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Leisure Tourism Geographies

Leisure/Tourism Geographies

Intro

• “considers leisure/tourism as an encounter – an encounter that exists between people, people and space, people as socialised and embodied subjects, expectations, experience, and desire.”
• ed. David Crouch, cultural geographer
• “Different ways in which people make leisure…active human subjects” (not as mere consumers, he says)
• leisure = “A process rather than a product, although it is frequently abstracted as the latter.”
  • “being worked, refigured, in flows rather than fixed in time-space”
  • “a practice” in the sense of having “relations and negotiations” which can include frustration and negative experiences too
• Leisure v Tourism
  • “There is a persistent confusion of categories between leisure and tourism…de-differentiated in post-Fordism and together are emblematic of postmodernity”
    • “less and less functional and increasingly aestheticised,” so they look like each other (this idea is in Lash and Urry’s 1994 Economies of Signs and Space
  • “Leisure becomes commodified (in places)
    • this is why leisure spaces are significant? b/c leisure’s commodification increasingly occurs on the level of space? maybe b/c that lets middle class think they have “leisure” even though traditionally implied loads of extra time? and now just a weekend holiday?
    • tourism too commodified
    • “both have the capacity for reflexivity” (odd; later says this is a contemporary phenomenon where you negotiate identity via aestheticization of leisure/tourism)
  • so this book decides to use both terms: “ambivalent position” b/ “in practice there are more similarities than differences” 2
• Leisure
  • B/c “work regimes are becoming increasingly flexible,” it can mean many things
    • activities like gardening or visiting family could either be viewed as routine or as pleasurable leisure time
  • leisure itself vague: is having your boss over for dinner work or leisure? and someone’s leisure space is another’s work space (hospitality employees, etc)
  • feminist works about leisure show that a lot of it is actually masked unpaid labor
• “Leisure/tourism is a means of practising space”
• “Leisure/tourism can provide one means of imaginative play and expressive behavior and identity” 2 but of course we are always set in some kind of social context
• Space and knowledge
  • “Leisure/tourism happens in spaces. That space may be material, concrete and surround our bodies. Space may be metaphorical and even imaginative”
    • metaphors: nature, culturally defined spaces (“the country”)
    • space via metaphors shapes your “enjoyment of leisure”
  • doesn’t want “instrumental” view of space in which it merely gives leisure a place to be, but rather leisure/tourism “As practicised” 2
  • During leisure/tourism, “we figure and refigure our knowledge of material and metaphorical spaces where that leisure happens. Particular features of geography become artefacts through which we remember. They are also embodied in our knowledge as lay geographies that enfold and are enfolded by relationships, movement and laughter” 3
    • this is Radley 1990 in Collective Remembering
    • lay geographies: popular geographies, a hot topic in geography right now: you start at the practice of a subject, not representations by pop culture
      • this is de Certeau here b/c they say people are renegotiating the constrains that socialization and power puts on them
      • lay geography: an ontological knowledge, ‘the feeling of doing’” accdg to Shotter 1993 Cultural Politics in Everyday Life
      • such doing-knowledge incorporates what’s accepted from context and socialization
      • lay geography will be incomplete, incoherent
  • The body: Harre (The Discursive Mind) and Pile and Thrift (Mapping the Subject) focus on the body: the sensing subject whose knowledge comes via embodiment
  • “Knowledge may be too strong a word to apply to the often fleeting, sensual practice of leisure/tourism” “vicarious” “not cumulative”
    • Urry 1990: “Like the occupation of liminal spaces these moments of practice offer a refiguring of normal roles that may be played with or played at rather than temporarily erase or inverted” (The Tourist Gaze)
      • “refiguring, reappraisal, or avoidance of everyday knowledge” 3
    • Sometimes you meet with ritual and repetition RATHER than playful refiguring (I’d say these in practice are indistinguishable w/in the space itself, and can only be judged once the person “returns”)
• tourism/leisure is intersubjective, and the person is a “socialised, embodied” person
• Roject, Decentring Leisure: remember the poetic, which is everywhere leisure is advertised
  • esp w/exotic
• De Certeau brought in explicitly by Ann Game, 1991 Undoing the Social
