Tim Edensor

Performing tourism, staging tourism (Re)producing tourist space and practice

This article explores the metaphor of performance to investigate how tourism can be conceived as a set of activities, imbricated with the everyday, whereby conventions are reinforced and broken. By looking at the contexts in which tourism is regulated, directed and choreographed or, alternatively, is a realm of improvisation and contestation, I will consider the constraints and opportunities which shape the ways in which tourist space (here considered as ‘stages’) and performance are reproduced, challenged, transformed and bypassed. A range of examples will be used to exemplify the ways in which tourism is staged and performed. I will also focus on how the global proliferation of tourist practices and attractions acts to theme tourist space in highly commodified ways and simultaneously decentre normative modes of performing tourism.

Staging tourism: tourists as performers

Abstract Metaphorically, tourists can be considered to enact a range of performances on distinct stages. Their enactions are distinguished according to various factors, including their competence, reflexivity, the extent to which they are directed and regulated, or participate in group or solo performances. Providing examples from research carried out at the Taj Mahal in India, particular attention is directed to the characteristics of the stages upon which tourists perform, with a distinction being drawn between “enclavic” and “heterogeneous” spaces. The paper exlores particular modes of walking to convey the diversity of tourist performances and how they are formed.

Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape:

This article looks at the discursive and practical construction of walking in a British context. It examines the ways in which notions and practices generated by conventions around the meaning of walking in the countryside apparently contradict prevailing ideas that walking is an escape from the restrictions of everyday urban life. Identifying particular, competing forms of walking and the techniques and identities that they espouse, it is suggested that such activities are suffused with disciplinary norms. Yet despite these conventions, walking holds out the possibility of disruption, through confrontation with physical discomfort, unpredictable features and sensual experience that contrasts with much contemporary forms of movement. The work of artist Richard Long is used to explore these issues.

Mundane mobilities, performances and spaces of tourism

Tourism is commonly understood as an exception or special time, a period when the normal everyday constraints are suspended: tourists are temporarily immersed in spaces of difference, free from the bounds of home and work, and may transgress their ordinary ‘appropriate’ performances. This article questions the extent to which much mass tourism is ‘extraordinary’, suggesting instead that it is more typically associated with habitual routine, cultural conventions and normative performances which circumscribe what should be gazed upon and visited, and modes of touristic comportment and recording. These conventions are also managed by the directors of the tourist product and encouraged by the production of distinct, serial forms of tourist space in which cultural differences are tamed for easy consumption. The paper argues that such forms of performance and their staging are designed to maximize comfort, a touristic desire that should not necessarily be the focus of critical scorn. On the other hand, so managed can the tourist experience become, that there are frequent attempts—often thwarted—to escape the tourist enclaves and schedules and become more closely acquainted with difference. Tourism then, because it is not separate from the quotidian, is an exemplary site for an exploration of the ways in which the everyday is replete with unreflexive practice and habit but simultaneously provokes desires for unconfined alterity.

Automobility and National Identity Representation, Geography and Driving Practice

Accounts of the nation and national identity have tended to focus upon the transmission by cultural elites of authoritative culture, invented traditions and folk customs. Following Billig, I suggest that the national is increasingly located in the everyday and in the realm of popular culture; far more so than in ‘high’ and ‘official’ forms of culture. To exemplify this, I discuss national automobilities, specifically exploring the role of iconic models, mundane motorscapes and the everyday, habitual performances of driving. With a particular focus upon British and Indian car cultures, I further suggest that the ‘national’ is not a singular or monolithic entity but is constituted out of a vast matrix of interrelated elements, three of which are the models, geographies and performances identified above. As the national proliferates and expands, becoming globalized, it generates multiple forms of national identity, although consistencies and points of focus remain. Accordingly, as in other cultural fields, I argue that while global manifestations of automobility proliferate, this has not necessarily diminished the salience of the national in the relationship between driving cars and identity. The national thus remains a powerful constituent of identity precisely because of its often unreflexive grounding in everyday spaces and practices.

