When an author engages in unregulated cliff jumping, against his better judgement, but in the name of research, the reader is in for a treat. The treat is offered in Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport, a refreshing exploration of the landscapes of contemporary dangerous sports. The book will be of interest to many tourism geographers, but especially those following lines of enquiry on experiential understandings of space. Considered against other books of its genre, Extreme Landscapes of Leisure is highly unconventional as it is supported almost entirely by ethnographic research, much of it auto-ethnographic. The author, Patrick Laviolette, is fascinated with the intimate connections between pleasure and landscape and how this connection is manifested in dangerous sports. He uses his own encounters and research to cleverly tease out the nexus between death, risk and adventure in a variety of spatial settings. The result is a text which provides ethnographic-thick descriptions of the relationship held between adventurers and their playgrounds.
The book opens with a foreword by David Kirke, one of the co-founders of the Dangerous Sports Club in Oxford. Kirke conceptualizes hazardous sports with notions of fear, risk and improvisation, all written in a humorous and imaginative tone, which is retained by Laviolette throughout the book. This tone is all too often absent in tourism studies – tourism is an escape activity after all and it is refreshing to read a text which mirrors this ideology. Geographical themes are in abundance throughout the book's seven chapters, as landscape, place and imagination are tackled with wit and a critical eye. It is a scrapbook of sorts and Laviolette's sources and presentation are as refreshing as the content itself. He considers an almost unrivalled breadth of material for such a text, including healthy doses of theory, personal anecdotes, ethnographic research, his own and others’ photography and a range of box inserts which detail skateboarding art, interviews and even a This is Your Life programme schedule.
Much of the book is devoted to exploring the paradoxes surrounding adventure tourism and consuming epic ‘thrillscapes’. Tourism should be an escape from everyday life and it is often presented as an activity which takes place some distance (whether spatially or otherwise) from ‘seriousness’. Yet the proximity of death in adventure sports renders it a wholly serious activity, regularly much more serious than the participant's everyday routine. This paradox is exposed at many junctions throughout the book. Laviolette notes how adventurous encounters exist on a scale, ranging from a safe fixed-fear state to a tailored encounter with risk which can provide the ultimate adrenaline rush. He interrogates the risks associated with adventure sports and offers several motives for the desire to participate. One such suggestion is that the existence of adventure sports owes itself to a subversive reaction to modernism. The dangerous sports participant is the mirror image of a Victorian traveller exploring new lands. Given the democratization of travel, thrill-seekers must seek new meaning in landscapes, manifested in this case by adventure tourism. The book is less concerned with the ‘why’ in risk pursuit, however – Laviolette leaves this to the psychologists – and is more concerned with the network of relations that are created around the how, when and where questions surrounding the pursuit of dangerous sports. Laviolette notes, for example, how those pursuing adventure sports find power in their path as they can consume landscapes which are not accessible to all. This power manifests itself in radical sports, which can test the limits of the landscape and the body while offering the participant a means of social measure. This is just one suggestion offered by Laviolette, who also uses imagination, media and social theories to disentangle his ethnographic writings.
While the thrust of the book is about experience and imagination in consuming unusual landscapes, it would be remiss to provide a review without comment on the methods used throughout. The book is a master class in ethnographic technique and Laviolette's devotion to the method presents an excellent social science research case study. Laviolette encounters many theoretical and practical challenges, all of which appear to be overcome with imaginative solutions, plausible propositions and even radical activities, such as cliff jumping, surfing and environmental activism. While his ethnographic work is both innovative and humorous, it is also a serious piece of scholarship which provides a previously unachieved depth in this particular activity niche. Laviolette identifies many of the problems posed by choosing ethnographic methods, particularly noting the difficulty in adventure tourism ethnographic research of simply keeping up to speed with the activities in question. Throughout the text Laviolette emphasizes his enthusiasm for using ethnographic methods, however, regularly highlighting the superiority of such methods over the more traditional (but often contrived) interview approach.
Ultimately the diversity of source material used by Laviolette and the variety in its presentation make it easy to engage with the author's fundamental arguments about how we imagine the landscapes which create fear and risk in adventure sports. The eloquent style of the book makes it a must have for anyone with an interest in the geographies or anthropologies of extreme sports. Likewise, the book will surely be of great interest to those studying adventure tourism (and, indeed, many of the tourism niches), outdoor education, tourism geographies and any leisure themes concerned with fear, risk or danger.