This article was downloaded by:[Genc, Ertugrul]On: 23 May 2008Access Details: Sample Issue Voucher: Leisure Studies [subscription number 793401025]Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Leisure StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713705926

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life andSociality on the MoveJonas Larsen aa Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008

To cite this Article: Larsen, Jonas (2008) 'De-exoticizing Tourist Travel: EverydayLife and Sociality on the Move', Leisure Studies, 27:1, 21 — 34

To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/02614360701198030URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614360701198030

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will becomplete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with orarising out of the use of this material.

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

Leisure Studies,Vol. 27, No. 1, 21–34, January 2008

ISSN 0261-4367 (print)/ISSN 1466-4496 (online)/08/010021–14 © 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/02614360701198030

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move

JONAS LARSENRoskilde University, Roskilde, DenmarkTaylor and Francis LtdRLST_A_219725.sgm

(Received February 2006; revised July 2006; accepted December 2006)10.1080/02614360701198030Leisure Studies0261-4367 (print)/1466-4496 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis0000000002007Dr JonasLarsenjonaslar@ruc.dk

ABSTRACT Tourism is traditionally treated as an escape from everyday life and tourism theory isconcerned with extraordinary places. Tourism and everyday life are conceptualized as belonging todifferent ontological worlds. The former is the world of the extraordinary while the latter is one ofthe ordinary. This interdisciplinary review article argues that this separation is flawed by examiningresearch that shows how leisure travel, tourism and everyday life intersect in complex ways. It beginswith a conceptual discussion of the everyday, which works as the theoretical foundation for the arti-cle. Then the article outlines how everyday routines and conventions inform tourism performances:much traditional tourism revolves around socializing pleasantly with one’s co-travelling family andfriends, while more and more tourism concerns visiting friends and family members living elsewhere.The conclusion discusses what consequences an everyday life perspective has for future tourismresearch.

KEYWORDS: tourism, everyday life, family life, performances, dwelling, networking

Introduction

In tourism studies and the social sciences more broadly, tourism is treated as anexotic set of specialized consumer products occurring at specific times and placeswhich are designed, regulated or preserved more or less specifically for tourism,such as resorts, attractions and beaches. Much tourism theory, such as the seminalwork of MacCannell (1976) and Urry (1990, 2002a), defines tourism by contrast-ing it to home geographies and ‘everydayness’: tourism is what they are not. It is‘a no-work, no-care, no-thrift situation’, according to Cohen (1979: p. 181). Themain focus in such research is on the extraordinary, on places elsewhere. Tourismis an escape from home, a quest for more desirable and fulfilling places. As a result,tourism studies produce fixed dualisms between the life of tourism and everydaylife: extraordinary and ordinary, pleasure and boredom, liminality and rules, exoticothers and significant others, to mention some. Such ‘purification’ means thateveryday life and tourism end up belonging to different ontological worlds, the

Correspondence Address: Jonas Larsen, Roskilde University, 0.2, Post Box 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Email: jonaslar@ruc.dk

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

22 J. Larsen

worlds of the mundane and the exotic, respectively (exceptions are Crouch, 1999;Löfgren, 1999; Williams & Kaltenborn, 1999; McCabe, 2002; Franklin, 2003;Uriely, 2005; Hall, 2005; Edensor, 2006).

This article discusses the problems of this separation between tourist travel andeveryday life. It takes inspiration from everyday life theorist Lefebvre’s (1991)claim that all aspects of social life are infused with elements of everyday life: nopractices escape ‘everydayness’. The article discusses some of the ways that every-day life permeates tourism consumption and especially how ‘tourist escapes’ areinformed by everyday performances, social obligations and significant others.

Discussion of everyday life is absent from tourism theory and research: they aremerely tourism theory’s mysterious ‘Other’: everywhere and nowhere, known andyet unknown. The article therefore begins with a theoretical discussion of everydaylife. It is argued that one significant aspect of everyday life is routine and that thisis part of the traveller’s baggage. However, it is simultaneously stressed howeveryday performances have potentials for creativity and the unexpected, and howmany everyday spaces are sites of tourist consumption. Then the significance ofsignificant others and face-to-face sociality in relation to everyday life arediscussed.

The main part of the article is concerned with reviewing, elaborating upon andbringing together various research projects within leisure studies, tourism stud-ies, migration studies and social networks analysis addressing connections andoverlaps between everyday life and leisure travel. Particular attention is paid tothe influential work of John Urry (1990, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2006a;Larsen et al., 2006a, 2006b) because it partly illustrates how leisure travel is nolonger merely an escape from everyday life but also a way of performing it.First, Urry’s hegemonic concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ is discussed (1990). Whilethe ‘tourist gaze’ was originally constructed on the premise that its opposite isordinary everyday life, Urry later clarified this by pointing out that the ‘touristgaze’ is both constructed and takes place through everyday media cultures.Second, it is shown how the recent ‘performance turn’ destabilizes the ‘touristgaze’ and highlights how many tourist practices are embodied, habitual andinvolve ordinary objects, places and practices. Third, migration, diaspora, tour-ism and social network research showing how leisure travel is concerned withvisiting and hosting significant others and attend to ‘obligatory’ social events isdiscussed. The conclusion discusses the implications that this article has forfuture studies.

