John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (2002)

This is a written summary of the text I presented in class. You'll see lots of overlap, but read on for a slightly different ending...

Urry states his aim in the first page:

This book then is about how different societies and especially within different social groups in diverse historical periods the tourist gaze has changed and developed. I shall elaborate on the processes by which the gaze is constructed and reinforced, and will consider who or what authorizes it, what its consequences are for the ‘places’ which are its object, and how it interrelates with a variety of other social practices.

At the outset, he claims, “such gazes are constructed through difference.” Here, he refers not only to differences in class (etc.), but the differences between tourism and “non-tourist forms of social experience.” He hopes his analysis will offer another angle on the social and material structure of not just of tourism, but of the everyday social world that tourism aims to escape temporarily. By the last chapter, when he takes up postmodernism and globalization, Urry argues that the tourist gaze is now “generalized into all aspects of culture.” Contrasts once confined to the holidays now confront us all the time. For Urry, this makes the study of tourism all the more critical today.

Urry insists that tourism is constructed differently in different contexts, but he offers several characteristics to provide a baseline definition. Tourism:
- Presupposes some ordered work and life;
- Involves movement, destinations;
- Is temporary;
- Seeks places disconnected from paid work (pleasure, not business);
- Is social, whereas travel is individual;
- Is shaped by a sense of anticipation;
- Is powerfully shaped by visual experience;
- Is constructed through signs;
- Includes a vast industry of tourism professionals.
This may be a useful starting point for the class and a list we will want to revise and challenge as we continue.

I cited a number of salient themes in class, mostly those related to his notion of the gaze. This was especially relevant to our discussion of Bruner and "cultural tourism," but I want to focus here less on Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze and more on the way he discusses the objects of that gaze. As we focus more on particular tourist destinations, I thought it might be helpful to have Urry’s three dichotomies for classifying tourist sites: “whether they are an object of the romantic or collective tourist gaze; whether they are historical or modern; and whether they are presented as authentic or inauthentic.” (94)

The romantic form of the gaze emphasizes “solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object.” In contrast, objects of the collective gaze are “designed as public places: they would look strange if they were empty.” (43) We might reflect on how certain places, including the Holocaust Museum, try to serve both these forms of the tourist gaze. Are these necessarily at odds or can both be present at the same site?

Urry notes the rapid growth of the “heritage/museum industry.” He critiques the typical complaint by scholars that such sites are inauthentic, saying, “social scientists may wel be prone to a kind of nostalgia, that is, for a Golden Age when the pass of the population were supposedly not take in by new and more distorting cultural forms.” (100) In contrast, his own analysis of heritage sites and museums notes important trends – increasing privatization and for-profit management; fascination with and preservation of popular and everyday objects and practices; and the rise of participatory, media-saturated museums. Alongside this nostalgia for heritage sites, there has been a growing interest in sites of modern, industrial production and places like Las Vegas and Disneyland, icons of a postmodern architecture that “proudly celebrates commercial vulgarity.” (111) Urry helpfully focuses our attention on the material exchanges at these sites. As we move forward, we will want to continue to ask such questions: What is being produced and consumed at a given site?; What is it that marks this consumption as similar to and yet different from any other?

The third dichotomy is one we discussed quite a bit last week – the question of authenticity. In observing dynamics of authenticity, Urry helpfully points out two important themes. First, he notes the struggles to preserve and reconstruct the past, a theme we will return to again and again this semester. He also stresses the importance of visual experience in both establishing and challenging authenticity. He reflects at length on the power of photography and its contradictions: “The power of the photograph thus stems from its ability to pass itself off as a miniaturization of the real, without revealing either its constructed nature or its ideological content.” (128) Urry recognizes that for many postmoderns (particularly those he labels post-tourists), authenticity is no longer seen as possible or important. Seeing is not necessarily believing. Tourism is a kind of ironic play on the whole notion of authenticity. We may want to ask nuanced versions of Urry's question as we proceed, integrating the multiple sorts of authenticity Bruner proposes. What does authenticity mean in a given context? What is at stake in a particular claim of authenticity?