Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
By constructing a particular view of tourism with endorsed social practices, the idealized
version, perhaps unwittingly and implicitly, comes to represent the version offered to the tourist's
interpretive repertoire. One depicted reality hides another. A place, event or people that becomes
marked out as a sign of tourism interest becomes the subject of a fi xed, legitimate and eventually
'normal view'; even to the extent that tourists are more engaged with the 'paradisal reality' of
Hawaii than with the actual place itself. This ideal view, as a basis for the appropriation of the
tourist's cultural knowledge, potentially marginalizes other interpretations of a destination. As a
result, marketing communications may construct a discourse of freedom and transcendence to
represent a space where there is also coercion and constraint of others (Coles and Church 2007).
More than this though, items, events and subjects that don't fi t the construction privileged in
marketing communications are extricated (sometimes very explicitly) from the tourist's gaze. In
the texts employed by travel agent marketers, guidebooks, guides and even tourists themselves,
certain subjects and relations are selectively edited out - being replaced by the idealized
representation. Tourist boards, seeking to present their country's touristic assets in the best
possible light to an international tourist audience, may well (mis)represent subject relations in
this way:
The relationships between the two cultures in New Zealand are represented as trouble free:
'like two distinct wines, the cultures co-mingle while retaining their individual distinctive-
ness' (NZTB 1996:8). The reality of Maori as largely urbanized people suffering high levels
of intergenerational unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates are carefully avoided by
the contemporary tourism discourse.
(Ateljevic and Doorne 2002: 662)
In this sense tourism discourses employed in marketing communications are only ever partial
and incomplete representations (Norton 1996), whilst often claiming quite the opposite, i.e. to
be an authority on how things really are (e.g. 'see the real Spain' or 'meet authentic local people
and their traditions' etc.). Is misrepresenting subjects and relations the only issue here? Is the only
outcome at issue here an interpretive one?
In the broad conception of discourse outlined here, there are important connections between
the knowledge, identity and practice of tourism. In short, how a place comes to be commonly
known, frames what kinds of subjects tourists can become in that space and accordingly, how
they should act in the other's regard. Thus the knowledge of tourism that is represented in a
given tourism text has the capacity to infl uence how tourists then do things to/with/for/against
others on holiday. Various authors have made this connection between tourism discourse and
knowledge/practice. Revisiting Bhattacharyya (1997) above, the Indian travel guidebook
infl uenced the traveller's view of what is of value and signifi cance, what can and should be done
and how travellers should interact in regard to local populations, to the extent that it places the
traveller above important moral conventions and rules that local people are strongly subject to.
Thus marketing communications can place tourists above important socio-moral sanctions that
would otherwise govern behaviour in those spaces - they can be amoralizing : 'Engendered by
spatial discourses, the dominant tourism culture is essentialized and marked as a neutral activity,
hardly ever questioned, yet assumes a distinct set of values and expectations' (Ateljevic and
Doorne 2002: 663).
Discourse employed through marketing communications can be argued to disempower not
only human others but ecological others too. As Johns and Clarke (2001) observe, tourists
discursively construct emancipatory boating identities whilst readily overlooking the environ-
mental destruction and water pollution caused by their 'free roaming' diesel boats. Once again,
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