Introduction to touring consumption

Introduction

The ways in which we consume in our contemporary world are becoming increasingly complex and fascinating, especially when we consider leisure, travel and tourism as global processes of consumption in which flows of people, capital, images and cultures are commoditized and reproduced (Appadurai, 1990; Lanfant et al., 1995; Miles, 2010). Where travel was previously conceived as a break-away from the everyday, contemporary notions of tourism consumption and tourism theories reflect a conflation of tourism and the everyday in which there is no dividing line between travel and everyday life, where tourism and everyday life collapse (Haldrup and Larsen, 2006; Simpson, 2001). Tourism has become a significant area of scholarship especially given tourism industry’s product development opportunities on a global scale. However, the emphasis placed on such research has largely been from a supply-side perspective, reviewing economic value within market segments. What needs to be explored is the shift towards the agencies of the tourist/traveller as consumer and consumption as being embodied as everyday practice in continuous states of touring.

The authors in this issue are not writing about tourism per se; instead we explore touring as an interdisciplinary category of meta-analysis for consumption and consuming. Touring consumption prioritizes the consumption process as the subject. Consumption itself is indeed mobile; it coerces movement as much as it is moved, in the folding and unfolding of social and cultural spaces. In a way, we are talking about a ‘movable type’ of the 21st century in that we move away from a production based on repetitive imprinting to a consumption based on embedded affordances that premise relationality, agency and reflexivity. In other words, as Gilroy (1993) and Clifford (1997) would probably concur, we need to return to our ‘routes’. Touring then can be understood as a playful, yet reflexive means to integrate tourism and travelling and deregulate how we understand their normative counterparts.

Touring is a detraction from a static notion of place or what is usually assumed to be the destination. Rather than reproducing the self-contained tourist destination, it is more important to have the actor (tourist or otherwise) incorporated into a dynamic space and conceptualize an ongoing process unto which the world is constructed. Cresswell and Merriman (2004) emphasize that ‘places and landscapes are continually practiced and performed through the movement and enfolding of a myriad of people and things’ (p. 7). Inasmuch as places are commodified for tourist consumption, the agencies of the individual need to be taken into account across social relations and emergent space. In this sense, touring becomes more meaningful as a verb than as a noun (Cresswell, 2003; Merriman, 2009) as a myriad of embodied subjectivities as opposed to the object of the gaze as exemplified in a tour.

For Neumann and Nünning (2012), ‘[t]he term ‘travelling’ does not merely refer to cultural movement but to creative take-up, change, blending and redefinition … conceived as a multilayered, complex and conflictual process which generates difference and defies tendencies towards homogenisation and universalisation’ (p. 7). It becomes clear that travelling concepts exist as reflexive, interdisciplinary approaches towards the study of culture. In this issue, consumption, authenticity and experience also travel figuratively at a meta-level (Bal, 2002; Neumann and Nünning, 2012) embedding new meanings across various cultural registers.

Few would argue when we say that the process of touring consumption is inherently cultural. Yet consumption is understood within a modernity that advocates a consumer culture, that you are first consuming this text, before you are reading it. Modern-day consumption processes are already largely reflexive, and it has as much to do with an ignorance of sustainable practices, for example, as the learned helplessness attached to what it might mean to purchase clothes at a cheap store in which the clothes are mass produced. As Giddens (1991: 81) has iterated, we have no choice but to choose. Inasmuch as we advocate agencies of consumption, we are also at the same time being swayed by a destabilizing process that alters the ways in which we understand a consumer good, alongside the reappropriation of cultural meanings.

Slater (2002) regards a culture of consumption perspective as ‘an active process of making and using meanings and objects, and the consumer as a subject active in the constitution of its own subjectivity and world’ (p. 148). As opposed to the passive consumer or the cultural dupe, it is imperative to position the consumer as one who consumes in a conscious, reflexive and productive way in which we have a kind of consumption that condones practices of meaning creation and dissemination (Humphreys and Grayson, 2008). Campbell (2005) depicts the contemporary consumer as one who goes beyond the dupe, the rational hero and the post-modern identity seeker. The concept of touring consumption therefore delineates a kind of performance that is not only reproduced but is also productive and emergent in its own right:

Consumption then can be seen not as an end point but as a means of creating and positioning the individual in relation to others. It is the symbolic values that are ascribed to, and derived from, places and their development as coherent and personalised narratives of consumption that are of significance. (Meethan, 2001: 88)

What is pertinent to examine then, in the context of this Special Issue, is the appropriation of spaces in which these practices are being forged, creating new identifications of consumption and commodification processes through the reappraisal of public spaces. Consumption and its relation to markets and culture can be considered in terms of social practices and as a phenomenon to understand processes involved in the creation and reproduction of practices. Warde (2005) relates consumption not as a practice in itself, but a moment in every practice in which appropriation occurs within practices and determines how practice is organized. It becomes apparent that practice accommodates both the holistic role of habituation alongside notions of agency, embodiment and experience.

