Tracing place, locating self: Embodiment and remediation in/of tourist spaces

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DOI: 10.1177/1470357211408818

2011 10: 349Visual CommunicationAdam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow

Tracing Place, Locating Self: Embodiment and Remediation In/Of Tourist Spaces

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traCinG PlaCe, loCatinG Self: emBodiment and remedia-tion in/of toUriSt SPaCeSadam jaworSkiCardiff University, Uk CriSPin thUrlow University of washington, USa

SaGe Publications(los angeles, london, new delhi, Singapore and washington dC: http://vcj.sagepub.com)Copyright © the author(s), 2011. reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/jour-nalspermissions.nav/ Vol 10(3): doi 10.1177/1470357211408818

aBStraCttourists’ encounters with/in places, while powerfully repre-sented and organized by visual imagery, are also experienced through material exchange, social interaction and physical movement. we offer a visual ethnography of the embodied, re/mediating inter/actions of tourists in a range of differ-ent sites. our images are organized into five compositional themes or narratives: (1) self-locational rituals and specta-cles; (2) tactile engagements with place; (3) digital remedia-tion of embodied actions; (4) scaling the ‘top of europe’; (5) the fleeting inscription of permanence. it is through their ways of seeing the world that tourists become viewing subjects and through their bodies that they become doing subjects. in both cases, their viewing and their doing produce tourists as knowing subjects, with a sense of the world as attainable and conquerable.

key wordSembodiment • habitus • photography • remediation • space/place • tourism discourse ethnography

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350 Visual Communication 10 (3) – Special issue: the Visual essay

on the hermeneUtiC CyCle of toUriSm

what is sought for in a holiday is a set of photography images, which have already been seen in tour company brochures or on tV programmes. while the tourist is away, this then moves on to a tracking down and capturing of these images for oneself. (Urry, 2002: 129)

on emBodiment in toUriSt PhotoGraPhy

… the nature of tourist photography is a complex theatrical one of corporeal, expressive actors; scripts and choreographies; staged and enacted ‘imaginative geographies’ … tourist photography is [thus] made less visual and more embodied, less concerned with spectatorship and ‘consuming places’ than with producing place myths, social relationships… (larsen, 2005: 417)

on the makinG of toUriSt SPaCeS

… imagined possibilities directly influence what travelers encounter, creating a constant and animated dialogue between images in the mind and realities on the ground … images in the mind are projected onto physical places, which in turn are shaped in ways that most successfully respond to, and further rekindle, the imaginary. (kahn, 2003: 308)




on (re)mediation and the toUriSt haBitUS

different technologies for turning actions into texts affect the kinds of social actions and social identities that are made possible both at moments of entextualization and at future moments of recontextualization. (jones, 2009: 283)

… the identities of tourists, the representations of tourist truths and the interactional organization of tourist sites work together – they mediate each other – in producing the habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) of tourism as an individual and collective disposition to gaze and (inter-)act in certain ways. (jaworski and thurlow, 2009: 255)

on toUriSm aS Banal GloBaliZation

these discursive practices may well be trite (for example, forced perspective snapshots of the leaning tower of Pisa) but they are far from trivial… the mundane practices – embodied and mediated – of tourism turn out to be global in their reach and possibly also in their impact. (thurlow and jaworski 2011: 246)




jaworski, thurlow: tracing Place, locating Self: embodiment and remediation in/of tourist Spaces

to be written off as; vision too is an embodied act, an act of the body. in his ethnographically-organized study of tourist photography, jonas larsen (2005: 417; see p. 350 above) echoes and amplifies kahn’s observations. despite the performative orthodoxy dominating tourism stud-ies and the growing acknowledgement that ‘tourism always involves corporeal movement and forms of pleasure’ (Urry, 2002: 152), relatively little is still known about the actual inter-play between the physical environment of the tourist site and tourist behaviour as a form of embodied action. Ultimately, the practices of tourism – whether verbal or nonverbal – rein-scribe an ideology of conquest – the control and possession of space. doreen massey (2005: 85) expresses this best:

Space… is about contemporaneity (rather than temporal convening), it is about openness (rather than inevitabil-ity) and it is also about relations, fractures, discontinui-ties, practices of engagement. and this intrinsic relation-ality of the spatial is not just a matter of lines on a map; it is a cartography of power.

in the pursuit of space/place, tourists’ own bodies are ideal discursive resources. our reflection on movement, posture, gesture and other material traces of tourists’ presence – graf-fiti, debris, pebbles rearranged on the beach – suggests a complex interplay of various modes such as written and spo-ken language, built environment, layout, mediatizing texts and social actors’ own ritualized, playful performances in cre-ating a sense of place and of self.