Everyday Life

It is partly understandable why tourism researchers have distinguished touristtravel from everyday life. In most of the everyday life literature ‘everydayness’ ischaracterized by repetition, habitual practices, obligations and reproduction. AsEdensor says:

The everyday can partly be captured by unreflexive habit, inscribed on the body, a normativeunquestioned way of being in the world…The repetition of daily, weekly and annualroutines…how and when to eat, wash, move, work and play, constitutes a realm of ‘common-sense’…These shared habits strengthen affective and cognitive links, constitute a habitus

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 23

consisting of acquired skills which minimize unnecessary reflection every time a decision isrequired. (2001: p. 61)

Featherstone contrasts everyday life with ‘heroic life’: ‘The heroic life is the sphereof danger, violence and the courting of risk whereas everyday life is the sphere ofwomen, reproduction and care’ (1992: p. 165). While ‘heroic life’ is male, unpre-dictable and nomadic, everyday life is fixed to a female and routinized domesticsphere. In this light, since travel has long been associated with masculine values ofadventure and self-realization, travel seems to epitomize ‘heroic life’.

However, this crude account of both travel and everyday life can be challenged.As Edensor points out, there is more to everyday life than the habitual, pre-scriptedand ordinary. The classical texts of Lefebvre (1991) and de Certeau (1984) showthe potential of everyday practices for creativity, subversion and resistance. Inparticular, de Certeau stressed the need for examining the ‘tactics’ that people intheir everyday life employ to manipulate officially inscribed signs, objects andplaces:

…the presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators and popu-larizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) tell us nothing about what it is for its users.We must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. (1984: p. xi)

In de Certeau’s work, the everyday is the heroic realm of modernity, full ofcreativity, manipulation and resistance. As discussed by Hingham (2002), mostwriters on everyday performances highlight ambivalent relationships betweenpossibilities and constraint, scripting and creativity, which reflect that everydaylife is a complex notion.

What is less discussed in the literature is the significance of sociality and socialrelations to everyday life. The classic texts of Simmel (1950, 1997a, 1997b) andGoffman (1959) are exceptions here. Both argue that humans are social beings andthat most everyday practices are social interactions which take place in close(visual) proximity to other people. One major aspect of Simmel’s work exploreshow modern cities create new experiences of proximity: ‘modern times for Simmelare experienced largely through changing relations of proximity and distance and,more broadly, through cultures of movement and mobility’ (Allen, 2000: p. 55).Simmel argued that people in the modern metropolis increasingly found them-selves amongst strangers and they therefore had to learn the social skill of distanc-ing themselves from the mobile crowd. Simmel (1950) adopted the figure of thestranger to illustrate the modern metropolis’ unique geographies of proximity anddistance: here people are close in a spatial sense, yet remote in a social sense. YetSimmel also discusses everyday interaction among significant others. Simmelspeaks of ‘sociability’ to denote those kind of interactions characterized by freeplay and non-instrumental and emotional sociality. ‘Sociability’ is a ‘pure interac-tion’ between, in theory, equal participants who come together for the sole purposeof enjoying each other’s company. One example of sociability is the communalmeal (Simmel, 1997b). More broadly, visiting and hosting friends and relatives –crucial leisure activities that often involve some travel – can be seen as emblematicforms of ‘sociability’ (see below).

Goffman’s classical Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) outlines a‘dramaturgical’ framework to describe everyday social interactions, especially

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

24 J. Larsen

amongst strangers in public places. For Goffman, the self is a performed character,a public performer with carefully managed impressions. Everyday life is describedas fundamentally performative and put on stage for an audience. Everyday life isperformed in the ambivalent space between prefixing choreographies and impro-visational performances; performances are culturally scripted but they are notpredetermined. People, as everyday actors, are reflexive and strategic agentsmoving between different socio-spatial stages (or regions) requiring and allowingspecific performances. These are front-stages and back-stages. A public perfor-mance is put on show in front-stages; in back-stage regions these performancesmay ‘knowingly contradict’; ‘back-stages’ allow masks to be lifted temporarily(1959: p. 114).

