Tourism and Visual Culture: volumen I Theories and Concepts

Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2020

This essay explores multiple aspects of a domestic tourism boom that has occurred in Ladakh, India, over the past two decades. It considers the nature of tourism itself within the context of leisure as a commodity and how visual interventions and photographic practices brand a tourist destination as a consumable idea, making a case for the insepa-rability of image and destination and arguing that the constructed image of a destination attracts a collective gaze. This perspective is then applied to the consumerist trajectory/ tragedy of Ladakh, which since the economic liberalization of India has been visually negotiated through imageries of the area as a destination for adventure and exotica. This experience is enacted through the consumerist practices of packaged tourism, and through a visual exploration of material remains-the paper documents material leftovers discarded by tourists.

The framed world: tourism, tourists and …, 2009

2008

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the tourist, like the vagabond or flâneur, as a marginal figure, until in the post-modern world it moved to the centre of a world 'fully and exclusively structured by aesthetic criteria'. 1 This paper is concerned wiith the last decades of the nineteenth century, an era when tourists were relatively common features of the urban landscape and the tourism industry became one of the agencies generating economic and social change. Tourism became taken for granted as more and more people incorporated tourist practices into their everyday lives, even if these only extended to local sight sightseeing. 2 Tourism as an activity belongs in the public sphere. Tourist practices help to produce places while being the product of the discursive structures determining the way that places are imaged and experienced. Not surprisingly therefore, a major influence on ways of modelling the relationship between tourists and their environment has been the use of a dramaturgical metaphor in that it gives scope for the analysis of tourism as a social and cultural institution from a number of different perspectives. My presentation will deal with some visual examples. By the end of the century tourists were extremely visible in the principal cities of Europe, though not of course, in the numbers we associate with the next century, but significant none the less. The more important resorts and capital cities were crowded with tourists and even small towns, unknown to foreigners, were noted in Baedeker and represented on postcards. In thriving cultural centres new restaurants and cafés, opera houses, theatres, concert halls were attractive to tourists as well as local residents. The everyday life of major tourist centres became an object of touristic interest and its more distinctive features incorporated into the way that places were presented and experienced by their visitors. For people living and working in the principal tourist zones, encounters with tourists became a regular feature of their lives and even those who did not tourists on a daily basis or engage with tourism themselves were increasingly aware of tourism as a feature of the modern world.

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Tourist Studies, 2004

Although the construction and amplification of touristically celebrated peoples’ Otherness on global mediascapes has been well documented, the genesis of touristic imagery in out of the way locales, where tourism is embryonic at best, has yet to be examined. This article explores the emergent construction of touristic imagery on the small, sporadically visited Eastern Indonesian island of Alor during the 1990s. In examining the ways in which competing images of Alorese people are sculpted by both insiders and outsiders, this article illustrates the politics and power dynamics embedded in the genesis of touristic imagery. Ultimately, I argue that even in remote locales where tourism is barely incipient, ideas and fantasies about tourism can color local politics, flavor discussions of identity and channel local actions.

Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, 2016

Journeys to battlefields or war-related sites are categorised as dark tourism. Dark tourism is travelling to sites associated with death, disasters or atrocities and has emerged as a major tourist attraction . As it deals with a wide range of travel related to death and disaster, definitions and descriptions of dark tourism have been eclectic and fuzzy (Sharpley and Stone, 2009). It involves visiting concentration camps, war memorials, cemeteries, scenes of mass murder, horror museums, fields of fatality, sites of natural disasters and perilous places , and has been varyingly described as 'morbid tourism' , 'milking the macabre' , Thana tourism (Seaton, 1999) 'black spots tourism' or 'sensation sights tourism' and 'the heritage of atrocity tourism' .

2009

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020

Tourism affects the lives of an increasing number of people across the world and has been growing and diversifying immensely since the turn of the 21st century. Anthropological approaches to tourism have also expanded from the early contributions of the 1970s, which tended to focus on the nature of tourism and its “impact” on peripheral host communities. These first interventions see anthropologists theorizing tourism as a “secular ritual,” studying its workings as a process of “acculturation,” and countering macroeconomic views of tourism’s potential for the economic development of peripheral societies by underscoring instead its neocolonial and imperialist features. Tourism is linked to the exacerbation of center-periphery dependencies, seen as an agent of cultural commoditization and responsible for the promotion and dissemination of stereotypical images of people and places. Moving beyond the impact paradigm, which has the disadvantage of portraying tourism as an external, disembedded, and imposed force on a passive population, constructivist approaches highlight its creative appropriations and integral role in the reinvention of culture and traditions. Anthropologists pay attention to the varied range of actors and agencies involved in tourism, accounting for the multi-scalar dimensions of this phenomenon and the uneven circulation of images, discourses, and resources it engenders. Tourism exerts a powerful global influence on how alterity and difference are framed and understood in the contemporary world and contributes to the valorization and dissemination of particular views of culture, identity, and heritage. Tourism is increasingly intertwined with processes of heritage-making, whose study helps advance anthropological reflections on cultural property, material culture, and the memorialization of the past. A key source of livelihood for a growing number of people worldwide, tourism is also becoming more and more associated with development projects in which applied anthropologists are also enrolled as experts and consultants. The study of the tourism-development nexus continues to be a key area of theoretical innovation and has helped advance anthropological debates on North–South relations, dominant responses to poverty and inequality, and their entanglements with neoliberal forms of governance. Given its diffuse and distributed character, tourism and touristification have been approached as forms of ordering that affect and restructure an ever-growing range of entities, and whose effects are increasingly difficult to tease out from concomitant societal processes. The ubiquitous implementations of tourism policies and projects, the influx of tourists, and the debates, reactions, and resistances these generate underscore, however, the importance of uncovering the ways tourism and its effects are being concretely identified, invoked, acted upon, and confronted by its various protagonists. Research on tourism has the potential to contribute to disciplinary debates on many key areas and notions of concern for anthropology. Culture, ethnicity, identity, alterity, heritage, mobility, labor, commerce, hospitality, intimacy, development, and the environment are among the notions and domains increasingly affected and transformed by tourism. The study of tourism helps understand how such transformations occur, uncovering their features and orientations, while also shedding light on the societal struggles that are at stake in them. The analysis of past and current research shows the scope of the theoretical and methodological debates and of the realms of intervention to which anthropological scholarship on tourism can contribute.

tourismes

the analysis of souvenirs and travel objects has filled many a page of postcolonial studies. In the majority of cases the focus has been the impact that the presence of the “invader” has had on the means of production of those “invaded”, to illustrate how artisan subsistence has given way to a technological or mass-production line approach. When this was not the case, the analysis has focused on the way communities and groups have been obliged to represent themselves through their objects and how that fictionalisation of identity has in some cases led to its demise, in others, to its affirmation and in many others, to a direct invention of the group identity