In order to prioritize the agencies attributed to the consumer, what is traditionally conceived as consumption must also give way to modalities of production by way of reproduction, co-production or even varied understandings of prosumption (Ritzer, 2014; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010; Toffler, 1980) and produsing (Bruns, 2008). It is facile to dismiss the notion of production to the practitioners of the tourism industry for the purpose of creating a sanitized tourist image of place and the hallmark of the tourist gaze. Anholt (2010), for example, argues that it is even possible for nations to determine, measure and manage the reputation of places. However, what seem to be neglected in these accounts are the dynamic agencies of the individual, where the consumer produces and reproduces in the act of consuming. Hence, the production and consumption of tourist commodities are not only implicated in the transfer of capital but also in the transfer of meanings, emotions, experiences and sensibilities attributed to these commodities by both producer and consumer (Hannam and Knox, 2010: 14). It is thus crucial to situate production as an inherent part of consumption, not only in terms of these ideas working together but both being embodied and commingling in unified fashion.

Touring consumption centres on the notion of touring across different fields and explores touring as a category of meta-analysis for consumption and consuming, as well as production and producing. What is key is a critical understanding of how the material and imagined worlds encapsulating the social, political, economic and cultural spheres intersect through commodification processes in touring contexts. It is vital to appreciate how these insights may contribute to our understanding of mobile and fluid states of consumption practices and what the ideal world of tourism would be, given the agencies of the consumer and how this is infused in the everyday. It is imperative to ask ‘guiding questions’ as to the implications of touring consumption in contemporary society and how the everyday is being shaped by touring (Sonnenburg and Wee, 2015: 10).

Finally, in confronting spatial, performative and cultural interrelations between touring and social behaviour, we hope to provide a critical platform for articulation and discussion of the possibilities, problems and complexities of studying consumption in our contemporary world. We attempt to do this through multivocal perspectives which are encapsulated in the forms of ‘authenticity and beyond’, ‘experience and beneath’, and ‘consumption in between’. Hence, we focus on the interconnectedness of meanings produced for consumption across various cultures, disciplines, ethnicities, gender and so on premising especially everyday practices, materialities and encounters.

Authenticity and beyond

The ‘Phileas Fogg’ type of adventure promises the exotic, because it reproduces a sense of authenticity through the incorporation of difference and the desires to be ‘out of place’. This personification affords representations that embody the sensuous self in an imagination of how the incarnations and transubstantiations of ‘Phileas Fogg’ are to be experienced, even to suit the palate. In fact, ‘Phileas Fogg’ also produces crisps with a slogan that reads, ‘exciting taste experiences from around the world’ (‘authentic’ and ‘exotic’ have also been used to replace ‘exciting’). ¹ Without needing to go on board a hot air balloon, ‘They’re not crisps, they’re Phileas Fogg’ ² is brought to you and experienced wherever you are. ‘Phileas Fogg’ tours as much as he is the tour.

Images and experiences of tourism, as well as those of everyday life, seem to converge in a manner in which faraway places move in and out of our living rooms (Bauman, 1998; Harvey, 1989; Larsen, 2008). This naturally begs the question whether cultures are at all rooted to place (Augé, 1995; Meyrowitz, 1985) and, in the case of ‘Phileas Fogg’, whether lucha libre is brought to your living room when you munch on ‘Nacho Cheese and Jalapeno’, Mexican style. ³ In this sense, the performative representation of authenticity (or a kind of para-authenticity) still relies upon a particular idea of place and its relationship to culture (Coleman and Crang, 2002), merely uprooted.

On the other hand, a ‘non-destination’ type of performance can also be contested and considered as a delineation of spaces through embodied movement in a fluid production of meanings. For Edensor (2006), space is ‘reproduced by the enaction of habitual performances and tourist forms of habitus find their expression in particular spaces’ (p. 32). This appeal to Bourdieu’s (2003) sense of habitus or ‘orchestration of habitus’ according to Casey (2001) is something internalized in terms of social practices, but ‘in its actual performance a given habitus is a reaching out to place, a being or becoming in place’ (p. 687). Hence, performance gives rise to emergent space, as opposed to the traditional notions of consumption which demarcate social differentiation and the distinctions of inequality where consumers ultimately reproduce their class consciousness (Bourdieu, 1984).

