Cultural Geographies of Tourism

Cultural Geographies of Tourism Mike Crang, University of Durham University Mike Crang is a lecturer in geography at Durham University. He has worked on issues of culture, identity and belonging which led him to study cultural tourism. He has been especially interested in issues around visual media and their influence of tourists. He is the co-editor of the journal Tourist Studies, and of the books Tourism: between Place and Performance (with Simon Coleman), Thinking Space (with Nigel Thrift), and Virtual Geographies (with Phil Crang and Jon May). Introduction Cultural geography, with its traditions of studying regional cultures, has tended to position „tourism‟ as a problem, as something that homogenises local cultures towards one undifferentiated aggregate – an „erosion thesis‟ where change is seen only as diminishing original cultures and reducing global differences (Hannerz, 1996). However, recent work has tried to open up this grim account in two main directions. First, examining tourism not simply as consuming places but also as a dynamic force creating them – which still leaves room for conflict, exploitation and resistance, but takes a more neutral start-point. Second, looking at the cultures of tourists and seeing how these evolve historically. So rather than dismissing tourism as just „a logical extension of the general principle of industrial capitalism to the realm of leisure‟ (Böröcz in Koshar, 1998: 325), treating it as a modern culture in and of itself. Tourism mobilises powerful social dreams and desires as the currency in which it trades by offering dream holidays, romance, paradise on earth and so on (Krippendorf 1987). These are social imaginaries, maps of what people believe and hope for – but they are rarely examined as such. As Inglis notes: „The dreams are powerful and beautiful. Of course, dedicated dreambusters in their big boots will, correctly, point out the horrors and boredom of actually existing tightly packaged trips, the mutual exploitation of tourist and native‟ (Inglis, 2000: 5). In this chapter then I want to sketch how tourist cultures develop rather than engage in the „dreambusting‟ that tends to characterise academic work which so often exemplifies distaste, treating tourists almost as another species – „turistas vulgaris‟ (Löfgren, 1999: 264) who travel in „herds‟, „stampede‟ onto beaches, „flock‟ to see places, and „swarm‟ around „honey-pots‟. Analyses of how tourism shapes places can become locked into a „coercive conceptual schema‟ of tourism „impacting‟ on local cultures which sees a local culture pitted against a global industry where „cultural changes arising from tourism are produced by the intrusion of a superior sociocultural system in a supposedly weaker receiving milieu‟ (Picard, 1996: 104, 110). This risks portraying the „hosts‟ as a bounded, static, undivided and happy culture prior to tourism. Now this is a dubious characterisation of even island destinations – as Picard (below) shows in terms of Bali – but seems cockeyed when we think of places like Las Vegas, Blackpool, or Benidorm, or the city tourist centres of London, New York or Hong Kong. Thus it seems more productive to use: „a more culturally complex rendering of tourism‟s “consumption” of places, one that sees not merely a globalizing force bearing down upon a once-isolated community, but also the dynamic ways local cultural meanings -which are themselves a product of a dialogue between local and extra-local cultural systems - wrap the tourism experience in an envelope of local meaning.‟(Oakes, 1999: 124). I want to thus start by thinking about what cultural geography can say about the shaping of destinations, about tourism as inventing, making and remaking places. Tourism as geography writ large. Tourism is an active agent in the creative destruction of places in what can be a violent, contested, unequal, but sometimes welcomed, transformative and productive process. The process is one of coconstruction where the destination is fashioned between different actors. This does not necessarily mean in an equal or harmonious fashion, but it is important not to start by denying locals or tourists any agency in the process, since that leads not only to a negative view of tourism, but a pessimism about the possibilities for people to shape it. Tourism is part of a reflexive process where all the actors learn from experiences (good, bad and indifferent). Thus the industry adapts and develops, tourists respond with changing tastes and preferences and locals rework their identities and strategies in changing conditions. So Picard‟s (1996) account of Balinese tourism describes a small culture that has experienced large scale tourist development bringing with it economic and cultural changes. At one level Balinese culture is being „replaced‟ by touristic culture with local rituals repackaged for tourists. At this level we can see the commodification of a culture turned into a bankable asset and given a new value in terms of its earning potential rather than any „intrinsic‟ value. But looking at this slightly differently we can see a more intricate set of developments. For a start, touristic interest and marketing of Balinese culture has intersected with a Hindu caste system, whose preservation has