Travel and Tourism: A Critical Perspective

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Tourist gaze expresses the dynamics associated with construction of tourist experience,

the complexity of the social organization of tourism, and the systematic nature of these

processes. It allows us to articulate what separates tourist experience from everyday

living and to illuminate ways in which production and consumption of tourist goods and

services have wide implications for social relations. The social organization of these

processes encompasses a number of elements, including carefully chosen images about

places to see, narratives that speak about the uniqueness of their history, culture and

heritage, varieties of performative practices through which tourist experiences are

embodied, and a network of professionals and institutions providing services to ensure

that particular tourist experiences can be generated. These developments are closely

related to the emergence of mass tourism, consumerism, and commodification of places

and cultural practices. The gaze is an organizing principle which structures encounters

among tourists and people and places visited at multiple levels; it helps to create

experience that is felt as extraordinary and in this way memorable and also implicates

people into an ongoing and systematic set of social relations through competition for

tourist attention.

The tourist gaze suggests that tourist experience involves a particular way of seeing.

Images and myths about what to see tend to be distinctive, striking, unusual, and

extraordinary. Such visual and narrative depictions of tourist destinations are strategically

promoted by the marketing industry to contrast with people’s daily routine and work

schedules at home. These imaginaries are captured through signs which signify a

particular fantasy. A photo of a couple kissing on the streets of Paris is not meant to

simply capture youthful behavior on a busy urban street but rather the idea of romantic

Paris. Similarly, a photo of the Grand Canyon does not simply signify an unusual

geological formation but rather the idea of unmatched natural beauty. Such gazes help

create anticipations in travelers about what they will encounter during their trip and they

fuel desire to experience these particular imaginaries. Varieties of gazes organize

anticipations of a wide range of experiences, from romance and pleasure to health and

education. Organization of such experiences also implies different kinds of socialities,

from private and solitary to collective involving festivity and conviviality. The tourist

gaze signifies something distinctive about tourist experiences because of which these

become endowed with importance and significance and come to be remembered as

unique.

In historical terms, the tourist gaze emerges from changes in the organization of travel,

innovations in communications technology, developments of travel infrastructure,

transformations of the economy, and the changing tastes of travelers. On their trips for

pleasure and cultural purposes, the elites of Imperial Rome made use of a network of

roads and various providers of hospitality. By the late middle ages, a network of hospices

and mass production of religious handbooks encouraged the spread of pilgrimage so that

in the fifteenth century, historians already note the existence of regularly organized tours

from Venice to the Holy Land. What is known as the Grand Tour flourished among the

sons of the aristocracy a century later. They traveled to prepare themselves for political

leadership at home by educating themselves about the languages and ways of life in

faraway places. Starting with the 16 th

century, historians begin to note a gradual

transformation from traveling for knowledge through opportunities for conversations to

traveling for the purposes of seeing something with one’s own eyes through eyewitness

observation. The development of the idea of scientific knowledge, coupled with growth

of professional classes, availability of the rail system, proliferation of guidebooks, spread

of packaged tours, and the invention of the camera, facilitated the emergence of scenic

tourism and the practice of sightseeing. These become the basis for the emergence of the

tourism industry, as discretionary income grows across the population and travel becomes

available to ever larger numbers of people. Throughout the past century, the scale of

tourism has continued to grow, entering what is known as the global economy.

Tourism has become a central component of the processes of globalization, subsuming

ever larger numbers of travellers to most every part of the globe, including, recently, the

outer space. From small towns to metropolitan centers, from the most remote parts of the

globe to areas that have long been placed prominently on the tourist map, places compete

for the growing flow of tourists by inventing and reconfiguring themselves to be able to

attract visitors. Most unlikeliest of places have developed tourism infrastructure, from

concentration camps, jails, and military occupation sites, to places associated with mass

murder and sacrifice, poverty stricken neighborhoods, and defunct and dilapidated

industrial sites. Such places and their populations enter a worldwide network of

restaurants, museums, tourist information centers, tour operators, tourist agencies, tour

guides, marketing enterprises, transportation corporations, mass media outlets, and TV

travel programs. In hopes to be able to enter the global order through tourism, cultural

and social life of people and their places become commodified.

In most basic terms, commodification of places and people involves their ability to be

effectively represented through images and myths in such a way that they can attract

tourist attention. Tourist representations are based on selected elements of history,

heritage, culture, ways of life, and various features of townscape and landscape. These

are captured through photographs, maps, film, documentaries, news, novels, postcards,

souvenirs, travel blogs, and alike. Such media enable this particular way of seeing a

tourist destination to be endlessly reproduced and globally disseminated. As more and

more spots around the globe compete to become tourist destinations, tourist gaze

becomes an ever more perfected marketing effort to maximize the potential of a

destination. This effort involves an array of specialized institutions and services,

including consultancy firms, university departments, professional conferences, and

various research centers. Such professionals work together to development signs that seek

to transcend the simple gaze captured through tourist images and narratives and produce

a carefully constructed destination concept. This process of concept construction is

referred to as destination branding.

In a highly competitive and overcrowded global tourism market, tourist destination

branding is an agenda to create a distinct and compelling destination identity which is

clearly and confidently differentiated from all other competitors. These efforts include

continuously perfecting criteria that evaluate the effectiveness of a particular brand,

actively pursuing venues to push the brand to the forefront of people’s attention, and

vigilantly devising procedures and measures to protect the brand from losing its appeal.

City and state governments are actively participating in the efforts to pursue such

opportunities. This is perhaps most visible in the fierce bidding competitions to host

highly visible global events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, or World Expos.

Governments see such events as opportunities to build, restore, or redesign their social

and physical environments to make them compatible with the concept of tourist identity

they are promoting. As the world’s attention is focused on the brand, dissent to these

practices often remains invisible. Poor and crime ridden neighborhoods are heavily

policed to demonstrate to the global audiences that a particular country and its urban

areas are a safe place to visit. The tourist flow is engulfed by surveillance technologies

and security procedures to preempt possible acts of violence against tourists and in this

way ensure uninterrupted tourist flows. Tensions over which aspects of history, heritage

and culture are to be included in the brand are pushed away from global media coverage

as are struggles over whether or not their locales should even become a tourist

destination. Also downplayed are power struggles over how state branding efforts should

shape identities of local minorities, particularly the racialized, the indigenous, and the

poor.

The concept of the tourist gaze has proven to be highly influential. Nevertheless, critics

suggest that its emphasis on representation and the power of the visual may have a

western bias. What is needed are historical-comparative and cross-cultural studies of the

processes of construction of tourist experiences that pay close attention to the dynamics

of practice and acting in different tourism contexts. At the local levels, detailed

ethnographic attention to performative practices and framing activities may generate

insights into possible cross-cultural differences in how tourist experience is embodied

and with what emotions. It may also broaden our understanding of the varieties of social

relationships such interactions may have a potential to create, not only among the tourists

but also between the tourists and the locals. At the global level, a historical-comparative

approach to tourism practices may be able to illuminate how the dynamics surrounding

the construction of tourist experiences have been changing over time in different socio-

cultural contexts and suggest to what extent cultural variations have been able to

withstand the homogenizing tendencies of the tourist gaze in the global economy. The

challenge remains to show in comparative empirical terms how, through tourism

experiences conditions are created for self-reflection, group empowerment, and visions of

alternative modernities.