we expect that the scenes depicted in the visuals here are im-mediately recognizable, not just through the identification of some of the ‘iconic’ locations and artefacts. at every level, these multimodal discursive practices – linguistic, visual and material – reveal some of the complex representational, inter-actional and textual meanings that underpin what john Urry (2002: 129; see p. 350 above) calls the ‘hermeneutic circle’. miriam kahn (2003: 308; see p. 350 above) means much the same thing as Urry when she talks about tourists’ imaginations always journeying ahead of them. nor is it only through the formal, professional practices of ‘tour company brochures’ and ‘television programmes’ that tourists are drawn into the hermeneutic circle; equally influential are the informal, ama-teur practices of tourists themselves. in flickr, for example. after all, much of the significance, the cultural capital, of tourism lies in the tourist haze created as tourists return home – or prepare for home – with their stories, their souvenirs, their memories (see thurlow and jaworski, 2010, for more on this). in either case, the tourist imagination and tourist performance are always heavily (in)formed by prefigured, mediatized representations and actions. as a cultural industry, tourism is fundamentally – and, at times, solely – semiotic in nature, and it is necessarily reliant on linguistic/discursive exchanges between tourists and hosts, and between tourists and other tourists, and – as we demonstrate in the following pages – between tourists and place.and then, there is tourist photography. as mike Crang (1997: 361) notes, ‘a structure of expectation is created, where the pictures circulating around sights are more important than the sites themselves… the signs that mark out what is to be looked at become as, or more, important than the sites them-selves.’ Certainly, by the time tourists–photographers find themselves in the target destination, most of them have a clear idea about what to expect and what to do. at every stage of our movement towards the place, our preparations to move in the space, our actions are being scripted. however, if people are travelling to see what they have already seen, then clear-ly tourism cannot only be about the looking. in this regard, miriam kahn (2003) adds another important dimension to the prefigured consumption of place when she notes how the tour-ist imagination not only represents but also produces the very places tourists come in search of. and it is precisely this enact-ment of place that is the focus of our essay: the capacity for tourists to make space while appearing merely to be creating images of space or to be moving through spaces.most social scientists nowadays recognize that space is as much a social construction as it is a physical phenomenon (see jaworski and thurlow, 2010; thurlow and jaworski, 2011). Spaces are culturally and communicatively constituted, and the meanings of spaces are established by the way they are represented (e.g. written and talked about) and by the na-ture of social inter/actions that take place within them. as such, space is always in the process of becoming, of being spatialized – through the ‘animated dialogue’ (kahn, 2003) which unfolds between our ideas/images of space and the material properties/features of space. for henri lefebvre (1991[1974]), space can thus be thought of as being real-ized in three dimensions: conceived space which corresponds to mental or represented images of space; perceived space which corresponds to the material or physical space itself; and lived space which emerges through the intersection/inter-action of both conceived and perceived space. it is just such lived spaces that tourists help create through their visits to their destinations.Space, as something conceived, perceived and lived, is clear-ly realized in the ways we represent it: how we write about it, talk about it, photograph it, advertise it and design it. But spaces also emerge in the ways we move through them, in-teract in them – and interact with them. without wanting to rehearse the already well-rehearsed literature, therefore, we too start from the premise that tourist spatializations, tourist performances in/of space, are never simply visual but primar-ily embodied. Besides, the visual itself is never the kind of pas-sive, two-dimensional, reflectional phenomenon that it seems

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BioGraPhiCal noteSadam jaworSki is Professor of language and Communica-tion at Cardiff University, Uk. [email: [email protected]]

CriSPin thUrlow is associate Professor of language and Communication at the University of washington, Bothell, USa.[email: [email protected]]

aCknowledGementSwe are grateful to our colleague kris mroczek for taking the photograph on page 360 and the various flickr users for per-mission to reproduce versions of their posts. all other images are our own.

referenCeSBourdieu, P. (1990) the logic of Practice, trans. r. nice. Cam-bridge: Polity Press.Crang, m. (1997) ‘Picturing Practices: research through the tourist Gaze’, Progress in human Geography 21: 359–73.jaworski, a. and thurlow, C. (2009) ‘Gesture and movement in tourist Spaces’, in C. jewitt (ed.) the routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, pp. 253–62. london: routledge.jaworski, a. and thurlow, C. (eds) (2010) Semiotic land-scapes: text, image, Space. london: Continuum.jones, r. (2009) ‘dancing, Skating and Sex: action and text in the digital age’, journal of applied linguistics 9: 283–302.kahn, m. (2003) ‘tahiti: ‘the ripples of a myth on the Shores of the imagination’, history and anthropology 14: 307–26.larsen, j. (2005) ‘families Seen Sightseeing: Performativity of tourist Photography’, Space and Culture 8: 416–34.lefebvre, h. (1991[1974]) the Production of Space, trans. d. nicholson-Smith. oxford: Blackwell.massey, d. (2005) for Space. london: Sage.thurlow, C. and jaworski, a. (2010) tourism discourse: lan-guage and Global mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave macmillan.thurlow, C. and jaworski, a. (2011) ‘Banal Globalization? embodied actions and mediated Practices in tourists’ online Photo-sharing’, in C. thurlow and k. mroczek (eds) digital dis-course. new york: oxford University Press. thurlow, C. and jaworski, a. (2012) ‘elite mobilities: the Se-miotic landscapes of luxury and Privilege’, Social Semiotics.Urry, j. (2002) the tourist Gaze, 2nd edn. london: Sage.




Tracing place, locating self: Embodiment and remediation in/of tourist spaces

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