Spatialities and Mobilities of Everyday Life

Goffman’s work illustrates how everyday life is performed in various places, buthome is traditionally regarded the base (especially for women) for everyday life,the ‘back-stage’ where families can be themselves. Heller writes: ‘integral to theaverage everyday life is awareness of a fixed point in space, a firm position fromwhich we “proceed” (whether every day or over larger periods of time) and towhich we return in due course. This firm position is what we call “home”’ (1984:p. 239). While there is a physical and static element to home, it is paramount alsoto detect how home can be mobilized and connected to other places. FollowingBerger (1984), we can understand home not solely as being rooted in one particularphysical place, but also as something that involves, and can be mobilized through,social habits, small daily rituals, precious objects, mundane technologies andsignificant others.

Households are plugged into an ever-expanding array of communication tech-nologies that connect them to the outside world: land line phones, mobile phones,computers, email accounts, TV channels, cars and so on. The home has become acommunication hub infused with mobile messages. The ‘time–space compression’(Harvey, 1989) that such technologies create means that distant places travel in andout of our living rooms:

But most of us are on the move even if physically, bodily, we stay put. When, as is our habit,we are glued to our chairs and zap the cable or satellite channels on and off the TV screen –jumping in and out of foreign spaces with a speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic jetsand cosmic rockets, but nowhere staying long enough to be more than visitors, to feel chez soi.(Bauman, 1998: p. 77)

Far from being grey and ordinary, our everyday spaces are full of exotic and spec-tacular signs. ‘Time–space compression’ also seems to involve ‘time–space distan-ciation’ (Giddens, 1990), that is, the geographical spreading of people’s socialnetworks. This is partly the result of recent increases in travel and in longer-distance communications through cheaper international calls, text messages andfree emails (Wellman, 2002; Urry, 2003). Larsen et al. show how it has becomecommon to have strong ties at-a-distance and sustain them through phone calls,text messages, emails and occasional visits. Socializing at-a-distance has becomea significant everyday practice. The social sciences can no longer equate closeness

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 25

and communion with geographical nearness and daily or weekly co-present visits(2006a, 2006b).

Yet geographers and transport researchers often highlight that everyday activi-ties and travel predominately take place within a localized ‘activity space’(Massey, 1995; Holloway & Hubbard, 2001; Ellegaard & Welhemson, 2004).Such research tends to be somewhat ‘a-mobile’ as it neglects the significance oflong-distance travel, occasional sociality and mediated communication to thespatialities of everyday life. Most social life during weekdays revolve aroundlocalized areas and routinized, brief trips, while many people undertake longerjourneys at weekends and holidays (Axhausen et al., 2002). This article highlightshow everyday life research should analyse how everyday practices of caring andsocializing also take place at a-distance and how people increasingly need to travelto socialize with their significant others. Everyday socializing is mediated anddistanciated.

Thus the notion of the everyday is complex. Some use the notion to highlight thequotidian while others speak of creativity and subversion. This complexity makes‘everydayness’ a useful concept in relation to studies of tourist performances. Onthe one hand, it allows an analysis of how ‘tourist escapes’ are full of everydaypractices such as eating, drinking, sleeping, brushing teeth, changing nappies, read-ing bedtime stories and having sex with one’s partner, as well as co-travellingmundane objects such as mobile phones, cameras, food, clothes and medicine.‘Even when a traveler leaves home, home does not leave the traveler’ (Duncan &Lambert, 2003; Pons, 2003; Molz, 2005). Home is therefore part of tourists’baggage and bodily performances. On the other hand, while neglecting the every-dayness of everyday life (Felski, 1999), de Certeau’s ‘resistance’ perspective canhelp to write more dynamic and open accounts of performances than is commonin the tourism literature, where tourists so often drown in a sea of signs andchoreographies (see Larsen, 2005).

Following Simmel and Goffman, an everyday perspective also enables studiesof the significance of significant others, sociability and role playing to the tourismexperience; to insert the social into tourism research. Tourism studies has mostlyneglected issues of sociality and co-presence and thereby overlooked how muchtourist travel is concerned with (re)producing social relations. Finally, an attentionto everyday media cultures makes problematic the idea that everyday life is greyand uneventful, as the following discussion of the ‘tourist gaze’ illustrates.

