Urry (2002) - The Tourist Gaze

From Inventiopedia

Urry, John (2006) "Extract from 'The Tourist Gaze'" in Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith: Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge, pp 220-226.
Extracted from: Urry, John (2002) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage (pp 1-7).

This extract appears to be from the start of Urry's book, from a section entitled "Why tourism is important" - and it argues for exactly that claim. It presents the topic of the book as this:

This book then is about how in different societies and especially within different social groups in diverse historical periods the tourist gaze has changed and developed. I shall elaborate on the processes by which the gaze is constructed and reinforced, and will consider who or what authorizes it, what its consequences are for the 'places' which are its object, and how it interrelates with a variety of other social practices. (220-221)

He then goes on to list some "minimal characteristics" of the social practices of tourism, of which I found a few particularly interesting:

1. Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work. It is one manifestation of how work and leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in 'modern' societies.[...]
7. The tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are viewed because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary. The viewing of such tourist sights often involves different forms of social patterning, with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than normally found in everyday life. People linger over such a gaze which is then normally visually objectivied or captured through photographs, postcards, films, models and so on. These enable the gaze to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured. 8. The gaze is constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs. When tourists see two people kissing in Paris what they capture in the gaze is 'timeless romantic Paris'. [...] As Culler argues: 'the tourist is interested in everything as a sign of itself...'
[...]
9. An array of tourist professionals develop who attempt to reproduce ever new objects of the tourist gaze.[...] (222-223, emphasis mine)

Urry also briefly outlines the history of tourism as an elite practice, from the travels made possible by the pax romana via 13-14th century pilgrimages to the concept of "The Grand Tour" for sons of the aristocracy and, later, the middle classes in the 17th-19th centuries. He points out, however, that

before the nineteenth century few people outside the upper classes travelled anywhere to see objects for reasons that were unconnected with work or business. And it is this which is the central characteristic of mass tourism in modern societies, namely that much of the population in most years will travel somewhere else to gaze upon it and stay there for reasons basically unconnected with work. (224)

Finally, Urry offers a number of statistics to document the massive scale of modern travel and tourism - of which one in particular caught my attention: "At any one time there are 300,000 passengers in flight above the US, equivalent to a substantial city" (224). Unfortunately Urry doesn't give a source for this particular piece of information, but if we take his word for it, this is a truly fascinating figure. Worldwide, he points to "698 million international passenger arrivals each year", projected to reach one billion by 2010.

--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 15:27, 28 April 2010 (UTC)