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[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
approach in social science in which hybrids, or non-humans and relational material agency, have been incorporated is Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Consequently, those who have tried to translate ANT into tourism studies (Franklin 2004; Jóhannesson 2005; Van der Duim 2007) have indeed emphasized this hybrid character of tourism as being “held together by active sets of relations in which the human and the non-human continuously exchange properties” (Van der Duim 2007, p. 964). ANT is thus an approach that treats entities and materialities as enacted and relational effects, and explores the configuration and reconfiguration of those relations. Its relationality means that major categories or ontological domains (for instance “tourism”, “society”, “nature”, “culture” or “human” and non-human”) are understood and treated as effects or outcomes, rather than explanatory resources. Without exchange of properties, mediations, the associations and the performative orderings of humans and non-humans through the configuration of those relations, there would simply be no tourism. Hall’s eight points that we listed earlier might well be viewed as an agenda to investigate these hybrid tourism spaces, with focus on mobility, sustainability, humans and the technologies of travel. We have indeed no difficulties in subscribing to the view that ANT has indeed much to offer tourism studies, not the least for taking nonhumans and material on board and for providing a methodology by which the performative ordering of tourism and tourists can be studied. But for the sake of our project we are obliged to try and “earthify” as much as we possibly can beyond the social. This means that it becomes important to avoid the possibility of understanding tourism as mere self-contained enclosed topologically complex being that produces its own spaces by connecting and disconnecting heterogeneous elements. For our purpose, we need to situate tourism also on the Earth as a plane of reference and provider of consistency for all actor-networking (Gren 2002). This is the fundament for thinking about tourist and tourism imaginationings, and leads us on to exemplifying the “earthification” of tourism in tourism imaginationings. Tourism in the world - on the Earth “World” is often used to mean something intrinsically related to human civilization or to specifically human realms of experience, understanding, or the human condition in general. This is the sense of “world” one gets in 97
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© Icelandic Tourism Research Centr
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Table of Contents 1. Introduction .
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esearch but also “education and c
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Tourism images have had a longstand
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gradually expanded and become more
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Tourism - an earthly business For u
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Image 1.3: The Island of tourism &
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2. Image & destination The actual a
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variety of sources could be used in
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consequences for how she or he will
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either the textual or the visual, a
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Composed of numerous small encounte
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materiality. Yet, you are able to r
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demand it is mediated by investment
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tourism reflects broader social and
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signification, not the least in tou
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usiness and market to potential cus
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ound to cross traditional disciplin
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sightseeing and whatever activities
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Social science research is carried
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environment. If they had, they were
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Our argument is that it is importan
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able to cross the minds of many tho
Page 50 and 51: Eight on my list is the heritage of
Page 52 and 53: The cartography of tourism imaginat
Page 54 and 55: Images of Iceland as a tourist dest
Page 56 and 57: Whatever the specifics and forms of
Page 58 and 59: Are you dressed in the road map of
Page 60 and 61: Summing up It has often been lament
Page 62 and 63: A challenge for tourism theory and
Page 64 and 65: carved in stone, they are not given
Page 66 and 67: some of the things that signalled t
Page 68 and 69: Tourist was in fact that “we are
Page 70 and 71: globalisation gets attributed excep
Page 72 and 73: do so on the basis of its own speci
Page 74 and 75: Arguing for or against the idea of
Page 76 and 77: pushed many economies towards crisi
Page 78 and 79: Whatever new ideologies of tourism
Page 80 and 81: The IPCC Reports are based on reach
Page 82 and 83: As evidenced by the Davos Declarati
Page 84 and 85: supports the position that signific
Page 86 and 87: “voluntary compensation is still
Page 88 and 89: terms of both adaption and mitigati
Page 90 and 91: Pratt and Watts 2000, p. 840). What
Page 92 and 93: co-creator of tourist spaces” (Ek
Page 94 and 95: can researchers use photography and
Page 96 and 97: latter, in order to set the scene f
Page 98 and 99: Even though the Earth is mentioned
Page 102 and 103: social science when it presents its
Page 104 and 105: They further argue that “[t]ouris
Page 106 and 107: meaning and matter. The research ag
Page 108 and 109: REFERENCES Aramberri, J. (2009). Th
Page 110 and 111: Franklin, A. (2004). Tourism as ord
Page 112 and 113: Jóhannesson, G.Þ. and Huijbens. E
Page 114 and 115: Shaw, G. and Williams, A. (2004). T
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