation, for as Degen
et al.
remark, visuality is invariably 'multimodal: that is, visual experi-
ences are almost always accompanied by aural, tactile, and oral experiences' (2008: 1909).
Similarly, Caroline Scarles maintains that the visual tourist experience of place 'exists as a
series of embodied practices as tourists encounter the world multisensually and multidimen-
sionally'. The gaze thus continuously 'emerges via the materiality and corporeality of the
body' (2009: 466). In a more specifi c example, Katrin Lund asserts that, whilst climbing, 'the
sense of vision and the mountaineer's gaze cannot be separated from examining the body that