The Tourist Gaze and Everyday Media Flows

In The Tourist Gaze (1990) Urry argues that tourism is formed in opposition toeveryday life: a ‘key feature would seem to be that there is a difference betweenone’s normal place of residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze…Tourismresults from a basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraor-dinary’ (1990: p. 11). In this early work the distinction between home and away,ordinary and extraordinary, is the identifying regulator of what may come to beconstituted as an extraordinary place of the ‘tourist gaze’. However, in Urry’s laterwork this distinction dissolves. Now it is stressed how ‘post-modern’ mediacultures saturate everyday life, which therefore itself becomes not merely grey and

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

26 J. Larsen

ordinary, but also full of exotic signs and consumer goods. Consequently, in 1994Lash and Urry felt able to proclaim the ‘end of tourism’:

People are tourists most of the time, whether they are literally mobile or only experience simu-lated mobility through the incredible fluidity of multiple signs and electronic images. (1994:p. 259)

‘The tourist gaze’ is no longer set apart from everyday life, as it used to be inmodern times, but has become part of it. There is a de-differentiation between tour-ism and everyday life (see also Rojek, 1993). Thus ‘the end of tourism’ actuallymeans not less but more touristic gazing because ‘the post-tourist does not have toleave his or her house in order to see many of the typical objects of the gaze’(2002a: p. 90). Although Urry occasionally suggests that ‘imaginative travel’through media cultures replace ‘corporeal travel’, the ‘end of tourism’ thesis reallysuggests the ‘touristification of everyday life’ and de-differentiation betweentourism, everyday life and various form of travel:

…there is no evidence that virtual and imaginative mobility is replacing corporeal travel, butthere are complex intersections between these different modes of travelling that are increas-ingly de-differentiated from one another. (Urry, 2002a: p. 141)

While the ‘tourist gaze’ blurs home and away by ‘exoticizing’ homegeographies, it is now discussed how the ‘performance turn’ connects tourism andeveryday life by highlighting the everyday and habitual nature of much tourismlife.

Mundane and Collective Tourism Performances

A ‘performance turn’ can be traced from the late 1990s in tourism theory (Edensor,1998, 2000, 2001; Franklin & Crang, 2001; Perkins & Thorns, 2001; Coleman &Crang, 2002; Crouch, 2003; Szerszynski et al., 2003; Bærenholdt et al., 2004;Haldrup & Larsen, 2006). This turn is formed in opposition to the ‘tourist gaze’ andother representational approaches privileging the eye and discourses (e.g.MacCannell, 1976; Shields, 1991; Dann, 1996; Selwyn, 1996) by arguing that‘tourism demands new metaphors based more on being, doing, touching and seeingrather than just “seeing”’ (Cloke & Perkins, 1998: p. 189; see also Edensor, 2006).It is inspired by Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical sociology in seeing tourist staffand tourists as expressive everyday ‘performers’ and by the attention given in‘non-representational geography’ (for a review, see Lorimer, 2005) to embodiedand technologized everyday practices.

The ‘performance turn’ redirects tourism research in several ways. By stressingontologies of acting and doing, it highlights the corporeality of tourist bodies andthe material, multi-sensuous affordances of places that have so often been reducedto ‘travelling eyes’ and dematerialized ‘imagescapes’. It shifts methodologicalattention from meanings and discourses to embodied, multi-sensuous, collaborativeand technologized doings and enactments. Crucially, in relation to this article, the‘performance turn’ explicitly conceptualizes tourism as intricately tied up witheveryday practices, ordinary places and significant others, such as family membersand friends, but co-residing and at-a-distance. In Edensor’s work (1998, 2000, 2001)where performances are seen as potentially creative, unreflexive, unintentional and

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 27

habitual enactments are also stressed. This differs from ideas of tourism as a liminalzone, where everyday conventions are suspended (e.g. Shields, 1991):

Rather than transcending the mundane, most forms of tourism are fashioned by culturallycoded escape attempts. Moreover, although suffused with notions of escape from normativity,tourists carry quotidian habits and responses with them: they are part of their baggage.(Edensor, 2001: p. 61)

Elsewhere, he argues:

Many tourist endeavours are mundane and informed by an unreflexive sensual awareness, andhence not particular dissimilar to everyday habits and routines. (2006: p. 26)

Tourists never just travel to places: their mindsets, routines and social relationstravel with them. The imaginative geographies of tourism are as much about‘home’ as faraway places. Such focus upon everyday practices and the ordinary isparticularly stressed by Pons (2003) in his Heidegger-inspired dwelling perspec-tive. Against ideas that tourism performances mainly engage the visual sense, thatthey are extraordinary and somewhat aloof and disembodied, Pons argues thattourism is a multi-sensuous and practical way through which we are involved inthe symbolic and not least the physical world; it is a particular way of being-in-the-world, of dwelling in it. He uses the notion of dwelling ‘because it enables agenuinely geographical and social account of tourism that prioritizes everydayembodied practices’ (2003: p. 47, my italics). Tourism, he argues, is essentiallyabout practising space and practising through space, it is about embodied doings:

It is because we are doing something in a particular way that we are tourists and we adopt tour-ist consciousness. The most relevant embodied practices through which we become tourists areeveryday ordinary, and often non-representational, practices. It is, therefore, insufficient intourist studies to focus only on extraordinary practices, like sightseeing… (2003: p. 52)

Pons asks us to explore the many more or less ‘ordinary’ practices and placesthat are made pleasurable on a holiday through creative inversions and how touristsmake themselves at home in foreign places (see Andrews, 2005). This requiresthat we de-exoticize tourism theory and adopt a non-elitist approach to tourismpractices.

