Andrew's Wiki
Consuming Places
- Thesis
- Key to understanding place, for any type of scholar, is to understand the sociology of place, that is, where “The relations between sociology and place” come together
- And to understand anything about consumption, you must investigate the relationship between material objects and built environments.
- to understand “place” is complex and requires massive theoretical apparatus b/c place is not an empirical object of investigation
- sociology has to understand “time, place, and nature” better to understand place
- places are “at least partly” consumed, and we haven’t given enough attention to it
- Consuming Places
- Places are being restructured as sites for consumption
- Places are consumed, mostly visually
- Literal consumption: places are “Exhausted” by their visitors, “depleted or devoured” by visitation and its support structures (industry, history, culture, natural environments)
- These places consume your identity too
- History
- 60s and 70s economic changes and new innovations by Marxism begin to revise social sciences
- late 1980s culture and politics
- led to two diff strains now: places are culturally constructed; places are intimately related to their economic basis in an “economy of signs”
- Also, in geography and sociology in the 80s they came to question the basis of sociology (man versus nature) and have thus questioned the Enlightenment view of nature as “out there” and to be mastered
- sociology had thought of social structures independently of time and place; ending at the borders of the nation-state; not much change admitted either
- Soja says: the innovations that changed spatial basis of life (telegraph, skyscrapers, airplane, cubism, etc) weren’t really given attention to by social theorists; became the special province of positivist geography
- Max Weber’s BROTHER was a theorist of industrial location, WOW!
- Giddens, structuration: “skillful and knowledgeable actions of social agents” both create and use as a medium a social structure
- Influential readings
- tourism as consumption
- “the tourist gaze” in the “making” of the Lake Country as a tourist site
- what you are looking at is a fetishized image made meaningful within a system of signs
- beings with Henry James: “tourists are vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”
- tourism can’t be separated from the society it’s in
- consumption as a profoundly social process that involves relations of inequality, not a particular moment of purchase
- for example consumption often happens in groups: families, couples, groups of friends
- you often produce and consume a particular SOCIAL experience which is hard to “see” and analyze
- “PART OF WHAT PEOPLE BY IS IN EFFECT A PARTICULAR SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF OTHER CONSUMERS” 131 which is diff for the “provider/merchant” to ensure
- consumption had been seen by sociology as a differential mechanism revolving around the purchase of discrete material goods, even though Marxist critiques of consumption have already made the point that all consumption is social
- you should also consider services, in this case, the “services” of tourism and “holiday-making” 129
- tourism as conflict: ie visitors and locals; visitors and police; merchants and “nature;”
- tourism as congestion b/c of competition: you have to get there now before everyone else; where the crowd destroys your freedom, relaxation
- tourism as reworking of local and national identities
Created on January 4, 2009 06:04:31
by
shawna?
(71.58.67.97)