enabled powerful Hindu‟s to counter possible Islamic growth on the island as „unBalinese‟. Indeed there has been a „Balinization‟ of Bali, and the aesthetic interest of tourists has prompted locals to reinvigorate cultural activities and celebrate their roles as cultural artists. So that, far from eroding traditional forms, a new vitality and interest has developed in them. Picard suggests this might be called „cultural involution‟, since: „The Balinese ... aspire to become modern while at the same time seeking to maintain their cultural traditions, and to do so, they need money; the tourists, who are the bearers of modernisation, are drawn to Bali essentially by the wealth of its traditions; consequently, for reasons of both cultural conservation and economic necessity, the Balinese cultivate their traditions with a view to procuring the necessary means for their modernisation. Thanks to this process of cultural involution, the modernisation of Balinese society may be based not on industrial production, whose destructive effects on traditional social structures is well known, but on cultural productions, thus permitting the establishment of a post-industrial society based on tourism services‟ (1996: 111). The implication is that tourism is premised upon and sustained by difference over space, and indeed it may well increase some kinds of differentiation. Tourism takes dreams and myths and inscribes them on to places, in other words it spatialises social meanings (Hughes 1998). Tourism could be seen as a semiotic process creating meanings through signs and symbols in a communicative environment (Dann, 1996: 25). Using the analogy of texts and language to look at how tourism inscribes meanings on to the landscape it seems a very literal sort of „geography‟ with its direct translation as „writing the earth‟. In doing this it works upon and amplifies associations already existing about places as part of a reflexive developing process – where for instance the northern wilderness of Canada was scripted in adventure stories as an arena for masculine endeavour (Phillips 1996) – a reputation as an environment for adventure which tourism has perpetuated and traded upon (Shields, 1991). The scripting may also rework the actual histories and geographies of places, as where the carefully maintained and managed deer shooting ranges of Scotland are marketed in terms of „wilderness‟ and „natural‟ scenery (Lorimer, 2000). As Jane Desmond notes „tourism is not just an aggregate of merely commercial activities; it is also an ideological framing of history, nature and tradition; a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needs‟ (1999: xii). With deliberate hyperbole, the architects MVRDV thus predict a Norway turned from a forest to a supervillage, the Alps becoming a park with hotel cities, France changing into a „ “Guide du Routard” landscape, in which the agricultural products became the instrument for a gastronomically oriented zone penetrated by hotels and restaurants according to special nostalgic rules‟ and Tuscany as an „international villa park‟ where „gigantic private gardens are maintained by the former farmers‟ (MVRDV, 2000: 57). Meanwhile other areas become associated with „ludic‟ activities – spaces where play is not only allowed but, in many cases, demanded. MVRDV suggest there is a single linear city spreading along the Iberian coast, and „[i]t is a space that has become the most effective substitute for the time of the breaking-up party, that countryside festival that industrialisation eliminated from the calendar of Europeans‟ (MVRDV, 2000: 109). Tourism forms a „territorialized hedonism‟ (Löfgren, 1999: 269). We might think of these as liminal zones with social rituals where normal rules of conduct are suspended, in times and spaces apart from the everyday (Shields, 1991). Spaces become scripted with particular rules of behaviour, for instance on many European beaches women are happy to go topless – but would feel it necessary, in the company of the same people, to put on a top to leave the beach and go for lunch even just across the street - or alternately may feel pressured to go topless on some beaches. Shields illustrates the long history of beach resorts as places of sexual license and intrigue, or how Niagara Falls became associated with honeymoons to the extent that it became a cliché. Various destinations become coded with a sexualised appeal since „tourism is about desire -- desire for change, but also a more sensuous desire to become intimate with the unfamiliar‟ and so the depicted and marketed „exotic other is most often female. Gender joins race on the manipulated bottom line of tourism‟ with seduction and adventure both „embodied as male goals in female flesh‟ (Lippard, 1999: 51). This analysis sees language as not only telling or showing but creating and doing (KirshenblattGimblett, 1998: 6). An example is the attempts to transform the everyday into the exceptional through, for instance, literary references, as in South Tyneside becoming „Catherine Cookson country‟, the North York Moors „Herriott country‟, Hampshire becoming „Austen country‟ and so on (for discussions see Pocock, 1992; Dann, 1996; Crang, 2002). This process has been likened to one of „sacralisation‟, marking out special and „exceptional‟ sites. We thus need to pay attention to the texts of tourism which maybe novels but are more often guidebooks, postcards, travel books, brochures, adverts and the like. These help shape notions of the destination and can be seen as „linguistic agents of touristic social control‟ (Dann, 1999: 163). This is because guidebooks do not just describe places but set normative agendas of, in the words of Murray‟s 1858 guide, „what ought to be seen‟ (Koshar, 1998). A semiotic analysis of these materials can tell us something of how a place is being shaped, by examining what or who is depicted (and what and who are not chosen to be included). Dann‟s (1996) study of Cyprus package tour marketing showed the hotel is in 68.2% of pictures, pool or beach in 14.1% but only 17.7% depicted the actual locality, suggesting levels of priorities. Meanwhile Chang has argued that cultural marketers may work to simplify or „tame‟ the associations of specific places. Thus Singapore‟s „New Asia‟ campaign involved zoning the ethnically marked „historic‟ districts of the central city (into the civic quarter, Chinatown, Little India, and Kampung Glam). While this has meant the physical preservation of these areas in the face of massive property development, „by prescribing themes to places, planners inadvertently freeze their identities and stultify their potential to evolve organically, effacing their myriad histories on the one hand while confining their future to a pre-ordained narrative on the other‟ (Chang, 2000: 35). Tourist discourses create sights to be seen, they etch significance onto the landscape and direct our attention. The ironic plaque on a house in Grassmere (in the Lake District in England) stating that „this house has absolutely nothing to do with Wordsworth‟ suggests a pertinent truth. Looking at any of the houses that do claim connections, it is the markers and signs that lend lustre not the building‟s intrinsic qualities. So, sacralisation often depends on texts and stories that circulate elsewhere or around the site so that our sense of having visited somewhere special, is premised upon other signs and texts. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett put it, there is a phantom landscape of associations underlying the one we see, where „the production of hereness in the absence of actualities depends increasingly on virtualities‟ so that we travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places (1998: 169, 171). This we might say chimes closely with the aesthetic appreciation encouraged in tourism. An example of vision shaping and sacralising a site comes from the novel „White Noise’ by Dom Delillo: „Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America… We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras… A man in a booth sold postcards and slides – pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. ”No one sees the barn,” he said finally.. “Once you‟ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn … We‟re not here to capture an image, we‟re here to maintain one. Ever photograph reinforces the aura … They are taking pictures of taking pictures … We can‟t get outside the aura.‟ (cited in Crang, 1996: 438). The markers, far from being secondary, are actually creating the site. Perhaps an extreme example is that of the small town of Wall‟s drugstore in South Dakota. In a town of 800 residents, a small drugstore opened in 1931 whose only especial feature was the sale of iced water. It was then a twenty-four by sixty foot structure. By the 1950s there were some 28,000 signs to „Wall Drug‟ – and American servicemen and visitors continued to plant them in Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Europe and elsewhere. What is famous about the store is its celebrity – on the back of which it grew to a fifty-five thousand square foot emporium with chapel, art gallery, memorabilia store and a vast array of kitsch (Meltzer, 2002). Markers may be more important than the sites themselves: „The proliferation of markers frames something as a sight for tourists; the proliferation of reproductions is what makes something an original, the real thing: the original of which the souvenirs, postcards, statues, etc. are reproductions. The existence of reproductions is what makes something original, or authentic, and by surrounding ourselves with markers and reproductions we represent to ourselves ... the possibility of authentic experiences in other times and other places‟ (Culler, 1981: 132) The process is bound up with a specific type of vision – where the practice of photography sacralises the site with of tourism as a specific way of seeing, or what John Urry (1990), drawing upon Foucault, called the tourist gaze. We do though need to remember the plural influences, and multiple motivations people have both individually, when between different holidays or within the same one they may have different priorities and interests at different moments, and for the majority of tourists travelling in (maybe, family) groups, that this is multiplied by the competing and collective desires of different members, rather than simply being a matter of deterministic meanings about destinations. So one of the key ideas is that destinations are shaped, but also that they are shaped ready for a particular sort of