Jonas Larsen

The Family Gaze

Despite the fact that taking photographs is an emblematic tourist practiceand that tourist studies have been dominated by a visual paradigm of gazing, littlesustained research has explored the general connections between tourism andpopular photography. We have virtually no knowledge of why and how touristsproduce photographic images. This article reframes the study of visual culture bystressing the sociality, reflexivity and embodied performances of tourist photography.Instead of portraying the shooting gazer as a disembodied and passive spectator, weview tourist photography as a theatre of life where people in concert perform places,scripts and roles to and for themselves. Whereas existing literatures ‘write out’tourists and their actual practices, interpretations and emotions, tourists’ ownphotographic images and the meanings and desires that tourists inscribe and ascribeto such productions are explored. The analyses show that much tourist photographyrevolves around producing social relations rather than ‘consuming places’. We bringthe performing family into tourist studies through the notion of the ‘the family gaze’that captures how family photography practices are socially organized andsystematized. Rather than being directed at extraordinary ‘material worlds’, the‘family gaze’ is concerned with the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of intimate ‘socialworlds’.

De‐exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move

Abstract Tourism is traditionally treated as an escape from everyday life and tourism theory is concerned with extraordinary places. Tourism and everyday life are conceptualized as belonging to different ontological worlds. The former is the world of the extraordinary while the latter is one of the ordinary. This interdisciplinary review article argues that this separation is flawed by examining research that shows how leisure travel, tourism and everyday life intersect in complex ways. It begins with a conceptual discussion of the everyday, which works as the theoretical foundation for the article. Then the article outlines how everyday routines and conventions inform tourism performances: much traditional tourism revolves around socializing pleasantly with one’s co‐travelling family and friends, while more and more tourism concerns visiting friends and family members living elsewhere. The conclusion discusses what consequences an everyday life perspective has for future tourism research.

Geographies of Social Networks: Meetings, Travel and Communications

The past decade has seen striking increases in travel and in communications at‐a‐distance through mobile phone calls, text messaging and emailing. People in prosperous societies are both travelling and communicating more to connect with absent others. People can travel, relocate and migrate and yet still be connected with friends and family members ‘back home’. So, increasingly, people who are near emotionally may be geographically very far away; yet they are only a journey, email or a phone call away. In this article we attempt to examine how such strong ties are spatially distributed and sustained through specific geographies of travel, meetings and communications. How often do strong ties meet, talk at‐at‐distance and write, and to what degree does distance determine regularity? To what extent are communications enhancing and/or substituting for physical travel? We examine in particular to what degree far‐flung ties and emotional networking at‐a‐distance are characteristic of many people other than the transnational ‘elites’ and ‘underprivileged’ migrants. We consider the notion of ‘network capital’.

Families Seen Sightseeing Performativity of Tourist Photography

Ideas of embodiment and performance have been crucial in destabilizing the visual hegemony of images, cameras, and gazes in tourist studies. This article discusses how a practice-inspired performance perspective potentially allows a more satisfying account of tourist photography’s “nature” than conventional “representational” ones in which tourist photography is dismissed as “all eyes and no bodies and sometimes no brain.” The author writes a new account, seeing tourist photography as performed rather than preformed and tourist photographers as framing as much as being framed. Tourist photography is a choreographed and experimental performance connecting the representational and nonrepresentational. Tourist photography is made less visual and more embodied, less concerned with “consuming” places than with producing social relationships, such as family life. The author examines the performances and performativities, the embodied practices and textual and corporeal choreographies, of tourist photography within a family photography context, the “family gaze.” The article draws on ethnographic research of tourist photographic performances at northern Europe’s largest medieval ruined castle, Hammershus.

Material Cultures of Tourism

Abstract Despite the fact that tourists constantly interact corporeally with things and physical places, tourist studies have failed to understand the significance of materiality and objects in modern tourism. Like much theory and research influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, tourist (and leisure) studies have melted everything solid into signs. This article is inspired by current calls for a renewed engagement with the ‘material’ in social and cultural geography and sociology. It introduces questions of materiality and material culture into cultural accounts of contemporary leisure and tourism, in particular in relation to space and ‘human’ performances. In doing so it stresses the inescapable hybridity of human and ‘nonhuman’ worlds. It is shown that leisure and tourist practices are much more tied up with material objects and physical sensations than traditionally assumed and that emblematic tourist performances involve, and are made possible and pleasurable by, objects, machines and technologies. Thus we suggest that further engagement with the ‘material’ would be the constructive path to follow for future leisure and tourist studies.