  • spatial practice: “to engage in a transformation…creatively to enliven, to repeat only the possibility of a new, unique moment”
  • Avoid “crude consumer” readings which “Do not reveal much about spatial practice”
    • Advertising and representations of places, he says, only provide structures for your desire to enter, not create or direct or determine that desire
    • Warren in Place/Culture/Representation 1993: “People may consume, but they make their own sense and value” commodification will “contexualise practice” but not exhaust it
      • me: I see this happening in a radical fashion ie you create your leisure in the sense of opposition against the expected tropes of leisure
    • work on Disneyland Paris has however shown that perhaps people see the “limits” that commodification places on them to be insupportable, not offer any chances for anything (Warren in this book)
  • Game: “desire has indeed been to know the place, to be able to read the codes of, for example, public footpaths and bridle ways; to have a competence with respect to this landscape…to be a local and party to local stories. In a sense, it is a desire to ‘know’ what cannot be seen”
    • you open yourself up to space, not a “proscribed story” “not a gaze but a multi-sensual sensitivity that is also in touch with an imaginary sensitivity”
      • me: is this where Bergson’s notion of that space between sensory input and motor output (affect)? where that space opens up? and it’s opened up b/c you’re supposed to be outside of the realm of necessity?
  • she avoids “overstating” de Certeau or joining in his somewhat unbridled romanticism and optimism
• These essays…
  • don’t use a spectacle-based concept where tourism “objectifies” what you see (instead multiple senses)
  • address the archetypal spaces of country/city, garden, beach, desert island, street
  • see how masculinity is inscribed through tourism practice: the founding fathers (Aitchison)
  • there’s a lot of interest in the state’s participation in the creation of parks, heritage sites, etc; politics of the Mass Trespass, and clubs that preserve areas
  • commodified country, Crouch 1992 in Journal of Rural Studies
  • power, management, control of freedom: “imply access” rather than have actual access (Ravenscroft), while still keeping traditional land ownership
    • commodification is important element in this process
  • places like theme parks present narratives you go through, but the visitors can always exceed this narrative (“Do not saturate” visitors’ experiences)
    • of course I say it’s not enough just to say that but instead you have to understand the relations between the official narrative and the ones that go beyond
    • sites are a “loose shell in which the subject makes he rown meaning and knowledge through her own shared practice and imagination” Ley and Olds on the World’s Fair “Landscape as spectacle” 6
• R. Finnegan: thinking that leisure is “produced” like a commodity makes humans passive, and so we need to reject this model
  • I say, whoa now, just b/c you don’t like the results doesn’t mean the method is flawed
  • you can’t avoid certain truths b/c they’re unpalatable
  • she’s against Bourdieu’s habitus which suggests that people will merely perform their class identities b/c consumption has links to “patterns of inequality and social differentiation” (Bourdieu’s Distinction)
  • her argument: b/c people of diff class positions are doing it (in her case, making music) then class distinctions “break down” (The Hidden Musicians)
    • and she emphasizes people as producing their own leisure goods (ie music)
      • me: but does that exempt them from having to buy instruments? have leisure time from work? finding a place to play?
    • “they may take fragments from produced goods and forms, but reassemble these significantly as they choose, where the familiar producer-consumer relation is unimportant” 6
      • that’s kind of neat
• “the earlier consumption models:” apparently the first way of interpreting these spaces was through a negative anti-commercialism viewpoint
• Some leisure spaces allow people to “create their own play…people informally take part and organize” (Crouch and Tomlinson, “Leisure, Space, and Lifestyle” 1994)
  • walks in country, theme parks, local parks, pubs
• Gregson and Crewe: “increased recognition of active and more diverse modes of practice, at the limits of commerically related consumption” (their work on car shows)
• Me: you have to remember the commercial stuff b/c otherwise it begins to sound like these commercialized spaces are purposefully giving people a place to remix culture in.
  • and that begins personifying these spaces, saying they “provide” spaces for play: that’s eliding the social production of these spaces
