Showing papers in "Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change in 2008"

Nostalgia, Identity and Tourism: Bollywood in the Indian Diaspora

Abstract: In today's global world of movement our personal identities are changing. So, ‘where is my “home”?’ and ‘what is my “identity”?’ have become essential questions in one's life. In recent times, more and more diasporic communities visit their homelands, perhaps to reroot their identities. This study explored the influence of Bollywood movies in the Indian diaspora's identity construction and notions of home and tourism behaviour to India. Findings revealed that the Indian diaspora's imagination of India is strongly informed by Bollywood movies. Yet, different generations of the Indian diaspora have different reasons for travelling to India. The first generation's nostalgia arises from watching Bollywood movies, and as a result, creates a motivation to travel to India. The second generation's main to travel behaviour to India is to experience the new ‘modern’ country, portrayed in the affluent surroundings of contemporary Bollywood movies. And, for those first generations, who have never seen India before, B...

The poetics of tourist experience: an autoethnography of a family trip to Eilat.

Abstract: This paper is an autoethnographic exploration of a tourist’s experience. Through interpreting qualitative material, in the form of a poem I wrote in 1994 about a short familial excursion to an Israeli seaside resort city (Eilat), the research seeks to sensitively describe the intricacies of travel experience. The research explores the advantages of the autoethnographic method of inquiry, and discusses tourism-related emotions and memories in the context of performance and representation. The paper joins recent efforts in attempting to challenge and loosen the grip of positivist epistemologies and discourses on mainstream tourism studies, by illustrating the emotional complexities and contradictions in the travel experience of tourists. In line with traditions of critical research in sociology, the exploration sheds light on the materiality of texts and on the role language plays in tourism, viewing the poem read in this paper (‘Quiet Eilat’) simultaneously as a representation, performance and material obj...

A critical discourse analysis of in-flight magazine advertisements: the 'social sorting' of airline travellers?

Abstract: The in-flight magazine is one of many industrialised print media to which the traveller is exposed. In-flight magazines, however ‘ideologically innocent’ they may appear, can be very powerful in representing the norms and values to which travellers should supposedly adhere. This paper builds on arguments that there is a lack of research on representation in tourism and focuses in particular on how in-flight magazine advertising produces, mediates and reproduces discourses surrounding air travel. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), advertisements from a selection of Qantas and Air New Zealand in-flight magazines from 2005 were studied. The content analysis of these texts reveals that the magazine advertisements wish to speak to a certain ‘elite’ type of traveller who is mobility-rich as well as financially wealthy, with the time to pursue a raft of travel activities and the money to buy an array of expensive luxury products. Essentially, the paper argues that magazine advertisements can be a subtle (o...

Encounters in the Fields – Tourism to the Battlefields of the Western Front

Abstract: The First World War is now slipping beyond the realm of lived experience, yet it continues to wield a profound fascination over the British modern imagination. The Western Front in France and Belgium, which was the decisive theatre of operations for the Allied troops, has fashioned its own mythology and imagery and has secured a firm place in modern memory. Although the unremarkable topography of the region now visually betrays little of the momentous nature of the battles fought across its expanses, thousands of British visitors travel to the area throughout the year. This paper explores the ways in which tourists embarking on commercial coach tours engage with the battlefield landscape by examining contemporary tourist performance. It also considers the role of the tour guide in setting and directing the tourist encounter.

Music, Emotion and Authenticity: A Study of Celtic Music Festival Consumers

Abstract: This paper centres upon the concept, authenticity, within the context of a Celtic music festival. Increasing attention has been paid to the music–tourism relationship and this paper seeks to elaborate upon the contested meanings and dimensions of Celtic music in the wake of its commodification through tourism. Attention is accorded to the interlocking tensions relating to commodification and authenticity within music and tourism studies and, moreover, the role of emotion within the authenticity and music debate. Drawing upon empirical research conducted at a Celtic music festival (Glasgow, Scotland) comprising in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey, it is suggested the festival audience attach authenticity to the music on the basis of their emotional interaction with the music. This occurs by the ways in which emotion is evoked within the music and the relationship between music, emotion and audience identities.

