“Nameless landscapes” - what can be seen and understood on a battlefield?

Abstract

A battlefield—as a complex notion—encompasses many kinds of space, from the physical to the symbolic. The features of geographical elements together created the stage for a clash and conditioned in some way (partly or even entirely) the course and result of the battle. However, today’s battlefield landscape is often a literary silent witness to history, telling us nothing of the past. Given the fact that battlefields have become tourist attractions and are a destination not only to the so-called ‘dedicated cultural tourists’, there is a need to give the landscape a voice in the complex tourist narration. In order to enable including a historical landscape story in a general tourist narration about a battlefield, a theoretical framework of a historical battlefield is proposed and discussed to justify the need of using specific tourist facilities to make the past present in today’s landscape. The case of Rac?awice battlefield in Poland illustrates the ‘nameless landscape’ where only the symbolic space is readable and linked with the past. It also supports a conclusion that there is a need to make the battlefield legible in terms of the sequence of events, the roles of people (groups and individual), and the role of geographical features in the battle. In this simple condition, a visit to a battlefield might be more complex and provide a fuller understanding.     

The aeromobile tourist gaze: understanding tourism ‘from above’

ABSTRACT

While the impact of aeromobility on the growth of tourism and its destinations is well documented, the role of aeromobility in the process of experiencing and shaping place with specific regard to tourist destinations has received little attention from scholars. With the growth of commercial aviation and the increasingly mundane nature of the experience within mass tourism, I draw attention to the touristic experience of flying as the activity beyond its role in arriving at the destination. After a brief review of the genealogy of aeromobility and tourism, I reflect on examples of tourist aeromobility in Cape Town, South Africa in order to theorise the aeromobile tourist gaze. This paper analyses mobile testimonies from online travel reviews from airborne tourists performing helicopter ‘flips’ over Cape Town. Results highlight the need to focus on flying as tourism itself while they illustrate the role it plays in the aeromobile tourist gaze, a unique perspective and experience of the tourism destination as ‘tourism from above’ that emerges from the touristic dimensions of flight including the destination, the flying device and flight route. The findings underscore the role of flying-as-tourism. The aeromobile tourist gaze thus spectacularises the destination and disrupts the relationship between tourists and place.     

Liminality and difficult heritage in tourism

Abstract

Difficult heritage, rooted in difficult knowledge, is not simply difficult because of traumatic content but also because of the responses it can provoke. These responses can include confusion, anxiety, and empathy for the fear and suffering of others. As such, difficult heritage sites can be problematic in tourism, which is typically characterized by expectations of fun and relaxation. Scholars recognize that the tourist experience is liminal in that tourists occupy a state of limbo outside of their normal places and lives. This article argues that difficult heritage can be a liminal experience within tourism by critically analysing tourist reviews of Bonaire’s slave huts. The Caribbean island of Bonaire attracts cruise tourists and tourists interested in water sports like snorkelling and diving. Yet, these tourists may visit the slave hut sites as a secondary activity during their stay on the island. TripAdvisor reviewers describe feelings of being both out of time and out of place at the slave huts as they imagine the conditions the enslaved would have experienced, and they describe emotional responses ranging from sadness to revulsion. Additionally, reviewers reflect on their visit to the slave huts after ‘resuming’ their vacation, particularly focusing on the contrast between their experiences. The approach of liminality has the potential to better understand tourists’ experiences of difficult heritage.     

重塑风景：兼论贵州旅游形象的建构

风景与旅游形象的关系密不可分。风景远不止于山山水水,它同时作为人类文化和理想的载体,更是旅行者实现“伟大浪漫”梦想的场域,同样的风景对不同的人群有着不同的意义——风景事实上有着一副多变的面孔（形象）。鉴于此,在建构风景形象或确立旅游主题形象时,不仅要根植于东道主文化,还应从“他者”的角度赋予地方更宽广的涵义,以创造和维持“地方神话”——因为在此建构过程中,旅游者也不由自主地参与了东道主文化的共生共建,其自身融入并构成了风景。     

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACT

Existing tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.     

