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would encourage the rational development of the healthy individual, whose eyes, nose and
ears would be uncluttered by sensory rubbish. Such plans proposed a practical solution to the
kinds of sensory overload suffered by urbanites that Simmel (1995) alleged led to the cultiva-
tion of a blasé attitude developed to minimise the sensory onslaught of the modern city.
It is easy to conclude that such spaces represent a baleful homogenisation of space, an unsen-
sual world in which tourists are too easily satisfi ed with the predictable and familiar. However,
the desire for comfort testifi es to the reliability of home (and home-away-from-home) as a
place of comfort: 'convenience, effi ciency, leisure, ease, pleasure, domesticity, intimacy and
privacy' (Rybczynski, 1988: 231), where the body is relaxed and unself-conscious.
Besides, space is never simply produced by planners and designers, but also by the conniv-
ance of the users of place through the regular practices that recur within it. Accordingly,
predictable tourist spaces possess particular affordances that encourage performative conven-
tions of walking and gazing, also promoting an affective, sensual contagion whereby cultural
norms of conduct and familiar sensations are communicated and shared by tourists (Edensor,
2001; Larsen,
Chapter 8
of this volume). An embodied lay geographical knowledge is thus
mobilised in the ways in which tourists pursue culturally organised and normative perform-
ance as part of a touristic habitus. Such enactions are also facilitated by the technologies that
extend physical capacities, such as the binoculars and cameras that shape the sensation and
performance of gazing, and thereby enable the body 'to do things and sense realities that
would otherwise be beyond its capabilities' (Haldrup and Larsen, 2006: 276).
Secondly, the sensory habits that are grounded in the experience and practice of familiar
space are intertwined with the cultural values that visitors bring to particular tourist contexts,
for the senses are always partially cultural, are 'cumulative and accomplished, rather than
given' (Stewart, 1999: 18), and can never provide unmediated access to the world as purely
'natural' tools. As Constance Claessen emphasises, '[W]e not only think about our senses, we
think through them', since 'sensory values not only frame a culture's experience, they express
its ideals, its hopes and its fears' (1993: 9).
These sensory values generate thoughts and feelings about the places, as Andrews (2005)
shows in depicting how the sensations experienced by British holidaymakers at Spanish
tourist resorts, notably the perceptions about their noisiness and smells, produce negative
value judgements. The cultural specifi city of these sensory values underlines further that we
must avoid making generalisations about how tourists gaze (and listen, smell and touch), and
drawing conclusions about what such sensory practices mean and feel like. It is almost impos-
sible to sense the way others do, not only because of the values associated with different senses
but also because of the differently habituated bodies that feel and respond to sensations differ-
ently. To date, the study of most tourist experience has been hugely ethnocentric, ignoring
the diverse, contesting values embedded in the tourist practices and experiences of non-
Western tourists (though see Winter, 2009; Winter
et al.
, 2008).
Occasionally, the distinct sensory regimes clash in destinations where tourists from various
cultural backgrounds congregate. For instance, British package tourists at the Taj Mahal
think that many of the Indian tourists, who outnumber them at the site, are too noisy, chat-
ting and laughing and thus violating the calm silence which they believe should surround the
consumption of the mausoleum. These persistent sensory value judgements can be argued to
have emerged in colonial travel accounts, producing evaluations about the abject qualities of
other places and people that persist. For instance, Gail Low writes that in British India, the
'native quarter' was perceived as 'the out of bounds city . . . where nothing is delineated but
everything exists in a chaotic state of intermingling: a carnival of night and a landscape of
darkness, noise, offensive smells and obscenities' (1993: 165). Rana Kabbani (1986) asserts