Swimming in cultural flows: conceptualising tour guides as intercultural mediators and cosmopolitans.

Abstract: Tour guides have traditionally played a key role in linking tour operators, incoming agencies and tourists. More than most other people employed in the travel business, they are constantly involved in reconciling native and foreign cultures. Ideally they function as intercultural mediators; that is, as pathfinders and mentors who reveal unfamiliar destinations to their guests in a culturally sensitive manner. Caught up in a cultural flow in both their professional and personal lives, they move back and forth between divergent cultures and develop a distinctly cosmopolitan lifestyle. This article examines various aspects of the profession and cites several tour operators and tourists regarding the role of tour guides as intercultural mediators.

Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico

Abstract: Conceived and owned by Korean investors, the shopping mall Plaza Mexico in Southern California embodies a unique case of invention and commodification of traditions for locally-bound immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent, showing the force of the contemporary processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorilisation of identities and the recreations of imagined conceptions of homeland. The Plaza is a unique architectural recreation of Mexican regional and national icons that make its patrons feel ‘as if you were in Mexico’. Plaza Mexico produces a space of diasporic, bounded tourism, whereby venture capitalists opportunistically reinvent tradition within a structural context of constrained immigrant mobility. While most of the contemporary theory of tourism, travel and place emphasise the erosion of national boundaries and the fluidity of territories, the case of Plaza Mexico brings us to appreciate this phenomenon and its opposite as well – the strengthening of national borders and their impact o...

Camp in the Country: Re-negotiating Sexuality and Gender Through a Rural Lesbian and Gay Festival

Abstract: ChillOut is Australia's largest rural lesbian and gay festival, and this article examines how the event both troubles and re-confirms normative understandings of sexuality and gender. To do this, we adopt a spatially sensitive, cultural geography approach, which asserts that spaces, bodies, and subjectivities are mutually constituted. In particular, we utilise theories of performativity, camp, and the spatial imperative of subjectivity. We apply these frameworks to a range of empirical material gathered at the 2006 ChillOut Festival from participant observation, media reports, in-depth interviews with participants and stakeholders, and a visitors' survey. Interpreting this data, we find that, on the one hand, increased participation at ChillOut challenges assumptions about the invisibility of non-heterosexuality in rural Australia, and that camp performances during the festival subvert conventional models of sexuality and gender. On the other hand, however, these sexualised performances reveal certain lim...

The Maori of Tourist Brochures Representing Indigenousness

Abstract: This study analyses how Maori operators in the tourist industry portray indigenous culture in their brochures. For close to 150 years, Maori people have been involved as entrepreneurs in New Zealand's tourist industry. Although now integrated into the modern New Zealand nation-state, the representation of their culture in tourism gives an image of a traditional people radically different and set apart from modern New Zealand (Kiwi) culture. Utilising Fabian's ideas regarding the organisation of otherness through cultural constructions of time and space, this article demonstrates how certain spatial arrangements are necessary to sustain the imaginary temporary division between a modern Kiwi culture and the representation of a traditional Maori culture, the latter is a tourist attraction in itself. Auto-ethnography in the discourse of tourism inevitably becomes ‘self-Orientalism’, even if some spaces makes co-presence possible.

Seattle's Pike Place Market (De)constructed: An Analysis of Tourist Narratives about a Public Space

Abstract: This paper is a critical analysis of the narrative construction of Seattle’s well-known and heavily touristed Pike Place Market. The analysed data come from both institutional and amateur sources, including travel guides and photographs taken by tourists at the market. Tourist literature provides narrative themes in the form of literary descriptions and photographic images, that emphasise and reveal only certain textual dimensions of a place. Tourists’ experiences and accounts are inevitably informed by such themes. In addition, studying tourist photography is an excellent way to understand how people actively use and resist modes of representation that are derived from institutional sources. Tourists are usually remarkably prolific photographers, while also being exposed to a great number and variety of institutional narratives of the sites they visit. Public space is not merely a geographical configuration, but also a verbal and visual narrative construction by means of technologies such as writing and ...