reception and particular tourist practices. It is to these tourist practices that I now want to turn. Being a Tourist, Doing Tourism It is not just that destinations that are scripted, but also the practices that comprise being a tourist. So if we take the example of the beach resort, the norms and expectations of behaviour have clearly evolved through history and it has taken centuries for the seashore to be colonized as the preeminent site for recreational visiting, and to be transformed into a theatre of pleasure (Lencek and Bosker, 1998: 6) while the practices associated with beaches have marked changing notions of social propriety and cultures of the body. Tourism is a set of learned competences and skills, and most definitely not something natural or innate. Even the apparently obvious sun, sea and sand tourism comprises a host of specific cultural practices. When MVDRV asked what people actually do at Benidorm, their surveys suggested wandering around town comprises 4 hrs and 14 km per day, with being on the beach only 3.5 hrs, which suggests „tourists surveyed in Benidorm are notable for their passion for the streets … incited by its charms, which they find unending, moved by surprise, encouraged by he possibility of meeting and recognising and urged on by the fleeting nature of their stays‟ (2000: 112). We should not suggest all visitors to Benidorm have a passion for the street, but the point is neither should we ignore the fact that many have. To illustrate the different norms and practices we might contrast the practices and norms of solitary, undeveloped „edenic‟ beaches and coves of Menorca or Cornwall with „[t]he carefully curated resorts of the French and Italian Riviera [which] parcel out the beach with the precision of Mondrian painting. [Where] in tiny plots staked out by private clubs and hotels, paying guests recline on color-coded chairs laid out with graph-paper rectilinearity in front of brilliantly painted cabanas. The beach fairly sizzles with the erotic voltage of bare-breasted, bare-buttocked beauties and virile stalwarts, but strict decorum the sensual stew at a steady, socially acceptable simmer‟ (Lencek and Bosker, 1998: xxiii). Other apparently obvious and banal practices of tourism also reward closer attention. Recently Löfgren has looked at how nineteenth century nationalists promoted rambling in the Swedish countryside as a way of coming into contact with „real folk‟ which would enable you to „walk yourself Swedish‟ (1999: 50). Likewise Edensor has looked to modern British countryside walking to unpack a series of cultivated ideologies of taste and value about independence, a notion of organic peace and contrasts with urban life (2000: 81). The values and habits of even walking thus vary between groups and over time. For some the adventurous and arduous is the aim, for others this implies a reduction in scenic appreciation, while for others the clothing and accoutrements offer avenues for pleasure and displaying social identities. However, we also need to inject some dynamism here – the tourist is not just someone who has a particular cultural baggage or who responds to a given culture of a destination. These two elements are mutually constituting, and from this it follows that both place and person may change, and change the other. For instance, rumours help shape expectations of visitors (Hutnyk, 1996; O'Hara, 2001) circulating, not just in a one-way street from marketers to audience, but among tourists, as in Hutnyk‟s description of „the endless flow of indo-babble‟ (p. 145) about stories told about going to India, having been to India, and so forth. Moreover, one of the effects (and sometimes aims) of travel is not to just experience a destination but to change our „self‟ – in some forms of tourism, as part of a more or less explicit project of „self-creation‟. We might see „vacationing as a cultural laboratory where people have been able to experiment with new aspects of their identities, their social relations, or their interaction with nature and also to use important cultural skills of daydreaming and mindtravelling. Here is an arena in which fantasy become an important social practice‟ (Löfgren, 1999: 7). So we could examine how tourism fits into, reinforces, challenges and changes our stories about ourselves. So the flip side of thinking about „liminal spaces‟ is to think about the role they play in our lives. It may be that they are experienced cyclically – an annual escape to somewhere we can „be ourselves‟, or just let our hair down. On the other hand, they might figure as part of an unfolding self-narrative of personal development. Anthropological work links liminal places with rites of passage, where people travel as part of social rituals that mark changing social status and position. So we might take „backpackers‟ or independent travellers as examples. In Britain there is a strong class and age association where a „gap year‟ out is taken between school and going to university, whereas in New Zealand the „Big OE‟ (Overseas Experience) tends to be longer and associated with a post university stage (Bell, 2002; Mason, 2002) but in both cases they form rites of passage. Such episodes may be part of the reflexive construction of autobiographies, by linking interior narratives of