Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient

235 Pages·2009·4.75 MB·English

by  Michael Haldrup

Tourism, Performance and the Everyday
Tourism has become increasingly ‘exotic’, a process made possible by low-cost charter
tourism and cheaper air tickets. Faraway and ever more ‘exotic’ holidays are becoming
widespread and within reach as destinations make their entry into the mass tourism market.
Strolls through the bazaars of Istanbul and cruises on the Nile are packaged into the sea,
sand and sun culture of traditional forms of organized mass tourism. At the same time
new technologies weave the fabric of tourism and everyday life even closer, circulating
images, information and objects between them. Taking off from this observation, Tourism,
Performance and the Everyday invites readers to follow the flows of tourist desires, objects,
meanings, photographs, fears, dreams and memories weaving together the spaces of and
between Western Europe, Turkey and Egypt.
This book carefully analyses the cultural and social impacts of mass-tourist experiences
of ‘exotic’ places on the wider aspects of everyday life. It treats mass tourism as a cultural
phenomenon that feeds into the practices and networks of people’s everyday lives rather
than as an isolated, trivial or ‘exotic’ event. Chapters cover topics such as the material
cultures of tourism, mobilizing the Orient and the afterlife of tourism. The argument traces
how these impacts are mediated by various mobilities between home and away through
innovative mobile and ethnographic research methods at tourist destinations and the homes
of tourists. The book contains analysis of diaries, photographs, blogs and web photo-
sharing sites, participant observation of performing tourists and ‘home ethnographies’ of
the afterlife of tourist photographs, souvenirs and memories.
In doing this, the book traces out the multiple interconnections and mobilities between
every day spaces and leisure spaces as well as the multiple ways in which the Orient is con-
sumed on holiday and at home. The book will appeal to a wide readership among students,
researchers and educators within the social and cultural sciences studying, researching and
teaching theories and methods of tourism, Orientalism and cultural encounters as well as
broader issues of leisure, consumption, mobilities studies and everyday life.
Michael Haldrup is a lecturer in Geography at Roskilde University, Denmark, and was a
Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University, UK, 2007. His main research interest is
in tourism, place and everyday life, with a longstanding interest in social theory and spatial
relations. He has written extensively on issues relating to mobility, place, identity, cultural
industries, heritage and tourism.
Jonas Larsen is a lecturer in Geography at Roskilde University, Denmark. He received
his PhD degree in Cultural Geography in 2004. He is interested in mobility, tourism and
media and has published 16 refereed articles on tourism, geography, mobility and media in
international journals and co-authored two books.
Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and
Mobility
Series Editor: C. Michael Hall
Professor at the Department of Management, College of Business &
Economics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch,
New Zealand
The aim of this series is to explore and communicate the intersections and rela-
tionships between leisure, tourism and human mobility within the social sciences.
It will incorporate both traditional and new perspectives on leisure and tourism
from contemporary geography, e.g. notions of identity, representation and culture,
while also providing for perspectives from cognate areas such as anthropology,
cultural studies, gastronomy and food studies, marketing, policy studies and
political economy, regional and urban planning, and sociology, within the devel-
opment of an integrated field of leisure and tourism studies.
Also, increasingly, tourism and leisure are regarded as steps in a continuum of
human mobility. Inclusion of mobility in the series offers the prospect to examine
the relationship between tourism and migration, the sojourner, educational travel,
and second home and retirement travel phenomena.
The series comprises two strands:
Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility aims to address
the needs of students and academics, and the titles will be published in hardback
and paperback. Titles include:
The Moralisation of Tourism
Sun, sand . . . and saving the world?
Jim Butcher
The Ethics of Tourism Development
Mick Smith and Rosaleen Duffy
Tourism in the Caribbean
Trends, development, prospects
Edited by David Timothy Duval
Qualitative Research in Tourism
Ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies
Edited by Jenny Phillimore and Lisa Goodson
The Media and the Tourist Imagination
Converging cultures
Edited by David Crouch, Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson
Tourism and Global Environmental Change
Ecological, social, economic and political interrelationships
Edited by Stefan Gössling and C. Michael Hall
Cultural Heritage of Tourism in the Developing World
Dallen J. Timothy and Gyan Nyaupane
Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts
Michael Hall and Alan Lew
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and
Mobility is a forum for innovative new research intended for research students
and academics, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:
1. Living with Tourism
Negotiating identities in a Turkish village
Hazel Tucker
2. Tourism, Diasporas and Space
Edited by Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy
3. Tourism and Postcolonialism
Contested discourses, identities and representations
Edited by C. Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker
4. Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys
Edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen
5. China’s Outbound Tourism
Wolfgang Georg Arlt
6. Tourism, Power and Space
Edited by Andrew Church and Tim Coles
7. Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City
Edited by Jan Rath
8. Ecotourism, NGOs and Development
A critical analysis
Jim Butcher
9. Tourism and the Consumption of Wildlife
Hunting, shooting and sport fishing
Edited by Brent Lovelock
10. Tourism, Creativity and Development
Edited by Greg Richards and Julie Wilson
11. Tourism at the Grassroots
Edited by John Connell and Barbara Rugendyke
12. Tourism and Innovation
Michael Hall and Allan Williams
13. World Tourism Cities
Developing tourism off the beaten track
Edited by Robert Maitland and Peter Newman
14. Tourism and National Parks
International perspectives on development, histories and change
Edited by Warwick Frost and C. Michael Hall
15. Tourism, Performance and the Everyday
Consuming the Orient
Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen
Forthcoming:
The Study of Tourism
Richard Sharpley
Tourism and Change in Polar Regions
C. Michael Hall and Jarkko Saarinen
Gender and Tourism
Cara Atchinson
Children’s and Families’ Holiday Experience
Neil Carr
Political Economy of Tourism
Jan Mosedale
Tourism in China
Policy and development
David Airey and King Chong
Tourism, Performance and the
Everyday
Consuming the Orient
Michael Haldrup and
Jonas Larsen
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Haldrup, Michael.
Tourism, performance, and the everyday : consuming the Orient / Michael
Haldrup and Jonas Larsen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Tourism – Orient. 2. Tourism – Social aspects – Orient. I. Larsen, Jonas.
II. Title.
G155.O75H35 2009
306.4′819095–dc22
2009003564
ISBN 0-203-87393-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–46713–1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–87393–9 (ebk)
ISBN 10: 0–415–46713–6 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–87393–9 (ebk)
Contents
List of figures viii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Performing tourism, performing the Orient 1
2 De-exoticizing tourist travel 20
3 Following flows 37
4 Material cultures of tourism 58
5 Mobilizing the Orient 75
6 Doing tourism 94
7 Performing digital photography 122
8 The afterlife of tourism 154
9 Tourism mobilities and cosmopolitan cultures 184
Notes 196
References 197
Index 214
Figures
3.1 Fieldwork sites (Turkey and Egypt) 55
3.2 Home ethnographies (Denmark) 56
4.1 The castle in Alanya 67
4.2 The swimming pool 69
4.3 Khan el Khalili, Cairo 70
4.4 Mobilizing the camel 71
5.1 The virtual album 90
5.2 Oriental back-stages 91
5.3 Circulating the pyramids 92
6.1 Screens 97
6.2 Oriental nights 99
6.3 Performing Bedouins 100
6.4 Provisional set-pieces 103
6.5 Sensing the pyramids 105
6.6 Homely objects 111
6.7 Home-making 114
6.8 Connections 119
7.1 Analogue camera and digital camera 135
7.2 Camera phones 137
7.3 Video photographers 139
7.4 Consuming the screen 142
7.5 Screens and co-performances 143
7.6 Co-performing the sign-board 146
7.7 Photographic turn-taking 148
7.8 Poses and turn-taking 149
8.1 Stylish screen 159
8.2 Ann’s souvenirs 164
8.3 Keith and Lisa’s living room 165
8.4 Photographic walls 170
8.5 Albums on Jonas’s Facebook profile 173
8.6 Susan’s living room 174
8.7 The materialities of digital photography 177
8.8 PowerPoint album 178
8.9 Album with digital photographs and necklace 180
8.10 Anne’s study 182
8.11 Slideshow 183
9.1 Positioning 188
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book was made possible by a grant from the Danish Research
Council for Society and Business and a contribution from the Department of
Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University
(2005–2008). In the preparation of the final manuscript we benefited from the
help of Andrew Crabtree and Ditte Junge in proofreading, Ritta Juel Bitsch in
preparing the maps, and Matthew Lequick, who provided graphic assistance.
This book is the product of a collaborative work process. Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6
and 8 were jointly written; Chapters 2 and 7 were written by Jonas Larsen and
Chapters 5 and 9 by Michael Haldrup. Some of the work presented has formed
part of various other writings by us. Most notably, earlier and shorter versions of
Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 have been published in Leisure Studies (Haldrup and
Larsen, 2006; Larsen, 2006). Chapter 7 draws on an article published in Mobilities
(Larsen, 2008) and Chapter 9 on a chapter in Cultures of Mass Tourism (Haldrup,
2009).
During the process of writing we have presented the arguments and material in
this book at conferences and seminars in Scandinavia and Great Britain, and we
would like to thank Joan Amer, Keld Buciek, Javier Caletrio, Kingsley Dennis,
Bülent Diken, Antje Gimmler, Derek Gregory, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Lasse
Koefoed, Jennie Germann Molz and Kirsten Simonsen for inspiring coopera-
tion, comments and contributions to our work. We have greatly benefited from
the encouragement and (as always) constructive suggestions from Jørgen Ole
Bærenholdt, Roskilde University, and John Urry, Lancaster University.
Jonas is grateful that Johanna participated on a fieldwork trip to Alanya; Elliott
is still happy that he can play with his father at the pool when he is at work.
Michael wants to thank his family, Bjarke and Wibeke, for (once more) acting as
his fieldwork cover, this time in Egypt. He is also grateful to them for spending
half a year with him in the north-west of England and to John Urry for hosting him
at the Sociology Department, Lancaster University, from January to June 2007.
Finally, both authors want to thank the people who have contributed, and
allowed us to use, material for this book through interviews and diaries, and by
opening up their homes for us.