In a methodological enquiry, Hollinshead (2004) highlights the importance of the ‘symbolic meaning of places (objects and events): what do objects, places, events “authentically” or “precisely” mean for their owning populations?’ (p. 85). The exactitude of what is authentic in terms of the ‘original’ or ‘real’ is less a defining aspect than how the objects, places and events connect with the population or individual in question. This is one of the foremost criteria in which identities are made and remade, but who owns what? How are concepts, values, representations, artefacts owned and how is ownership manifested and for what gains? It is important to tackle these questions by way of a reflexive, self-critical and creative dialogue (Holliday, 2002) in order to understand embodied encounters through an immersion of self with what is construed as tourist practice.

This is evident in ‘Consumers of witnesses? Holocaust tourists and the problem of authenticity’, in which Daniel Reynolds positions the role of holocaust tourism within the framework of authenticity. He begins by questioning the normative, consumerist approach in which tourists embrace wholeheartedly the commodified artefacts of the Holocaust without any room for critical capacity. He then situates Holocaust tourists as active producers and custodians of collective memory, historical knowledge and ethical reflection, with the ability to delineate what is authentic or not authentic within the realm of their experiences. What Reynolds offers is a deeper way to explore how collective memory is organized and reproduced so that the discursive notion of authenticity may be reconsidered in terms of tourist practice such as photography.

In ‘Touring the consumption of the other: Imagining authenticity in the Himalaya and beyond’, Christopher Howard renders descriptions of his ethnographic work in the Himalayas and provides a base towards the notion of authenticity. For him, authenticity is a crucial, modern condition for western travellers visiting the Himalayas, one that functions as an ideal world of encounters with places and people deemed ‘authentic’. Yet, through modern performances of mobilities, these travellers were found to bear, at the same time, a kind of authentic cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing a consumerism that reconciles the here with the there. Howard demonstrates that encounters with radically different environments and less consumeristic cultures of consumption coerce a kind of reflexivity in understanding the paradoxes of modern life.

Experience and beneath

Contemporary tourist cultures develop through the accumulation of experiences and identities within complex networks. As increasing number of nations and cities around the world contest for a share in the global tourism market, there is an underlying need to understand ‘local’ participation in tourist culture. Meethan (2006) illustrates how we need to consider ‘the production of tourist space as the creation of socio-spatial forms which, by referring to common discourses and imagery, provide a framework within which experiences can be organized’ (p. 5). By sidetracking commercial and marketing perspectives in the case of ‘Phileas Fogg’, it is important to consider a consumer who is not only implicated in tourism but one who bears an inherent relationship with and within an everyday construction of identities. In this sense, touring consumption goes beneath tourist representations to explore how embodied spaces are experienced and practised in a multitude of ways involving multimodal sensualities and emergent forms of mobilities, media and identities.

Rather than looking at tourists travelling and consuming culture, it is important to look at tourists as travellers performing a particular culture while doing tourism. Tourist cultures are linked to identities that are ‘multiple and contradictory, constructed and reconstructed through the negotiation of experience that occurs in the context of tourist space’ (Wearing et al., 2010: 12). In this respect, we shift our focus away from traditional subject–object polarities towards a fuzzy convergence of a co-consumption and co-production of culture incorporating blurring experiences and notions of tourism and the everyday, home and away, and ‘dwelling and travelling’ (Clifford, 1997: 2). We need to constantly reflect on the touring mechanisms embedded with meaning and experiential content by showing how various spatial environments are inherently intertwined with values and feelings attached to various modalities of consumption.

Kaya Barry’s work entitled ‘Transiting with the environment: An exploration of tourist re-orientations as collaborative practice’ is also, like Howard, based in the Himalayas, but her emphasis is on experience, how environments produce tangible experiences that arise through collaborative interactions. She reflects on how tourists re-orient with their surroundings and in doing so repositions individual expectations for novel co-consumptive processes. Barry premises the notion of constant transition and modification as practices of mobility and suggests potentials for new relationships with our surroundings between tourists’ expectations and the environments they encounter.

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt’s paper on ‘Experiencing the enchantment of place and mobility’ reveals how experiences are performed as part of place and mobility. He develops the concept of ‘Erlebnis’ and illustrates, in many ways, all the way from the multiple layers of experienced reality to a more removed kind of living adventure. Yet this adventure, or the process of enchantment, is a real experiential engagement that is also, at the same time performed and co-performed. It is through these kinds of co-created environments that tourist consumption could be more effectively understood, especially in terms of how people engage with the world. Bærenholdt uses the example of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde to demonstrate how multiplied realities connect to the making of experience of place and mobility as a kind of enchantment.