Dwelling and building is intimately connected in Heidegger’s thinking (1993).Leisure and tourism research has shown how allotments and summer cottages aresignificant places of working and dwelling where ‘people are working intensivelymost of the time’; through free creative play (Jarlöv, 1999: p. 231). Partlytherefore, summer cottages are places where people often put down a rooted senseof belonging (Jarlöv, 1999; Löfgren, 1999; Williams & Kaltenberg, 1999; Hall &Müller, 2004). But tourists in rented summer cottages can also be said to bedwelling:

Up for an early morning bath, at the beach all day, bathing, building castles in the sand, collect-ing mussels at the beach, the children tumbling around in the sand, had lunch on the beach.Walked to our house, decorated the house with shells and stones, played cards with the chil-dren. (Diary entry by a German woman, quoted in Haldrup, 2004: p. 444)

Heidegger’s (1993) equation between building and dwelling is evident here. Thefamily is domesticating the vacation stages by building sandcastles and decoratingthe rented house with the collected shells and stones. This landscape is what Ingold

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

28 J. Larsen

would call a taskscape (Ingold, 2000; and see Edensor, 2006). The notion oftaskscape refers to the ways humans routinely inscribe themselves in space, byusing, inhabiting and moving through it: ‘Just as the landscape is an array of relatedfeatures so – by analogy – the taskscape is an array of related activities’ (Ingold,2000: p. 195). Taskscape highlights how tourists enact corporally and multi-sensu-ally, routinely and creatively with landscapes. They step into the ‘landscapepicture’, and engage bodily, sensuously, and expressively with their materialityand ‘affordances’. And throughout this engagement they build landscapes andthings, such as sandcastles.

Löfgren (1999) and Bærenholdt et al. (2004) bring out the social and emotionalsignificance of ‘ordinary’ tourist practices and co-travelling significant others tothe tourism experience. Tourism studies have overlooked the fact that many tour-ists do not experience the world through a solitary ‘romantic gaze’ or the ‘collec-tive gaze’ of mass tourism (Urry, 1990, 2002b), but in the company of friends,family members and partners. Performing Tourist Places opens with a privatephotograph of two families posing with spades and buckets on a beach in front ofthe sandcastle they have just built. The communal projects of building a sandcastleand taking photographs show how tourists not only bring their own bodies buttravel and perform with other bodies too. Most tourism performances areperformed collectively, and this sociality is in part what makes them pleasurable.

These books demonstrate how tourism is not only a way of practising or consum-ing (new) places but also an emotional geography of sociability, of being togetherwith close friends and family members from home. While travelling together,couples, families and friends are actually together, not separated by work, institu-tions, homework, leisure activities and geographical distances. They are in a sensemost at ‘home’ when away-from-the-home. Performing Tourist Places speaks of‘inhabiting tourism’ while Löfgren speaks of ‘Robinsonian tourism’. Bothconcepts highlight how much tourism is bound up with performing social life andbuilding an alternative ‘home’, a utopian performance where everyday routines,doings and roles hopefully become extraordinary: relaxed, jointed and joyful.Tourists are not only questing authentic places and objects; they also search forauthentic sociability between themselves (Wang, 1999: p. 364). ‘Getting awayfrom it all might be an attempt to get it all back to together again’ (Löfgren, 1999:p. 269).

Ethnographic studies also show how much tourist travel even to typical touristsites is about sociability. Kyle and Chick’s (2004) ethnography of an AmericanFair and Caletrio’s (2003) study of Spanish tourists on the Costa Blanca demon-strate how families repeatedly return to these places because they have turned intomeeting places where they meet up with relatives and friends living elsewhere.This focus on ‘significant others’ is also central to the new literature examininghow some people travel to ‘distant’ places to meet significant others rather thanmerely ‘consuming’ the ‘Other’.

Meetings at-a-Distance

As Williams and Kaltenberg say: ‘When we think of tourism we often think oftravel to exotic destinations, but modernization has also dispersed and extended

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 29

our network of relatives, friends and acquaintances’ (1999: p. 214). And statisticaldata show that such extended social networks now generate much tourist travel.The World Tourism Organization (WTO) records 154 million internationalarrivals for ‘VFR [visiting friends and relatives] health, religion, other’ in 2001,compared with 74 million in 1990 (http://www.world-tourism.org/facts/trends/purpose.htm). While holiday visits to the UK are declining, more and more peopletravel to the UK to visit friends and family members (Travel Trends, 2004) andalmost half of all long-distance journeys in the UK are made to visit family andfriends (Dateline, 2003: pp. 17, 57).