• Crouch says the advertising images are “merely imaginary diversion, indefinite mythical aspirations,” but then again they haven’t really defined active practice of leisure in stronger terms than that, unless you count the action of the body
  • that is, when it’s the person producing the images, you say it’s significant, and if it’s some company doing it, it’s not: inconsistent
• Spectator: not passive: “imaginatively and emotionally” engages, conversing about it
  • the control over crowds is “not…overpowering” 7
  • cf Neils Nielson on sports crowd which undergoes “transformations” regardless of police
  • cf Zukin on women feeling more confident when there’s policing around, not feeling less freedom
• “Practice offers a model of a more active process than consumption.” 7
  • esp for “expressive and performative leisure” of ritual and art
  • people are reflexive and conscious, not these dupes! don’t let “elitism” get in the way of analysis
    • “self-empowerment and identity, creativity and confident self-feeling, which may also be shared with others…nothing to do with legal or financial influence”
• New interest in gardening in UK, make your own liminal space!
  • Groening’s chapter in this book: how people take the received ideas and “struggle” with them for self-expression
• Expressive leisure
  • dancing and sports: the body doesn’t actually obey the regulations rigorously
  • cf Merleau-Ponty’s “body-space” as empowerment
  • cf Bourdieu: you can “adjust” your movements despite the regulations, that is, “interrelation between rules and freedom, or contexts and reflexivity” (“From rules to strategies” an interview w/Bourdieu)
    • not “unlimited control” but contextualized (this is what I like and would like to support)
• Rojek’s decentring leisure is from postmodern view of decentered subject
  • Yet says Crouch: “space can be a very useful tool for transforming apparently distanciated selves into the embodied and familiar…may be a nostalgic or imaginative process” 10
• Gorz: remember “communication, giving, creating and aesthetic enjoyment, the production and reproduction of life, tenderness, the relation of physical, sensuous and intellectual capacities, the creation of non-commodity values” qtd 10
• “Finding and reworking new social relationships and identities are important components of practice”
  • Space helps you do this, involving spatial proximity (“proxeme”): nearness, farness: what you do related to how far you’re going
  • “refiguring social relations” you’ve got “frequent investment of self-generation in leisure/tourism, fairly detached from consumerist conditions…and sometimes even outside the regulation of the state” 10
    • “people assert themselves despite such regulations…as typical means of reflexibity”
    • me: stating the case a little too strongly
• Jarlov: creation of summer cottage, using your own creativity to build your identity
  • of course that’s middle class only but no matter the class “what people do bears similar characteristic of negotiation, tacits, imagination, and creativity” 11
    • again it sounds too congratulatory
• Crang: how taking pictures is itself an “embodied social process,” not an abstract gaze 12, and helps to heighten friendship
• Putting It All Together: “aesthetic production, ritual, and the embodied subject embedded in social relationships…produces a participatory lay knowledge”
  • Leisure space lets you “practice values” like home, nation, identity
  • in which space is a “working partner”
  • lay geography: subject “plays an imaginative, reflexive role, semi-attached, socialised, crowded with contexts”
    • its kind of “knowledge” “resembles a patina and kaleidoscope rather than a perspective with horizon, a series of mutually inflected and fluid images rather than a map”
      • me: but what does that say about its potentiality for creative rediscovery? does it truly happen on a diff level than power does? (b/c that’s the silent alternative here…the map, the perspective)
  • liminality: “less a distinct, temporal break than a chance to refigure, replay, remix other everyday spaces, representations, ideas, and lives…not limitless and works, often uneasily, within socialised constraints” 12
    • so the practice is “awkward” and “complex”
• Space, seen as objective; place, seen as practiced by people
• Warning about “Consumption:” Crouch notes that “too often” it becomes about the “production of consumption” which I find to be a good warning
  • Crouch says that the study of space and leisure has been “over-focused on the market, commodification, and its reslts” b/c it’s just a self-fulfiling prophecy mode of scholarship
  • they’re eliding friendship, identity, empowerment, and community-building 13
  • we can get so much info on popular understandings, not elite understandings (“less a debate about authenticity than about empowerment”)