It becomes apparent that the designation, idiosyncrasies and particularities of place influence multi-sensual experiences. For Bærenholdt, places become purposeful and afford meaningful tourist performances, and in Barry's case, the environment encapsulates the tourist not only to re-orient and co-consume but also to co-produce new collaborative experiences. Virtual or vicarious, the experience of change and movement is a present one which transforms not only the traditional sense of travel and tourism, but it reconfigures one’s own personal sense of being or becoming in a phantasmal space that is constantly being reshaped and reconstituted.

Consumption in between

The representations, practices and discourses of tourism that shape local knowledge can also be conceptualized as a kind of positionality situated between the self and the other. This negotiated, embodied and performed self may find cultural as well as political significance through the mediation of institutions to ‘intervene in the construction of local identity: to constantly create and recreate a sense of belonging, past, place, culture and ownership’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 9–10). It becomes for Franklin and Crang (2001) a ‘cultural involution’ rather than the quest for authenticity where ‘tourism promotes local awareness’ (p. 10). In his research on a Chinese frontier river town, Oakes (1999) postulates a tourism that conflates with the processes of local appropriation, considering its development as much a local cultural product as it is an external force. What is observed is:

A more culturally complex rendering of tourism’s ‘consumption’ of places, one that sees not merely a globalizing force bearing down upon a once-isolated community but also the dynamic ways local cultural meanings wrap the tourism experience in an envelope of local meaning. (Oakes, 1999: 124)

We are reminded of Bruner’s (2005) ‘borderzone’ in Bali as a ‘meeting place between the tourists who come forth from their hotels and the local performers, the ‘natives’, who leave their homes to engage the tourists in structured ways in predetermined localities for defined periods of time’ (p. 17). However, this performative interaction between tourists and locals is not a linear impartation of culture but an emergent one in which ‘both locals and tourists engage in a co-production: They each take account of the other in an ever-shifting, contested, evolving borderzone of engagement’ (Bruner, 2005: 18). This playful engagement illustrates most clearly that tourism not only shapes Balinese culture but could even be said to be a part of Balinese culture (see Bruner, 2001).

It is apparent that as much as touring consumption concerns the consumption of place and practice, it is also about consumptive relationships and tensions explored in place and in-between spaces. There is constant negotiation and being in-between spaces that are determined as tourist places, given both industry backing for the packaging of touristic consumption and the dynamic flux of tourist and local practices (among many others). Chiara Rabbiosi and Maria Skivko both situate interrelated concepts of shopping and fashion as tourist practice. Rabbiosi is focused on the co-production of consumptive leisure through shopping, and Skivko demarcates fashion as the object of consumption, and how these representations are manifested through tourist practice.

In ‘Itineraries of consumption: Co-producing leisure shopping sites in Rimini’, Chiara Rabbiosi explores leisure shopping and its emergence as a new performative realm by considering shoppingscapes as a co-production of shopping and tourism. She positions contingent performances of tourists, retailers and tour operators in Rimini and explores how they introduce leisure shopping in a location that is more commonly associated with beach tourism. Rabbiosi focuses on leisure shopping and tourism impacting on spatial practices in Rimini and how itineraries of consumption are able to deal with overlapping tourist flows through tourists’ traditional leisure shopping and spatial patterns.

Maria Skivko’s paper entitled ‘Touring the fashion, branding the city’ researches how city spaces are being authenticated based on the appeal of the fashion phenomena and how this is commodified through representation. For her, consumption as an everyday practice in tourism and fashion can be examined in terms of consumer patterns and integrated into the contemporary urban environment. Skivko considers the representation of cities and its implications towards tourist practices and corresponding consumer behaviour. She situates her work in urbanscapes to understand how various elements of fashion are represented in both the physical places and imaginary spaces of Paris and Amsterdam. With these backdrops, Skivko identifies three perspectives starting from a ‘branded city’ in which institutionalized fashion brands represent the city through retail, ‘city look’ describing how people perform urban lifestyles through identification processes and ‘urban garments’ which are specific fashion objects that represent a city’s fashion trends.

It becomes evident that places emerge as touring spaces when they are performed (Coleman and Crang, 2002) and when they are appropriated, used and made part of memories, narratives and images of people engaged in embodied social practices (Urry, 2006). By incorporating Phileas Fogg who represents a visual and disembodied experience of place, the concept of touring consumption is an affordance of space for thinking around tourism as social and cultural practice and exploring how people and places interact to constitute performance alongside how these touring spaces are practised (Crouch, 1999; Edensor, 1998; Rojek and Urry, 1997; Wee, 2012). Crang (1996) would assert that such imagined knowledge and material consumption, lucha libre or otherwise, are ‘characterized not only by the points in space where they take and make place, but by the movements to, from and between those points’ (p. 47). As such, this in-between and movable type of touring consumption mystifies consumer identity across social relations, leading to emergent spaces and new forms of materialities, identities and reflexivities.