Indigenous Tourism: The Commodification and Management of Culture

Abstract: (2008). Indigenous Tourism: The Commodification and Management of Culture. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 221-223.

‘Moral Renovation and Intellectual Exaltation’: Thomas Cook's Tourism as Practical Education

Abstract: Tourism has long had significant educational potential from the enlightenment of the Grand Tour to contemporary high-school and university tours to Europe and beyond. The development of mass, conducted tourism as a form of education for middle-class women and the working classes is less well understood. Based on primary research at the Thomas Cook archives, this paper examines how Cook attempted to harness the educational potential of travel by transforming it into a commercial product that the average consumer could afford. Tourism not only needed to be affordable, but also comfortable and safe given the relative inexperience these groups had travelling. Cook's critics lambasted the educational qualities of his tours and the ability of his tourists to truly appreciate what they were witnessing and experiencing. However, this criticism was often based on elitist attitudes about who could travel and the ability of the ‘lower sorts’ to comprehend it all. Cook's mission was to transform travel into tourism m...

When the Past Poses Beside the Present: Aestheticising Politics and Nationalising Modernity in a Postcolonial Time

Abstract: This article focuses on the Tunisian government's tourist promotion policies during the 1990s. It takes a Deleuzian perspective, using the notion of crystalline narration developed by the author of The Time-Image. I will emphasise the idea of coalescence between past and present as revealed in the advertising images of the period where heritage objects appear among other contemporary objects. In fact, I will draw on a corpus of short films and commercials produced by the Tunisian tourism bureau to be broadcast both inside and outside the country. My analysis will focus on the ways in which actors in the fields of politics and tourism use these objects for media purposes, targeting both Tunisians and foreign tourists to whom they strive to hold up a crystal-image of Tunisia. This image is shored up by a political discourse put forward by a state that wishes to appear both to its citizens and to others as reconciling past and present. The crystal metaphor evokes a narrative mode in which heritage is likened...

Death of a Backpacker: Incidental but Not Random

Abstract: This case study of the fatal shooting of a backpacker by a policeman in the otherwise peaceful town of Pai in northern Thailand aims to show that, though incidental, it was not just a random occurrence. Rather, the event can be interpreted in terms of wider social structural processes and personal agency. The growing tension between the police and the backpackers in town, partly resulting from pressures to upgrade the community for more up-market domestic tourism, created the conditions for the occurrence of the event; but the personal predispositions of the main antagonists exacerbated these tensions, eventuating in tragic consequences. The article examines the contrasting versions of the event, and the ‘ethno-victimology’, implicit in the manner various groups of foreigners allocated the responsibility for the shooting between the antagonists. The article concludes that the event may have a negative effect on backpackers’ image of Pai (but not on the domestic tourists’ image), while the growth in the nu...

The Inca Heritage Revival: Indigenismo in Cuzco, 1905–1945

Abstract: The Inca heritage is intermingled in a long trajectory of histories, creations and revivals that have constantly contributed to the renewal of its imagery. This paper analyses an important Inca revival movement that has been crucial in the making and remaking of Southern Andean identities: Indigenismo Cusqueno (1905–1945). This Cuzco version of Indigenismo was a regionalist urban middle class movement that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. I analyse how these Indigenistas, or an elite of intellectual ‘legislators’ from Cuzco shaped the regional identity through the ‘recovery’ of an authenticity founded in the legacy of the ancient Empire. Four decades of the production of a heritage initiated a so-called ‘folklorisation’ process that led to the mobilisation of the peasant mass through the enactment of an ancient Inca ritual in 1944. By staging performances of identity and promoting wide participation, the Indigenistas aimed at promoting a ‘regionalist’ identity campaign, attracting tourism-related ...

Managing Heritage and Cultural Tourism Resources. Critical Essays, Volume One

Abstract: (2008). Managing Heritage and Cultural Tourism Resources. Critical Essays, Volume One. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 223-226.