Changing geographies and tourist scholarship

In this short commentary I consider the development of conversations between human geography and tourist studies: ‘tourist’, because my own work is motivated by an interest – and concern – for the human encounter, the human–other than human interactions and relationships in diverse material worlds. In this sphere of insights, there has been profound and enriching progress over the most recent decades, transforming geography in particular, and in particular ways increasingly valuable for the wide reach of tourist studies. Briefly, I note some of the progress but also the ‘drag’ of human geography across recent decades.

Once geography's space meant distances between; to be measured and mapped for military or efficiency purposes, according to decisions of the powerful. Space was regarded with negligible attention to human living. Contemporary progress was marked in spacetime compression. A world view of business profitability (Harvey, 1973, 1989). As Meethan articulated, such priority can be tracked in the organisational power of tourism, with increasingly disturbing consequences for the globe, humanity, environmental and cultural distinction and sustainability (2001).

Post-modernism further side-tracked serious thinking for geography and tourism, and over-emphasised the power of signs in shaping consumption. Our relation with space itself reduced to signs, not grounded in our complex and varied, changeable experience if living. In tourism, this way of understanding the working of humans and spaces became emblematic through the work of a sociologist with a published interest in space (Gregory & Urry, 1985).

Urry's The Tourist Gaze (Urry, 1990), with negligible research, pursues the primary power of the visual in ways in which people, as customers, make sense of tourism. The gaze is uninvolved, detached and uncaring. Similarly the simplistic, reductive notion of film-induced tourism posits tourism as done in isolation from the rest of life, the tourism bubble, inhabited by the tourist etached from the world (Crouch, 2017).

These recent reductive insights into tourism increasingly are brought to confront a more inclusive, embracing understanding of human–other, human–space relations. The snapshot, the sign, the representation, have, however, become critiqued as being merely partial fragments of the story is not enough (Thirft, 2008)

As an activity on earth, like other activities tourism is about space, in a number of ways. Widely there is a ‘spatial turn’ across many disciplines, including humanities and the arts. There emerge new ways in which this changing configuration of geographical interest affects thinking around matters of tourists and tourism; in turn contributing to increasingly overlapping insights. Space is not one thing, nor only something abstract.

Individuals live amongst networks of contacts, sites of action across different trajectories of time; memories and doings of immensely varied intensity and register and that can be mutually affecting in multiple spatial relations. Space is subjective and personal; emerging, contingent, changing, fluid in character; ‘becoming’ (Crouch, 2010). Things and actions are recognised not as fixed, but in processes of change, between holding on and going further, resonant in making sense of tourists’ geographies, what spaces mean for tourists and how tourists’ spaces occur.

Influenced by French thought, perhaps less restrained by the latent essentialism of the English language, the word espacement transcribes space as practice, ‘spacing’ rather than a noun (‘space’) (Nuiwenhuis & Crouch, 2017). Spacing resembles flirting's uncertainty, akin to playing, that works between script and freedom (Crouch, 2010). Whilst space is always open, place distinguishes the moments when space remains steady awhile.

Today, space is more likely to be understood as something that is fluid, which occurs, yet old dualities persist. When space is felt to be constant, known and secure it derives the term place; when changing, uncertain, whether through outward action, adjusted memory and emotion; feeling of heritage and changing life opportunities, place becomes space; the distance between, passageway, separation. Yet, these varied and varying conditions can occur anywhere, abruptly or smoothly. Place is understood as a long valued site, through tradition of more recent popularity and marketing. Especially in the latter case, this can result from borrowing something valued to existing or previous cultures beyond tourism; now, the consumable site; astonishingly misnamed ‘tourism product’ be it a hotel, beach, mountain or age-old local festival. Yet, in contemporary understandings of space, this applies to space too.

The contexts in which life, and space happens flicker and simmer, may have some influence on our attitudes, choices and decisions but do not control these, nor us. We turn out to be multi-sensual, to have our own varied memories (Crouch, 2010, Crouch & Lubbren, 2003). It is to this swirl of living and its more nuanced atmospheres of things, events that anthropologist Kathleen Stewart unravels a more aware and practical understanding of things and space, and how distinctive spaces may occur: ‘things… flash up - little worlds, bad impulses, events alive with some kind of charge….' (2007, p. 68). These are networks of our contacts, sites of activity, memories and doings of lively interaction (Crouch, 2010). Felt settled, memory can be jogged into new patterns and emphases in the performance of our lives. These are parts of the space-processes through which spacing, thus space, occurs.

Stewart often focuses her enquiries on everyday life, and this prompts a curiosity of whether being-tourist or ‘doing tourism’ is just another part of everyday life. Philosopher de Botton observes, everyday things happen when being tourist; ’back home’ can bring moments, friends, practices and objects from the being-tourism time into ongoing life (2001). Things mix and merge. Feelings about home may adjust on return; locations of doing tourism can sit awkwardly with expectations taken with us. Life mixes; being-tourist mixes, events emerge, encounters occur, that dent our feeling; tourism is not all happiness, and to purvey such a horizon is deceit.

Once human geography deleted the ‘human’ save as statistical abstractions shaped by business and government demands. Increasingly today, space, in this context of life's nuance, complexity, fluidity and multiple influences and affects, has engaged a range of disciplines nesting around geography: anthropologists Miller (2008), Ness (2016), Stewart (2007, 2011); geographers ourselves Vannini (2009) Crouch (2010), Benediktsson and Lund (2010); literature and American Studies writer Neil Campbell (2016). The apparently intractable complexities and nuances of things and spaces are being interpreted through multiple approaches of investigation. From time to time these contributions coalesce in multi-disciplinary texts around tourism, where an understanding of space further emerges (Andrews, 2011; Crouch, Jackson, & Thompson, 2005; Lean, Stariff, & Waterton, 2014; Smith, Waterton, & Watson, 2014; Waterton & Watson, 2014). Adapting Stewart (2011), they try to compose an open list of questions about how affectivities come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, imagination, lived sensory moments and constitute atmospheres of space and life, atmospheres of rhythms, emotions, tempos, and varied and changing lifespans, and applied to tourists. Tourism and its felt spaces of life do not occur in a world separate from leisure and vice versa. Our commingling geographies happen in relation, and are better understood thereby (Crouch, 1999).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.