personhood with exterior experiences and practices, and as moments when we take time out to „find ourselves‟ offer answers to questions we ask about „who we are‟ at key junctures in our lives (Desforges, 2000: 936). We bring our backgrounds and desires but tourism also impacts upon our senses of selves. Even for the antithesis of the backpacker – the Club Med „party‟ holiday - the definition of self through hedonistic consumption can feed back into senses of identity. „The full process of the anticipation of holidays, the act of travel, and the narration of holiday stories on return are all tied into an imagination and performance which enables tourists to think of themselves as particular sorts of person‟ (Desforges, 2000: 930). Tourism both sustains and is sustained by stories that define ourselves. The telling of these stories is as important as actual events where „the journey becomes a spatial and temporal frame to be filled with identity narratives‟ (Elsrud, 2001: 605). This may be by differentiating ourselves from others – as in backpackers who deride the collective travel of Japanese tourists, and who thus form „imagined ghosts upon which to build difference narratives‟ (Elsrud, 2001: 607) and instead define their own holiday in terms of adventure, solitariness and indeed a thrill of danger stories of hardship and danger. These stories are exchanged in a variety of locales such as at hostels, particular cafes and so forth with specific topics and norms of conversation (Hutnyk, 1996; Murphy, 2001). Information about specific places is exchanged as people plan itineraries and stories get exchanged. However, these conversations also spill out into circulating narratives as where, it is becoming common for „experienced‟ backpackers to distance themselves from newcomers by calling the latter „FNGs‟ – an abbreviation for „Fucking New Guys‟ used by US soldiers in Vietnam, and popularised by Alex Garland‟s novel about backpacking, „The Beach’ (Elsrud, 2001: 610). The experiences become one of the resources we mobilise and recount when we are called upon to define ourselves. Using Pierre Bourdieu‟s terms we could see trips as a means of accumulating „cultural capital‟ (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu 1991) where, just as economic resources can be accumulated, so too can cultural „wealth‟ be stockpiled. The value of particular experiences is going to change according to time and tastes – and also social groups. So different holiday experiences will have different values to different tourists. This highlights a dynamic field where as one site becomes popular it loses or gains caché with different groups of people according to the various canons of taste that apply within and between groups. The novel The Beach, exemplifies this being structured around the quest for the unspoilt beach, as yet untramped by other tourists – even backpackers, hidden in a national park: „ “travellers try to find new islands beyond Ko Pha-Ngan because Ko Pha-Ngan is now the same as Ko Samui.” ”The same?” “Spoiled. Too many tourists. But look this book is three years old. Now maybe some travellers feels these islands past Ko Pha-Ngan are also spoiled. So they find a completely new island, in the national park.” “But they aren‟t allowed in the national park” Étienne raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Exactly! This is why they go there. Because there will be no other tourists.” […] Set up in Bali, Ko Pha-Ngan, Ko Tao, Borocay, and the hordes are bound to follow. There‟s no way you can keep it out of the Lonely Planet, and once that happens it‟s countdown to Doomsday‟ (Garland, 1996: 25, 139). Here the protagonists‟ cultural capital comes from avoiding the „hordes‟, from their abilities that allow them to find an untouched beach. This is not a literal example of how tourists think – but rather it resonates with an audience because it does evoke some of the feelings about tourism and because we have seen that this novel is one of the discourses circulating with tourists and shaping their practices. Many studies suggest there is something of a continuum of cultural values – for upper and middle class western tourists – that privileges first the explorer, then the traveller and judges them in distinction to the declassee mass tourist. More scrupulous accounts also point out that academic sympathies with travellers and against tourism tend to suggest commonalities of cultural values and practices between academics and elite tourists. One upshot of seeing tourist practices as ways of narrating ourselves is that we have to look at tourist itineraries as not just beginning and ending with the trip but also extending into the whole life course. For instance, people take still or video pictures in part to provide evidence of a trip, of experience accumulated and places visited to be shown upon their return (Neumann, 1988: 23; Crang, 1997). More strategically this might be linked with notions of sights that „must be seen‟ or the way people „do‟ Italy to suggest that a key element of tourism is not going to places, or being at places but rather attaining the status of „having been‟ somewhere (Kelly, 1986). Thus if we look at iconic sites like the Taj Mahal that are often a non-negotiable, „must-see‟ element in tours to India, tourists