Eric Laurier, “That Sinking Feeling” on upper classes teaching yachting to their young

• “Leisure theory makes it quiet clear that [leisure and work] are utterly entangled”
  • Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory, Decentering Leisure
  • Cohen and Taylor, Escape Attempts
  • Shields Places on the Margin
• “Release, escape and freedom from work in leisure are unattainable states, yet they remain key signifiers in discourses of leisure”
• Veblen: “the dreams of escape for all of society were shaped by a leisure class. Something of this remains in the mythology of the yacht” 202
• Boundary work
  • boat requires lots of knowledge, capital, aesthetics, and actually a moral system of integrity, honor, trust
  • “boundary work:” the work that goes into creating boundaries between included and exluded, “bounds of reasonable behavior”
    • in which embarrassment is the primary vehicle of social control (me: that’s cool, you can see embarrassment in all kinds of narratives about social climbing)
    • showing embarrassment is part of the process b/c recognizing the boundaries usually prefaces you following them 202
• Leisure requires lots of “emotional management”
  • ”’having a bad time’ is the ultimate failure of precious investment given over to leisure” 203
  • “hosting, relaxing, encouraging, and enthusing” which he calls “strategic surface acting”
  • you must surface act in order to maintain the atmosphere of everyone having fun
• Leisure itself is kind of an invitation to embarrassment, the toeing of boundaries
  • “the encouragement of free acts during leisure activities by increasing a situation’s informality multiplies the possibilities of an embarrassing occurrence arising”
  • however there ARE rules and norms: “times of leisure are thus testing times…the work that is done on boundaries”
    • can you fit in? can you enjoy? it tests your competency
• the “Waving-thing people did on boats:” if you don’t wave to other people on boats w/in eyeshot, then you are considered anti-social: “they were making a boundary as they waved and placing each other inside it” 204
  • whereas festivals and regattas required diff kinds of actions, where non-experts were temporarily hailed as friends
  • like the password: it’s a secret password but if you know it you can get in no matter how much a stranger you are: “May I come aboard?”
• “kinetic mimetics:” learning by doing as others do; v. important in exceptional spaces
• “Each time someone steps aboard the boat they are offered a position which they can then best fit according to their dispositions and competence” 205
  • This is all about boundaries and order: “Order can be embodied in the leisure object”
    • So, leisure isn’t the absence of order; it is an alternative order
• Mooring: periodic mooring where you can take the tender (the small boat) out and get ashore “to explore and get away from the excessive physical and emotional intimacy of the boat, my own unease over dressing and undressing rituals, sleeping arrangements and boat-bizarre toilets; all telling signs of my lack of practical knowledge. And the bruises of course from constantly cracking my head, striking shins and catching my shoulders….”
  • And even his fears showed his incompetence (Laurier has decided to do ship-work on a private yacht to write this essay)
  • The experts “put great store by their orderly knowledge of the multiple internal divisions, the poetic nooking and crannying of the boat” w/complex shelving that prompts him to quote Bachelard on the types of objects that give “A model of intimacy” to our intimate spaces
  • there is NO empty space on a yacht, and you must have a “librarian” for the “archive of everyday goods” on the ship “and sitll being able ot surprise with a packet of chocolate biscuits from inside a welly boot” 206
• Mere manuals won’t suffice; you have to ask your fellow sailors when you see them ashore “where is good to go to”
  • “These spatial practices and knowledges allow the people on board their boat to move in and out of commodified places” giving them a “privileged freedom…the power of disconnection from an extensive network”
    • wow: capitalism might actually let you escape it if you’re willing to pay for it…
• The work you do is considerable and difficult but “achieves the effects of escape form other kinds of works and larger ‘systems’ that are beyond the individual. Hugh’s ‘systems’...are his, they are not the systems he was submerged in at his workplace before he retired” 206
• “The yacht gives the impression of being a discrete object, a sealed up place independent of larger human ssemblies. That is part of its exclusionary appeal.”
• He does wrestle with the problems of researching leisure practices: the irony of working at such leisure sites, the feeling of unease if you start to enjoy yourself, the fact that you must be able to afford it, what is authentic while you study it, that you can’t rebveal your real self
  • What I think is cool about it is that even non-researchers have this borderline participation identity (cf Buzard’s Disorienting Fictions)
• “yachting in practice frequently involved hosting guests who were neither emotionally nor practically competetent” 207 haha and “managing” the people who aren’t having a good time
  • this is what he calls the “emotional work” of leisure (Dee, the wife, is doing all this stuff to make Laurier comfortable)
• His position was one of anxiety, embarrassment, etc
• Method: “will drift away from leisure as simply a conservatively defined public good – ‘playtime of the masses’” but instead the elite aspect: about one percent of UK own a boat at all, much less a yacht
  • “power relations,” emotional work, and boundary work make it up, the “field” of elite leisure
• Cruising a yacht: not competitive, discursively created as free time, have to have abstract knowledge (charts) and social knowledge (communicative conventions)
• Notes that young men will “Crew” on someone else’s yacht in order to “prepare” for their later life when presumably they will be wealthy and get a boat of his own (yes, usually boy)
• Creation of enthusiasm for certain kinds of boats is construed as “shared enthusiasm” rather than exclusion: ie, “we like classic boats” doesn’t sound like “we like people who can afford classic boats and aren’t nouveau riche enough to want a brand-new boat and aren’t cultured enough to understand the pull of a classic boat”
• Grossberg’s We gotta get out of here on rock music: “maps of mattering”
  • “These mattering maps are like investment portfolios…different intensities or degrees of investment…practices, pleasures, meanings, fantasties, desires, relations…different purposes which these investments can play. Mattering maps define different forms, quantities, and places of energy. They ‘tell’ people how to use and generate energy” 200-1
  • a matter of managing your emotions, provoking your emotions, and finding your own “emotional and ideological histories”
• You make personal systems of finding out where to go, where to moor, your own personal complex of calculations 201
  • this happens on beaches, cafes, etc too, I say