Experiencing Dracula's homeland

ABSTRACT

Transylvania has not only a geographical location as a province of Romania but also a mental meaning as Dracula's land. Dracula has become an important brand name for Romania, attracting many tourists in recent years – especially after the fall of communism. The main dimensions of Dracula's castle (i.e. Bran Castle) experiences shared online by tourists were identified to ascertain the primary reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction with visits and to test whether narratives and satisfaction vary according to the occasion (i.e. Halloween). Quantitative (i.e. computer-based) and qualitative (i.e. narrative) content analyses were conducted on the Web reviews written by visitors. The results reveal that the experiences are multidimensional, and they include the following themes: ‘castle’, ‘visit’, ‘Dracula’, ‘inside’, ‘tourist’, ‘outside’, ‘trip’, ‘souvenirs’, ‘stairs’ and ‘Dracula's castle’. The main reasons for dissatisfaction are overcrowding, which is connected with the outside theme, and the disappointment of tourists regarding the old furniture, which is associated with the inside theme. The results also reveal that visitors are the most satisfied with their experience around the time of Halloween. The narratives shared online emphasise tourists’ need to associate their imaginings with this region and castle, giving their experiences greater meaning through this destination's image as Transylvania.     

‘Islands within Islands?’ The Maldivian resort,between segregation and integration

Abstract

The Maldives resort islands are a type of tourist enclave subject to a dual form of borderization. The islands have an external border that coincides with each island’s coastline and with the limits of the private property of the resort; this border regulates the movement of tourists and locals. The islands also have an internal border that separates the outer edge of the island from the inner edge. The outer edge, which is supposed to represent the perfect landscape of the ‘tropical island,’ houses all of the tourist facilities, while the interior contains the structures dedicated to the metabolic activities of the resort. The frontline staff members and the tourists share the ‘dreamscape’ of the outer edge, whereas the maintenance workers live in the secluded space inside the island, where they are typically hidden from the sight of tourists by high walls, and their movement is usually restricted from staff designated areas to their location of work. For maintenance workers, these spaces, necessarily limited due to the small size of the coral islands, risk becoming ‘islands within islands.’ Recently, the Maldivian government has begun to promote projects and initiatives in support of territorial integration between the resorts and communities of neighboring islands. Thus, the outer limits of the resort islands are, today, more porous. Their internal borders, in contrast, remain very difficult to cross.     

Tourist or vagabond?

Abstract

Poverty isn't an option for the poor so why should it be one for the Church? How do we relate to the experience of being poor in the UK, to the phenomenon of globalization which increasingly shapes all our experiences, and to the task of theological interpretation of the signs of the times? This article explores dimensions of poverty in the UK and in particular the phenomenon of the invisibility of the poor, offers some explanation as to why poverty has grown substantially in the UK over the past two decades and seeks to set this within the wider context of the debate about globalization and its victors and victims—the tourists and vagabonds. Finally, it suggests that much of what passes for modern theology is in fact a form of ‘tourist theology’ and explores ways of creating a new ‘vagabond theology’ for the twenty-first century.     

Policy Merchandising and Social Assistance in Africa: Don't Call Dog Monkey for Me

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter-revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra-territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.     

“We can’t return to normal”: committing to tourism equity in the post-pandemic age

Abstract

Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—particularly in preparing its current and future leaders. A commitment to equity is about making specific changes in practices and decisions at multiple levels, along with growing a wider ethical framework. This pivot of a mindset requires us, as tourists, corporations, and educators to step away from a selfish perspective and critically change our perception and understanding of tourism to a truly equitable focus. Consequently, these actions force us to question the consumerism and capitalistic lens that has contributed to mass growth across the touristic landscape and instead, choose a system that fosters sustainable and equitable growth - which in turn, ‘slows down’ our ways of consuming the world around us - transforming our values and experiences of what tourism is and should be.     