Clifford’s notions of ‘dwelling-in-travel’ and ‘travelling-in-dwelling’ decon-struct distinctions between home and away by pointing to the possibilities of beingat home while travelling and coming home and dwelling through travel. Now thattravel and displacement are widespread, we need to rethink dwelling so that it is nolonger the antithesis to travel or simply the ground from which travel departs andreturns (Clifford, 1997: p. 44; see also Franklin & Crang, 2001: p. 6). In hisSociology beyond Societies (2000), Urry argues that there is ‘a variety of ways ofdwelling, but that once we move beyond that of land, almost all involve complexrelationships between belongingness and travelling, within and beyond the bound-aries of national societies. People can indeed be said to dwell in various mobilities’(2000: p. 157).

Tourism and migration researchers are beginning to examine how ‘tourismvisits’ are essential to the lives of migrants and diasporic cultures, who often havestrong ties in multiple places and feel at home in more than one place. Migration isfar from being a one-way journey leaving one’s homeland behind, and is often atwo-way journey between two sets of ‘homes’ (Duval, 2004a, 2004b; Mason,2004). And this generates tourist travel. ‘Many forms of migration’, as Williamsand Hall say, ‘generate tourism flows, in particular through the geographicalextension of friendship and kinship networks. Migrants may become poles of tour-ist flows, while they themselves become tourists in returning to visit friends andrelations in their areas of origin’ (2000: p. 7; see also Williams et al., 2000;Gustafson, 2002; O’Reilly, 2003; Coles & Dallen, 2004).

While diasporas and displaced people traditionally demonstrate a desire for apermanent return, today’s migrants can fulfil their ‘compulsion to proximity’(Boden & Molotech, 1994) (the desire to be physically co-present with people)with their homeland through frequent virtual and imaginative travel, and especiallythrough occasional visits. Various studies show how many immigrants and their(grand) children regularly visit their ‘homeland’ and other displaced familymembers across the world to keep their ‘national’ belonging and family networks‘alive’ (Kang & Page, 2000; Miller & Slater, 2000; Mason, 2004; Sutton, 2004).Duval (2004a, 2004b) and Nazia and Holden (2006) illustrate how parents ofCaribbean and Pakistani origin feel obliged to travel to their homeland and intro-duce its key features personally to their children. Social obligations to travel areoften intricately intertwined with obligations to visit specific monuments andreligious sites. Nazia and Holden (2006) call this ‘the myth of return’.

This section ends by discussing a research project on social networks and travelthat Urry has co-authored (Larsen et al., 2006a, 2006b, 2007). It researches thegeographical ‘stretching out’ of social networks and its implications for sociality

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

30 J. Larsen

and travel. Their research on ‘youngish’ architects, diverse employees in fitnesscentres and security staff living in northwest England shows that it has becomecommon to have ‘strong ties’ at-a-distance and to undertake regular long-distancetravel to meet friends and family members This is both because of the historicallyhigh levels of migration for work and education, as well as the emergence of low-price long-distance travel and communication. On the average, their respondentslive some 400 km from their identified ‘strong ties’ and make ten long-distancenational journeys yearly, mainly to visit kin and friends, and attending Christmasparties, weddings, stag or hen nights, birthdays and so on. They compensate for theintermittent nature of meetings and the cost of transport (time, money and weari-ness) by spending a whole day or weekend or even week(s) together. Researchsuggests that people are socializing less frequently with each other on a weeklybasis partly because networks are now more dispersed (see McGlone et al., 1999;Putnam, 2001), but Larsen et al. thus show that travel at weekends and holidays tosome extent counteracts this.

This research indicates that ‘VFR tourism’ is desirable and indeed necessarybecause even highly regular phone calls, text messages and emails are not enoughto reproduce strong ties, which also depend on periodic face-to-face meetings.Larsen et al. argue that the increase in ‘VFR tourism’ stems from a ‘compulsion toproximity’ and from various obligations that require physical co-presence. Theynote how most tourism theories fail to notice the obligations that choreograph ‘tour-ism escapes’ and leisure travel more broadly (2006b; see also Urry, 2002b). But itis shown how there are obligations that require face-to-face co-presence, such asbirthdays, Christmas parties, funerals, hen nights, stag nights and the weddings ofclose friends and family members, even if they require substantial travel. Not fulfill-ing such social obligations often has significant social consequences: social facesand relationships are likely to be damaged. While social obligations required rela-tively little travel when social networks were socially and spatially close-knit, theytrigger much long-distance travel today, when social networks are widely distrib-uted and the world is becoming compressed due to historically cheap and fast trans-port. They concluded that travel that would have once been classified as ‘touristic’and by implication a matter of ‘choice’ seems to have become central to manypeople. Their findings are in line with Franklin and Crang who argue that: ‘Tourismhas broken away from its beginnings and ephemeral ritual modern national life tobecome a significant modality through which [national and] transnational modernlife is organised’ (2001: p. 7).

