Materialities of tourism in the twenty-first century: A very brief introduction

In tourism people interact routinely with a wide range of objects and material environments; they bring their gendered, racialized and aged bodies into play when performing leisure and tourism.

The ‘material turn’, seen across a number of disciplines in recent years, turns, in this issue, towards tourism studies. From its early appearances as ‘thing theory’, marked by Bill Brown’s special edition of Critical Inquiry in the Fall of 2001, it has had renewed impact in the social sciences, even though parts of anthropology would insist that they have always paid profound and detailed attention to ‘material cultures’. What changed, for instance, with the impact of Bruno Latour’s (2013) insistence on the agency of things and his inclusion of non-humans in a reconfigured governance model, is that objects achieve a surprising ‘vibrancy’ (Bennett, 2010). To coin a slogan, the newer materialist turn enjoins us not to see things as all being dead in the same way (merely material, all composed of atoms), but being potentially alive in their own unique ways.

Objects and non-humans are not just there to serve us, or, for the gaze of the humanities, to provide rich textual or symbolic ‘readings’. ‘We’ are no longer looking out and interpreting the ‘world’ across an imaginary but powerful divide. There are complex pathways of humans and non-human entanglement that need to be traced along knowledge acquisition and affect acquisition pathways. This is where tourism studies’ traditional emphasis on real-world trajectories comes to the fore.

Material things have a particular value in the leisure and tourism markets as they are absolutely necessary for human agency and performativity in them, for example, as souvenirs (think Eiffel Tower on key chains), background images for photographs (think Princess Diana in front of the Taj Mahal) or means of embodying otherness or fandom (think Japanese children in the United States Basketball jerseys). When future archaeologists excavate the strata of the Anthropocene, much of what they will find, and as such the modes of existence they might generate from it, will be based on these interwoven credentials of subject/objecthood. A vast literature shows how our culture and the social are tied up with and enabled by such objects, technologies and materialities (Dant, 1998, 1999; Hinchliffe, 1996, 2003; Ingold, 2000; Michael, 2000; Miller, 1998; Murdoch, 1997; Whatmore, 1999, 2002). Inspired tourism researchers have drawn from this in their accounts of tourism as embodied, multi-sensuous and technologized performances (Bærenholdt et al., 2004; Crouch, 2002, 2003; Franklin, 2003; Löfgren, 1999; Pons, 2003).

This Special Issue on ‘Materialities of Tourism’ originates from a panel at the 2012 conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) that was co-organized by us. Its contributions are empirical studies that present particular cases in point. Stephen Muecke and Carsten Wergin introduce the phenomenon of the ‘survenir’ through which tourists inscribe new meaning to places. In their discussion of the interior of the iconic Australian outback pub Daly Waters, they present tourists as postcolonial subjects desperate to continue a colonization process that overrides the Aboriginal story. Felicity Picken follows in this line of thought on how tourism prepares people to see places as ‘objects of tourism’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 10) as she presents the materiality of tourism photography. Adrian Franklin adds to this a historical dimension when in his article he investigates the origins and liveliness of the humble ‘bucket and spade’ and how it shaped the beach cultures of the United Kingdom, the United States and the beyond. Chris Gibson then takes us to the United States and its longstanding history of Texan boot-making. Following the tracks of the boot-leather industry, he traces the diverse networks and passionate histories of those who stand tall in the comfort of the Wild West. Finally, Debra L. Gimlin turns to another contemporary and booming market in the material tourism sector, that of beauty surgeries and its overseas industry. In her comparative study, she explains how holidaying, its survenirs and their embodiments take on a new dimension as British and American consumers return from Istanbul with new teeth and noses.

The diversity of instances presented in this Special Issue shows how a great variety of things and technologies can be understood in tourism as such ‘prostheses’ that enhance our bodies and enable us to do things and sense realities that would otherwise be beyond our physical means (Parrinello, 2001: 210). Surgical tourism, the respective readings of the ‘survenir’, of photographic ‘snapshots’, ‘Texan boots’ and ‘buckets and spades’ take this to a new level. If their materialities are what will be left of our world, the discussions in this Special Issue might at least help those future archaeologists to understand what made them a worthwhile experience for us.