Untitled

Whatever alternatives there may be, it is clear that these would entail an
engagement with:
multiple associations of humans and nonhumans waiting for their unity
to be proved by work carried out by the collective, which has to be
specified through the use of the resources, concepts, and institutions of
all peoples who may be called upon to live in common on an earth that
might become, through a long work of collecting, the same earth for
all (Latour 2004, p. 46).
Earthly methodology
About to reach the end of our journey on the Island of tourism and tourist
imaginationings we cannot avoid feeling an affinity with Bob Dylan when
he somewhere stated that; “Images are taken at face value and it kind of
freed me up”. And method can be freed too. Without the heavy burden of
being a set of techniques for providing an image of a given reality “out
there” or a subjective order “in here”, method becomes productive of
realities rather than merely reflecting them:
Method, then, unavoidably produces not only truths and non-truths,
realities and non-realities, presences and absences, but also
arrangements with political implications. It crafts arrangements and
gatherings of things – and accounts of the arrangements of those things –
that could have been otherwise (Law 2004, p.143).
That methods participate in producing realities, like those we find in
tourism studies, challenges many of the traditional and standard accounts
that one finds in textbooks on method. Most importantly, it signals a kind
of ontological politics in research:
What does that mean in practice? The answer is that I do not know. But
one thing is clear. In the longer run it is no longer obvious that the
disciplines and the research fields of science and social science are
appropriate in their present form (Law 2004, p.156, see also Mol 2000,
p. 97).
In the short run, we have depicted tourism and images as practices
of imaginationing and on-going exemplifications of life in-between
101