Daniel Williams, Bjorn Kaltenborn, “Leisure Places and Modernity”

• “Leisure/tourism is often less packaged, commodified, and colonial than contemporary academic renderings seem to permit” 214
• Cottaging is a significant form of leisure travel that people don’t often think of as such
  • unique b/c they’re half resident, half tourist
• On Modernity
  • “Modernity is, in large part, experienced as a tension between the freedom and burden to fashion an identity for oneself”
    • they take this from Berman b/c we want to have roots in stable past, but we also want the growth that destroys the former
  • “Modernity possesses an excess of meaning and no meaning at all.” 215
  • Harvey: “The forebording generated out of the sense of social space imploding in upon us…translates into a crisis of identity. Who are we and what space/place do we belong?” Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference
  • They suggest that instead of seeing “Circulation and movement as the rule rather than the exception,” even though people have before seen movement as special and temporary
    • thus we need to look at “how people in in differing cultural contexts use leisure and travel to establish identity, give meaning to their lives, and connect with place” 215
• Leisure in Modernity
  • “Leisure represents the increased freedom or capacity to seek out and express identity and the burden of discovering meaning in a meaningless world. Guided by fewer stricters on how and what to choose….”
  • And yet as a market it is commodified
  • So it’s a heady mixture of freedom and constraint, authenticity and commodity
• For them modernity refers to the world of ATMs and the internet, but still…
  • Modernity creates a vacuum, a lack of a stable source for identity, leaving people longing for the one place where they’ll have authentic unproblematic identity
  • Their “modernity” is really modernization
  • Their account of this process is supported by Giddens, Massey, Gergen, etc: modernization leads to insecurity leads to search for stable place
• They note that certain responses are reactionary: poor Tonnies gets a bad rap here (bioregionalism, communitarianism)
• Sack’s Homo Geographicus says that instead of modernity being aboue “decline or loss of place-based meaning” instead it’s “a change in how meaning is created in the modern age. These processes thin the meaning of places.”
  • Sack: “From the fewer, more local, and thicker places of premodern society, we now live among the innumberable interconnected thinner places and even empty ones”
• Three reasons for cottages
  • Back to nature (diff kind of embodiment)
  • Inversion: home is for work; cottage is for leisure: relaxed
    • “the line between work and leisure fades” b/c all your activities revolve around the cottage (home chores, cooking dinner, being w/family)
    • many of the residents say they spend a lot of time doing “nothing in particular” (just thinking, reflecting, not aware of time moving)
  • continuity
    • your primary home changes, but not the cottage
    • will pass it on to your kids
    • their “Emotional home”
    • social lives w/other residents, spending a lot of time visiting others and hanging out at bars, restaurants there

David Crouch, “The Intimacy and Expansion of Space”

• What is leisure space practice?
• Leisure space is indeed commercialized, but people overemphasized the “gaze” part of it, consuming the landscape (probably thinking of Urry here)
  • feminist responses reminded people of the embodiedness of leisure: Rose and Wearing
  • the critiques of these commercialized leisure space rants began to take place in mid-90s
  • Warren worked from Gramsci’s saying that “people use different agendas from those supplied by commodification and work their own sense into these leisure spaces” 258
    • response? peple say this idea is too optimistic (that’s what I say too), but at least it’s opened up a real conversation
  • ie family and friendship is going on too
• Crouch: leisure space isn’t just a semiotic experience but a bodily one too
  • people like him use de Certeau to rethink what you mean by “proper knowledge”
  • People like Finnegan show how production and intersubjective experiences occur as well
• Jackson, “Street Life and Carnival” uses Bakhtin’s carnival for leisure
• Lash and Urry, tourism and leisure used to gain sense of security