The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space

In this paper I investigate how the effects of the disordered spaces of industrial ruins can interrogate and contest the normative ways in which memory is spatialised in the city. By focusing upon confrontations with the ghosts which haunt ruins, I will suggest that the affective and sensual memories conjured up act as an antidote to the fixed, classified, and commodified memories purveyed in heritage and commemorative spaces. In contradistinction to the didactic and constrained remembering that prevails across Western cities, a form of remembering which is inarticulate, sensual, and conjectural allows improvisatory scope to supplement and challenge ordered forms of social remembering.

Waste Matter - The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World:

By exploring the disordering effects of ruination, this article critically explores the ways in which the material world is normatively ordered. The yet to be disposed of objects in ruins have been identified as ‘waste’, an assignation which testifies to the power of some to normatively order the world, but also is part of an excess, impossible to totally erase, which contains rich potential for reinterpretation and reuse because it is under-determined. Through processes of decay and non-human intervention, objects in ruins gradually transform their character and lose their discreteness, they become charged with alternative aesthetic properties, they impose their materiality upon the sensory experience of visitors, and they conjure up the forgotten ghosts of those who were consigned to the past upon the closure of the factory but continue to haunt the premises. In these ways, ruined matter offers ways for interacting otherwise with the material world.

Illuminated Atmospheres: Anticipating and Reproducing the Flow of Affective Experience in Blackpool

This paper considers the atmospheric qualities of illuminated space, grounding notions of affect in investigating the longstanding autumnal event of Blackpool Illuminations. I consider the affective qualities of lighting before discussing the ‘atmosphere’ of the Illuminations. I critically explore the division between affect and emotion, the insistence on affects precognitive qualities, and the notion that affective atmospheres produce a ‘mute attunement’ to place. In foregrounding the dense social production of atmosphere at Blackpool Illuminations, I highlight the flow of affect and emotion in place, show how lighting is ideally constituted to blur divisions between the representational and nonrepresentational, identify the anticipation of affect, and demonstrate that affective atmospheres are coproduced by visitors as part of a reiterative, festive, convivial, and playful social practice in familiar space.

Walking in rhythms: place, regulation, style and the flow of experience

Following Henri Lefebvre, this article investigates the distinct rhythms of walking and the ways that it intersects with diverse temporalities and spaces. Because walking is practised and experienced in innumerable contexts, generalisations are problematic. Nevertheless, this article identifies some of the ways in which walking produces time-space and the experience of place. I subsequently discuss how walking is inevitably conditioned by multiple forms of regulation but possesses peculiar characteristics that always make these orderings of space and body contingent, facilitating immanent, often unexpected experiences. I further examine how walking is surrounded by notions of style that reproduce particular rhythms. Walking is inevitably, therefore, suffused with contending notions about how and where to walk, by ideals and conventions laid down by the powerful and not-so-powerful. However, I pay attention to the multiple phases and moments of walking. Both the conventions of walking and its unfolding, sensual and contingent apprehension are difficult to elucidate in academic prose, and luckily there are several challenging walking artists whose work highlights these issues and the rhythmic dimensions of walking. Accordingly, I draw upon the ‘textworks’ of Richard Long, Francis Alyss series of walks entitled Railings, and Jeremy Dellers 2009 Procession to elicit some of the rhythms of walking.

Reconsidering National Temporalities: Institutional Times, Everyday Routines, Serial Spaces and Synchronicities

This article attempts to foreground the importance of everyday life and habit to the reproduction of national identities. Taking issue with dominant linear depictions of the time of the nation, which have over-emphasized ‘official’ histories, tradition and heroic narratives, this article foregrounds the everyday rhythms through which a sense of national belonging is sustained. The article focuses upon institutionalized schedules, habitual routines, collective synchronicities and serialized time-spaces to develop an argument that quotidian, cyclical time is integral to national identity. In conclusion, accounts that discuss the increasing dominance of a postmodern global time are argued to be hyperbolic, since the nation remains a powerful, if more flexible constituent of identity.