Images of ‘Wild Africa’: nature tourism and the (re)creation of Hluhluwe game reserve, 1930–1945

This paper explores the relationship between new discursive constructions of South African nature and the material imperatives that influenced game reserve management in Zululand in the 1930s and 1940s. It also investigates the social consequences of these developments. The paper traces the emergence of marketable constructions of ‘wild nature’ linked to the development of tourism and their expression in the increasing exclusion of Africans from game reserves. At Hluhluwe, this process was tentative and its outcome far from inevitable. Yet while the question of an African presence in game reserves remained open in the early 1930s, in the longer term it was clear that black people could not be part of Zululand's new, purified ‘space of nature’ – or, more correctly, they would participate only as employees and not as residents or tourists. The management of the Hluhluwe game reserve as a tourist destination ultimately entailed the more systematic exercise of spatial controls over its landscape, contributing to the dispossession and exclusion of local Zulu people. The paper argues that enhanced social controls and a new brutal geography of forced removal are implicated in the (re)creation of Hluhluwe as a romantic space in which tourists could experience wild nature and an ‘unspoilt’ African landscape.     

Moroccan Jewish first-places: contraction,fabrication, dissipation

Abstract

The idea of first places is inevitably linked with diasporas. At the heart of this idea and since the very start, there has always been the Jewish case. The diaspora of the Jews of Morocco, in the periphery, was presented by some authors, as a good case with which to relativize the theoretical pertinence and conceptual inspiration of the Jewish model. Focusing on Jewish history, heritage, and travelling in Morocco, I will continue to question the paradigm of social studies based on the bi-polar center-diaspora model. I will testify to the emergence and fabrication of new Jewish ‘first-places’, a process attending the aging and departure of the last Jews of Morocco and with the support of the Kingdom, while following current, and disruptive trends of contraction, commutation and dissipation of ‘first-places’ in different Jewish practices and narratives. The individualization of religious practice in post-secular societies allows and includes – and often merges – secular, ethnic and political approaches of what once was purely designated as religious identity. Heritage Moroccan landscape (and landscaping) allows different approaches and thus probably why one can think of it as an emerging ‘first-place’ for some.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’     

Instagram abroad: performance,consumption and colonial narrative in tourism

As a form of travel writing and a highly favoured marketing tool, Instagram provides a blueprint of the ideologies underpinning contemporary tourism. This article argues that consistent visual motifs on Instagram echo a colonial iconography that sees tourist destinations as available for possession and consumption, effacing local place and identity. The reproduction of three motifs – the tropical exotic, the promontory gaze and fantasised assimilation – mediatises ideations that, rather than depicting these destinations as contemporaneous spaces in which a tourist is a guest, depict them as ‘other’ realms for the tourist’s taking. Local residents, when pictured, are configured as genericised icons of exoticism that serve to imbue the tourist’s experience with authenticity. These visual tropes, paired with textual captions and hashtags, present tourists as the rightful occupants and users of local spaces in a way that echoes the colonial seizure of foreign lands, an action that is imaginatively performed as tourists enact these three motifs in Instagram posts. Taken together, the visual regime witnessed and performed on Instagram contributes to the imagined and real perpetuation of unequal power relations in global tourism, which continue to privilege wealthy tourists over local residents.     

An irreconcilable first-place: the precarious life of tourism and heritage in a southern European historic centre

Abstract

This article discusses the ambiguous relationship between heritage tourism and everyday life in the historic centre of Naples. This area, long characterised by a lower-class residential population and intermittently considered off-limits to tourists, has over the last two decades become the focus of a burgeoning heritage tourism industry. The article adopts the idea of precariousness – understood contra conventional formulations as a condition that elicits both anxiety and emancipatory release – in order to make sense of the allure and repulsion that the historic centre exerts in tourist encounters with the city. Through three examples – a bus sightseeing tour, online responses to a New York Times article about Naples and local people’s perceptions of a pedestrianised piazza as a tourist contact zone – the article illustrates how the historic centre as a tourist destination is constituted by a mix of foreboding and excitement; where affective experience tends to trump the monumental gaze. Thinking in terms of precariousness not only underlines the contradictory role that this area plays in the local production of cultural heritage but also poses a challenge to those accounts that see in the advent of a visitor economy the inevitable ‘museumification’ and gentrification of historic centres.     

