Untitled

[M]ost significant phenomena that the so called social sciences now deal
with are in fact hybrids of physical and social relations, with no purified
sets of the physical or the social. Such hybrids include health,
technologies, the environment, the Internet, road traffic, extreme
weather and so on. /…/ The very division between the ‘physical’ and the
‘social’ is itself a socio-historical product and one that appears to be
dissolving (Urry 2003, p. 17-18).
One could then argue that the most significant phenomena dealt with
in tourism studies are hybrids too. Indeed, according to Franklin and
Crang; “[t]ourism is entirely populated by hybrids, and future
investigations in tourism will need to enumerate and analyse their
potencies” (Franklin and Crang 2001, p. 15). In this account, tourism
literally is a hybrid population of bodies, hiking shoes, hotel beds,
capitalism, destination images, discursive practices, whales, money,
motivations, promises, exchange values, cameras, desires, cars, animals,
homes, practices, taxes, tour operators, apples, guides, day dreaming, fuel
emissions, electricity, sunbathing, walking, spreadsheets, maps,
expectations, promotion brochures, weather, aircraft, food, neo-liberalism,
and what not else.
The implication for tourism theory, of this conceptualization of
tourism and tourists as unclean mixtures of hybrids or heterogeneous
materials, is that neither can be adequately mapped onto the reference
plane of a purified social without severe reduction or distortion. That
tourism is a hybrid population implies also that it is not something that
occurs in society, if we conceive of society as made up of social relations
between humans only. Tourists too are at best only partly social, always
dependent as they are on non-humans and their material potencies, if for
no other reason than simply being able to travel and stay “away from their
normal home environment for a variety of purposes” (Beaver 2005, p.
380). One could further argue that tourism is not only “entirely populated
by hybrids”, but is itself a hybrid which has been transformed into a
delimited phenomena after labours of purification. In other words, what is
referred to as “tourism” is then an abstraction from the concrete population
of hybrids whose belonging to the domain of tourism are constructed a
post teori.
The notion of hybrids then objects to an understanding of tourism as
a purified social phenomena albeit topologically complex, by highlighting
the mixtures of entities with different ontologies, and raises questions
about the role of non-human and material agency. The most well known
96