A Dynamic Framework of Tourist Experiences: Space‐Time and Performances in the Experience Economy

This article outlines a conceptual model that allows a discussion regarding tourist experiences. Through the notion and deconstruction of the concept “experience design” it is argued that in order to be able to analyze tourism and develop new innovative strategic approaches to tourism management, dynamic notions of space, time and performance have to be especially attended to. This is done through a discussion of “experience” and “design” as both nouns and verbs. This makes it possible to work with four definitions of “experience design”, all situated on a continuum from a static starting point to a dynamic endpoint. It is argued that most research findings are placed in the more static half of this continuum, even if there are tendencies toward more dynamic approaches. These efforts are however usually based on a spatial ontology that is situated in the static half of the continuum. This paper aims to enhance these tendencies by focusing on the more dynamic half of the continuum. Notions of space‐time as relational processes that should be understood as a hermeneutic circle and a view on the tourist as an active performer and producer of space are stressed. This conceptual model is crystallized and exemplified through the case of tourist photography, showing that the ontology chosen has a direct result on the concrete conduct of method and area of research interest.

Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient

1. Performing Tourism, Performing the Orient 2. De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 3. Following Flows 4. Material Cultures of Tourism 5. Mobilising the Orient 6. Doing Tourism 7. Performing Digital Photography 8. The Afterlife of Tourism 9. Tourism Mobilities and Cosmopolitanism Cultures

Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework

This article develops a methodological framework for undertaking empirical studies of practices and flows, of doings and circulations, of digital tourist photography. The article outlines what might be termed a non‐representational approach to photography concerned with affordances, actor‐networks, hybridized practices and networked flows of photographs. The article falls in three parts. It begins with rethinking photography theory. Traditional dualisms between affordance and practice are challenged, and photography is conceptualized as a hybridized, embodied performance. How digital photography changes photographys traditional affordances is then discussed. The third part discusses various methods to describe how affordances of digital tourist photography are used, twisted and resisted in concrete hybridized practices. I suggest undertaking multi‐sided ethnographies with ‘busy photographers’ to craft non‐representational accounts of mobile practices of photographing and flows of photographic images across various sites and actor‐networks. In a broader sense, this article is a methodological contribution to ‘the new mobilities paradigm’.

Gazing and Performing

The Tourist Gaze [Urry J, 1990 (Sage, London)] is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4000 citations on Google scholar). Whilst wide ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucault-inspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. However, some recent literature has critiqued this notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ for reducing tourism to visual experiences—to sight seeing—and neglecting the other senses, bodily experiences, and ‘adventure’. The influential ‘performance turn’ within tourist studies suggests that the doings of tourism are physical or corporeal and not merely visual, and it is necessary to regard ‘performing’ rather than ‘gazing’ as the dominant tourist research paradigm. Yet we argue here that there are, in fact, many similarities between the paradigms of gaze and of performance. They should ‘dance together’ rather than stare at each other at a distance. In this paper we rethink the tourist gaze in the light of this performance turn and of a Goffmanian dramaturgical sociology by examining the embodied and multisensuous nature of gazing as well as the complex social relations and fluid power geometries comprising performances of gazing. The Foucault-inspired notion of the tourist gaze can be enlivened—made more bodily and theatrical—by incorporating Goffman and post-Goffman analyses and aspects of nonrepresentational theory.

Auto)Ethnography and cycling

This article discusses the formation, salience and reformation of everyday bodily routines and resources in relation to cycling; it also examines how we can study them ethnographically in different places. I discuss forms of embodied, sensuous and mobile ethnography that can illuminate how routines, habits and affective capacities of cycling are cultivated and performed. The article argues that autoethnography is particularly apt at illuminating the embodied qualities of movement, and it sits within established ethnographies of ‘excising’ and ‘mobile bodies’. In the second part of the article, I draw upon ongoing autoethnographies of cycling in a familiar place (my hometown, Copenhagen) and by learning to cycle ‘out-of-place’ (in London) and ‘in-a-new–way’ (when commuting long distance on a racer bike). The study challenges static notions of the body by analysing how cyclists’ (and researchers’) affective capacities develop as they practice cycling.