The Tourist Gaze 3.0 by John Urry Jonas Larsen

Author:John Urry, Jonas Larsen [John Urry, Jonas Larsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Sociology, Travel
ISBN: 9781849203777
Google: 2If2DzbwJsgC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 20659815
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There is a rich network of local activity groups, travel outings, and active participation in heritage conservation through voluntary labour. What is available to life members is a coordinated lifestyle achieved through association … ‘a timeless organisation upholding traditional values’. (1995: 155)

Hewison, moreover, presumes a rather simple model by which certain meanings, such as nostalgia for times past, are unambiguously transferred to visitors by these heritage sites (1987). There is little sense of the complexity by which different visitors can gaze upon the same set of objects and read and perform them in a different ways (see Urry, 1996; Franklin, 2003). Indeed, sites are not uniformly understood and passively accepted by visitors. Macdonald shows in an exhibition at the Science Museum how visitors frame and interpret the visit in ways not expected or planned for by its designers (1995: 21). Such visitors connect together exhibits that were not meant to be linked, they read the exhibits as prescriptive when they are not intended to be, and mostly they do not describe the exhibition in ways that the designers had intended it should be so described (and see Shaw et al., 2000: 276).

Research at the Albert Dock in Liverpool further shows that people actively use sites as bases for reminiscence, ‘as the point of departure for their own memories of a way of life in which economic hardship and exploited labour were offset by a sense of community, neighbourliness and mutuality’ (Mellor, 1991: 100). ‘Reminiscence’ may indeed be a major ‘practice’ at such sites. And reminiscing involves performance – both by those ‘real’ performers who are there to stimulate memories, and by visitors who often have to work cooperatively with others in order to produce their memories. Reminiscencing is not an apparently passive process of individual visual consumption. In some ways, it is similar to various other spatial practices taking place at tourist sites, such as walking, talking, sitting, photographing and so on, generally carried out with others and especially family and friends (see Edensor, 1998; see Chapter 8 on performances).

There is something condescending about Hewison’s view that such a presentation of heritage cannot be interpreted and performed in different ways, or that the fact that the experience may be enjoyable means that it cannot also be educational. This can be seen in the case of New Salem where Abraham Lincoln lived during the 1830s. The meaning of this site is not given and fixed (Bruner, 1994: 410–11). Tourists play with time frames and experiment with alternative realities. They reconstruct their sense of the past even as such sites possess a strong entertainment and playful character. Bruner concludes that: ‘many tourists make associations between what they see at the site and their personal lives’ (1994: 410; and see Chapters 1 and 8 on performance).

Hewison concentrates upon the Wigan Pier Centre (closed in 2007) in north-west England as emblematic of this turning of history into heritage. However, this criticism is partly unfair since the Centre is scholarly and educational; it presents a

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