South–South? Culture Talk and Labour Relations at a Chinese‐owned Factory in Hungary

In 2011, a large Hungarian chemical factory was acquired by a Chinese competitor. The resulting encounter between Chinese managers and Hungarian staff — which took place in the context of a harsh retrenchment that has curtailed the powers of organized labour in Hungary — highlights the inadequacy of dichotomies such as North/South, East/West and socialist/capitalist. As with other corporate acquisitions in Europe, Chinese managers expected to ‘learn’ from ‘advanced Western management practices’; instead, they found what they interpreted as a backward, ‘socialist’ work culture in need of modernization. For their part, Hungarian staff feared the imposition of a culturally inappropriate ‘Asian labour discipline’, but have come to see at least some of the changes as part of a necessary modernization. ‘Asian’, ‘European’, ‘Western’ and ‘socialist’ are floating signifiers used by both Chinese and Hungarian staff at the factory in various, often contradictory ways to justify management choices, staff resistance or individual preferences. As a result of their analysis, the authors suggest that discussions about the impact of Chinese investment on labour practices should recognize a wider range of contexts, including the presence of precarious socioeconomic environments within the so‐called ‘advanced economies’.     

旅游产品特点、消费技术与景区解说系统

在旅游产业发展进程中旅游景区的重要性和竞争压力越来越大。本文在这样一种宏观背景下,分析了传统的旅游产品的定义,指出了其逻辑上的问题,从新角度研究了旅游产品的特点,指出应该从旅游者与旅游企业之间的交易、旅游者自身的生产消费这两个角度来理解,提出了旅游经历与旅游体验之间的差异;从旅游者生产消费形成自身私有产品的角度分析,指出应该重视旅游过程中的消费技术问题,而且由于这种消费技术的可移植性和旅游消费的时空规定性,要以高于重视工业产品的消费问题的态度对待旅游消费技术的问题,从而论证了景区解说系统对于旅游景区及旅游目的地发展的重要作用,尤其是对于我国这样一个具有悠久深厚历史文化的观光国家而言,意义尤为重大。     

旅游吸引物符号的双层表意结构与体验真实性研究

把罗兰·巴特关于语言符号的双层表意结构运用到旅游研究中来,可以发现旅游吸引物符号实际上也包含一个双层表意结构。不同形式的能指和所指搭配形成了旅游吸引物符号系统。符号的双层表意结构揭示了旅游体验过程中旅游者对不同类型旅游吸引物符号的能指(旅游客体)和所指(旅游者心理或行为模式)的不同真实性期待。本文在对不同类型旅游吸引物符号的结构特征进行分析的基础上,尝试性地构建了旅游体验真实性的概念体系:"客观主义"的真实性、"文化附会"的真实性、"主题文本"的真实性、"行为模式"的真实性、"享乐主义"的真实性以及"主客一体"的真实性。     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

基于方式—目的理论的民族旅游者目的地选择研究——以临夏回族旅游者为例

作为旅游者决策行为研究的重要组成部分,旅游者目的地选择研究对于旅游目的地营销有着十分重要的作用。本文采用方式—目的理论,以临夏回族旅游者作为调查对象,探讨了民族旅游者旅游目的地选择的过程与影响因素。研究表明,回族旅游者首先考虑的因素是旅游目的地文化因素,即清真食品和回族氛围等因素。其次是旅游目的地的景观因素。在最终的旅游目的地选择时,距离因素起到了十分重要的作用。同时,研究表明回族旅游者对于旅游目的地的选择上具有自身独特的特点。最后提出了研究结论对于旅游业营销、市场定位和产品开发的意义。