Emotion, Space and Society
n Tourism, Performance, and Place, four reputable scholars of tourism studies join their respective expertise to posit geography as an imperative to tackle a complex interdisciplinary tourism agenda. Apprehending landscape as “the medium with which tourists interact as they perform place” and noting that “it is landscape that tourism practitioners use in the marketing of tourism places” (p.3), the authors’ aim at developing a landscape approach to tourism that links the study of tourism sites with that of touristic experience. According to them, this connection has been insufficiently examined in tourism scholarship, resulting in the experience of place often being separated from place itself. To fill the lacunae this has caused in the understanding of tourism as place performance, they propose that geography is ideally situated since it provides crucial theoretical underpinnings for the fruitful integration of tourism studies with landscape studies, a necessary prerequisite to the production of a place-based theory of tourism. Four case studies illustrate the premise that “tourism does not just happen in places, but places are performed through tourism practices” (p.87). Jewish youths participating in an Israeli “Birthright” tour, tourism promotional material in Denmark, repeat American tourists in Italy, and lifelong traveling rock climbers constitute the storyscapes used by Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd, Daniel C. Knudsen, Lisa C. Braverman, and Michelle M. Metro-Roland to draw a placebased theory of tourism. Each of these case studies reinforces the power of place in tourism and confirms the value of framing tourism as place performance. Indeed, they highlight the production of tourism places through the rituals of touristic experience, which include pre-departure preparation to touring, dwelling, sharing, building communities and belonging (or not) in place. The book is divided in two main parts, one theoretical and one empirical. As it puts different theoretical approaches in conversation with each other and then explicitly embeds the case studies in the theoretical discussion, the volume leans heavily on key thinkers in tourism studies. The organization of the book is made clear by efficient and recurrent roadmapping and the theoretical and research agenda are explicitly enunciated. Frequent references to previous and coming chapters help the reader navigate the various facets of the volume and link its different parts. While the rich theoretical overview constitutes a rather abstract discussion, the well-narrated case-studies provide real-world thematic illustrations, although it is at times necessary to refer back to the first part of the book to clarify theoretical points. While Urry's gaze and MacCannell's theorization of tourism sites as signs and sightseeing as ritual constitute important theoretical foundations for the book, other conceptual approaches are prominent throughout. Together, they validate the performance turn in geography and position landscape at the center of analysis of place-based tourism experiences. Among the perspectives the book puts in dialogue with each other to formulate questions about touristic place-making and experience, a few stand out. The case studies incorporate Bruner's theorization of encounters between various actors of tourism and the construction of narratives in cultural tourism, as well as Graburn's spatial and temporal tourism inbetweeness. Saussure's structuralist semiotics and Goffman's theory of staging and frame analysis are recruted to further highlight questions of representations. Also pushing forward our understanding of tourism sites and tourism experiences are Peirce's object, representamen and interpretant, Tuan's fields of care and public symbols dichotomies, and Zi zek's contribution to place- making through place mythology. Many of the important questions leading this work are ques- tions that tourism scholars all ask and that can seem straightforward until we try to formulate an answer. By linking tourism sites and tourism experiences, the authors attempt to address numerous interrogations about sites and tourist's attitudes towards them, as well as practices within them. Performance, i.e “the enactment of contexts and situations, events and moments” (p.3), is used as the conceptual thread linking the case-studies, which collectively identify what makes a tourism site and how tourists cultivate preconceptions about tourism attractions, as well as how site representations shape touristic practices before travel, once on site, and upon return (for example through imagery of Danishness in tourism marketing material). Several chapters question the role of mobility in shaping the relationship between home and tourism. The traveling rock climber networks in particular challenge the notion of dwelling by showing not only that tourism places are constructed through mobility, but also that tourism places are funda- mentally relational. This leads to more interrogations about the nature of the relations that constitute tourism places and how they are maintained, as well as how place identity gets constructed and the actors shaping it, whether human or non-human (from people to things and institutions). The connection between tourism sites and tourism experiences also triggers questions about methodologies, for example what is the best scale at which to examine tourism practices to understand the social and personal functions of tourism? Chapters 6 and 9, in particular, offer an account of research design and methods that draw attention to ways of dealing with deception in the field (for example teasing out the tourist-researcher continuum during the Birthright tour) and the sampling of a population that is by essence fleeting, as is often the case in tourism research. Other questions seek to explore what makes a “successful” tourism destination, and what success is in the first place (and for whom/what agenda). Those are only a few of the significant inquiries that this book engages readers to think about in their own work through the lens of place performance. In attempting responses, the authors show that an array of processes intervene at various scales in the understanding of tourism sites and experiences. They use ritual, semiotics, ideology and performance to conceptualize mobility, agency of tourism actors, communitas, liminality, time/space and the temporality of tourism experiences, the role of aesthetic and branding in touristic placemaking, and enthymematic interactions and persuasion. They also introduce non-representational theory to address body movement in tourism sites, tourism mobility and embodied practices, such as those of (hyper)-mobile lifestyle climbers. While none of the concepts are new, the ways in which they are beaded together in a small number of case-studies through the concept of performance is commendable. This is not the first time, however, that place and performance are brought together in the analysis of tourism practices. Worthy of mention is the volume edited by Coleman and Crang (2002) that over a decade ago already questioned this complex relationship. While both volumes use casestudies to delve into place performance, spectacle, home and embodied encounters in tourist sites, what is different in the present volume is the heavier emphasis on integrating various theoretical currents to create one holistic theory of tourism: a place-based theory of tourism. The book is well-suited for tourism studies scholars who will appreciate revisiting theoretical classics as well as learning from conceptual relationships fostered. The volume may also prompt empirically-grounded scholars to consider theoretical ramifications of their research or guide them in using their findings to illuminate theory as to advance both theory and practice. It is regrettable that, due to printing, some of the black and white photos used to illustrate the text are too dark to identify precisely what they add to the demonstration. Nevertheless, this book represents an ambitious effort at confirming a geographical approach as distinctly relevant to grasp place as performance in tourism studies. At the same time, the emphasis on mobility and representation shows that tourism geography can contribute to the development of geography at large by establishing linkages between tourism studies and human geography. Geographers surely know that “place matters”. If tourism scholars are not yet convinced that “place matters in tourism” (p.153) too, this book should surely heighten their awareness.