may only spend about an hour there - but it is an „essential‟ hour since such „symbolic sites are foci around which the mnemonic devices of travel narratives and photography are structured‟ (Edensor, 1998: 107, 141). We might therefore see many tourist itineraries as ways of picking up sites, ticking off activities that are required in order to have a „successful‟ holiday. There are holidays that market directly to this practice – for instance literary tours, where tourists pay often substantial prices to be guided around key sites in an author‟s life and writings (Crang, 2002). Here there may be „serious leisure‟ with dedicated „collectors‟ building up complete sets of sites over several vacations. As we noted above, the caché offered by different activities or their „cultural capital‟ will vary, and may well change over the life course of an individual. These changes may be due to changes in the „value‟ of a destination, as somewhere becomes more well known it may lose distinctiveness it held when visited; or it may be that social groups change, so what was admired by one‟s eighteen year old friends as mature and sophisticated, appears less so when one is thirty; or it may be that through our lives we move through different social circles who value things differently. This notion of self-development can also apply to apparently „non-cultural‟ practices. Thus if we look at beach tourism, there is often a great investment in the body – in honing it, tanning it and displaying it. Not only coming back from holiday with a body bearing the physical imprint of a sunny climate, not only deliberately and possibly dangerously exposing it to the sun, but exercising before the holiday, going to tanning salons in advance. It is not just the bodies and cultures of locals that are shaped through tourism. As Picard notes, the bare breasts of Bali were used in illustrations as part of campaigns to make Bali a (male) paradise of western fantasies, but ironically, „today it is the Balinese, dressed from head to foot, who come to contemplate the generously exposed breasts of the foreign women‟ (1996: 80). This points to a whole range of corporeal practices and investments bound up in tourism. Beach tourism‟s sun worship is so obvious it is easy to overlook but as we have seen there are also bodily performances of walking holidays, and we might add a range of sports and adventure tourism. In the latter the mode of perceiving the landscape and our bodily relationship may well change, as where we think of a shift from the physical exertion of slowly climbing a peak to the stomach churning thrill of hurtling from a bridge on a bungy line – from an appreciation of the individual and sublime nature we have an accelerated body and an inverted sublime (Bell and Lyall, 2002) or a body pitted against the rocks and rapids in white water rafting (Cloke and Perkins, 1998). Indeed we might look at the whole constitution of body-nature relationships, where some speak to notions of conquest, or the body transcending nature while others may speak to the sense of loss of self (Fullagar, 2001). Conclusions I have attempted to show that destination and tourist cultures are both transformed and produced through tourism. We started with notions of tourism „scripting‟ and shaping the landscape and then addressed how tourists too are scripted by these preshaped destinations. Except, I hope I have suggested both of these processes are massively over-determined in a recursive and reflexive system that creates a multitude of opportunities and unplanned outcomes. Throughout I have tried to emphasise a language of scripts (where language shapes action) rather than images and representation (where reality is more or less distorted). Places are made, done and performed and through making, doing and performing them tourists become, well, tourists. In other words both places and tourists are processual. The implications of all these examples then are that tourists do not have pregiven identities but rather there are identities formed through processes of identification and self creation. One of the tendencies is to see this self-definition as operating against a foil of localised and bounded local cultures – destinations which are visited. But we need caution since the meaning of places is constructed through actors and discourses that are both local and distant, and when we think of „locals‟ and „tourists‟, we should recall that many of us are both (mostly at different times and places, as our homes too may well be someone else‟s destination, but we may even switch roles in one place, for instance as we take out guests to visit particular sites). This sense of instability is not meant to imply that outcomes are always surprising, and certainly not that they are always happy, but that there are opportunities here, for change, contestation and, even, struggle. The cultural geography of tourism is not about a fixed map of destinations and peoples who are more less neatly packaged or accurately represented, but rather about a set of practices that constitute notions of what „over there‟, and thus „over here‟, is like and what constellations of practices and performances that recursively produce destinations and visitors. 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