Conclusion

This article has documented the need to de-exoticize tourism theory, not todispense with the exotic and extraordinary as such, but to make space within thetheory for ‘everydayness’. It was first argued that ‘everyday life’ should be centralto future tourism research because it is a multifaceted notion referring to routines,ordinary objects and familial faces as well as to excitement, creativity and small-scale disruptive ‘tactics’. By incorporating an everyday life perspective intotourism theory it is possible to produce complex, dynamic and contextual accountsof tourism.

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 31

Particularly, this article has outlined how everyday routines and habitualdispositions influence tourism performances that nonetheless still have potentialsfor creativity and the unexpected. Moreover, it was shown how many tourismperformances revolve around pleasant sociality with co-travelling significantothers. Finally, it was discussed how sociality in tourism also matters in relation toso-called ‘VFR tourism’, which is increasing because social networks are becom-ing more geographically dispersed.

While this article has explored connections between everyday life, significantothers and travel, there is still a great need for research in this field. Future stud-ies should pay attention to the fabric of everyday practices of real holiday expe-riences to obtain a better idea of what tourists do when vacationing, and how itboth ties into and occasionally departs from the lived everyday life at ‘home’.This includes understanding how tourists might ‘discover’ as much about theirown culture as the one they tour. As Molz says: ‘On a daily basis, we may noteven be consciously aware of the various ways we embody and carry home withus…As travelers are constantly called upon to physically perform the unaccus-tomed – to eat strange foods, mouth foreign words, or use unfamiliar toilets –they become cognizant of the way certain rituals make them feel more at home’(2005: p. 5).

The everyday characteristic of the tourist spaces passed through and dweltwithin also requires more attention. There has been an obsession with places thatare extraordinary, exotic and inscribed through signs as tourist places. Futureethnographies need also to take place in ‘ordinary’ tourist places, and this includesplaces typified more by ‘global flows’ than by the ‘local’ culture, such asMacDonalds, Starbucks and western-style supermarkets. And we need to followthe flows of emails, text messages, postcards, photographs, souvenirs that touristsmake, produce, purchase and circulate to their social networks at home orelsewhere, both while on the move and when at home again. Such mobile ethnog-raphies make it possible to explore how tourist images and objects (re)producesocial networks and decorate home geographies.

Much of the research discussed in this article suggests that networking is now anilluminating concept to work with. As discussed elsewhere, networking highlightshow leisure/tourist travel is a social practice that involves significant others, face-to-face proximity and non-commercialized hospitality. It further highlights howtourist travel is not only a way of seeing the world but also a way of socializingwith significant others and attending obligatory social events. It suggests that theanalysis of everyday practices, social obligations, networks at-a-distance andsocial capital should be central to 21st century leisure and tourism theory (Larsenet al., 2007).

This also means that the term tourist needs some deconstruction as people under-take leisure travel for many different reasons (see also Rojek & Urry, 1997). Thosespending the summer in a second home or visiting their best friend who nowhappens to live abroad are not likely to consider themselves tourists in the sameway as someone spending two or three weeks on a package tour. Indeed there is theprobability that they will not consider themselves tourists at all. Nonetheless, theWTO will include them as tourists in its statistics. The WTO uses overnight staysto differentiate between day trips and tourism, and leisure travel becomes ‘tourism’

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

32 J. Larsen

whenever it involves an overnight stay, no matter where this takes place (hotel orprivate accommodation).

This definition is both problematic and constructive. The former because itmixes together forms of leisure travel that have little in common except perhaps thejourney and the overnight stay. Moreover, it neglects that tourist consumption cantake place at home. The latter because it highlights how tourism increasingly over-laps with other forms of mobility and has become central to much social life in evermore mobile societies. In the process of de-exoticizing theory, this article suggests‘de-purifying’ the disciplines concerned with travel and mobility, such as leisurestudies, tourism studies, migration studies and transport studies. Rather than adistinct discipline of ‘tourism studies’, therefore, we need to developtransdisciplinary ‘mobilities studies’ (Urry, 2000; Coles et al., 2005).

References

Allen, J. (2000) On George Simmel: proximity, distance and movement, in: M. Crang & N. Thrift (Eds) ThinkingSpace, pp. 54–70 (London: Routledge).

Andrews, H. (2005) Feeling at home: embodying Britishness in a Spanish charter tourist resort, Tourist Studies5(3), 247–266.

Axhausen, K. W., Zimmermann, A., Schönfelder, S., Rindsfüser, G. & Haupt, T. (2002) Observing the rhythmsof daily life: a six-week travel diary, Transportation 29(3), pp. 95–124.

Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization (Cambridge: Polity).Berger, J. (1984) And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London: Writers & Readers).Boden, D. & Molotoch, H. (1994) The compulsion to proximity, in: R. Friedland & D. Boden (Eds) Nowhere,

Space, Time and Modernity, pp. 257–286 (Berkeley: University of California).Bærenholdt, J., Haldrup, M., Larsen, J. & Urry, J. (2004) Performing Tourist Places (Aldershot: Ashgate).Caletrio, J. (2003) A Ravaging Mediterranean Passion: Tourism and Environmental Change in Europe’s

Playground (Lancaster: Lancaster University, Department of Sociology).Clifford, J. (1997) Routes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).Cloke, P. & Perkins, H. C. (1998) ‘Cracking the canyon with the awesome foursome’: presentations of adventure

tourism in New Zealand, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16(3), pp. 185–218.Cohen, E. (1979) A phenomenology of tourist experience, Sociology 13, pp. 179–202.Coleman, S. & Crang, M. (Eds) (2002) Tourism: Between Place and Performance (Oxford: Berghahn Books).Crouch, D. (1999) Introduction: encounters in leisure/tourism, in: D. Crouch (Ed.) Leisure/Tourism

Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, pp. 1–15 (London: Routledge).Crouch, D. (2003) Spacing, performing, and becoming: tangles in the mundane, Environment and Planning A

35, pp. 1945–1960.Coles, T. & Dallen, T. (Eds) (2004) Tourism, Diasporas and Space (London: Routledge).Coles, T., Hall, C. M. & Duval, D. (2005) Mobilising tourism: a post-disciplinary critique, Tourism Recreation

Research 30(3), pp. 31–41.Dann, G. (1996) The Language of Tourism (Wallingford: Cab International).Dateline (2003) Design and Application of a Travel Survey for European Long-Distance Trips Based on an

International Network of Expertise (München: Institut für Verkehrs- und Infrastrukturforschung GmbH),available at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/dateline/home_page.htm.

De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press).Duncan, J. & Lambert, D. (2003) Landscapes of home, in: J. Duncan, N. Johnson & R. Schein (Eds) A

Companion to Cultural Geography, pp. 382–403 (London: Blackwell).Duval, T. Y. (2004a) Linking return visits and return migration among commonwealth Eastern Caribbean

migrants in Toronto, Global Networks 4, pp. 51–58.Duval, T. Y. (2004b) Conceptualising return visits: a transnational perspective, in: T. Coles & T. Dallen (Eds)

Tourism, Diasporas and Space, pp. 50–61 (London: Routledge).Edensor, T. (1998) Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site (London: Routledge).Edensor, T. (2000) Staging tourism: tourists as performers, Annals of Tourism Research 27, pp. 322–344.

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

De-exoticizing Tourist Travel 33

Edensor, T. (2001) Performing tourism, staging tourism – (re)producing tourist space and practice, TouristStudies 1, pp. 59–81.

Edensor, T. (2006) Sensing tourist places, in: C. Minca & T. Oaks (Eds) Travels in Paradox: RemappingTourism, pp. 23–46 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).

Ellegaard, K. & Vilhelmson, B. (2004) Home as a pocket of local order: everyday activities and the friction ofdistance, Geografiska Annaler Series B 86 B(4), pp. 281–296.

Featherstone, M. (1992) The heroic life and everyday life, Theory, Culture and Society 9, pp. 159–182.Felski, R. (1999) The invention of everyday life, New Formations 39, pp. 15–31.Franklin, A. (2003) Tourism: An Introduction (London: Sage).Franklin, A. & Crang, M. (2001) The trouble with tourism and travel theory, Tourist Studies 1, pp. 5–22.Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press).Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books).Gustafson, P. (2002) Tourism and seasonal retirement migration, Annals of Tourism Research 29(3), pp. 899–918.Haldrup, M. (2004) Laid back mobilities, Tourism Geographies 6(3), pp. 434–454.Haldrup, M. & Larsen, J. (2006) Material cultures of tourism, Leisure Studies 25(3), pp. 275–289.Hall, C. M. (2005) Reconsidering the geography of tourism and contemporary mobility, Geographical Research

43(3), pp. 125–139.Hall, C. M. & Müller, D. K. (Eds) (2004) Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes: Between Elite Landscape and

Common Ground (Clevedon: Channelview Press).Harvey, D. (1989) The Postmodern Condition (London: Blackwell).Heidegger, M. (1993) Building dwelling thinking, in: Basic Writings, pp. 347–363 (London: Routledge).Heller, A. (1984) Everyday Life (London: Routledge).Hingham, B. (2002) Introduction. Questioning everyday life, in: B. Hingham (Ed.) The Everyday Life Reader,

pp. 1–34 (London: Routledge).Holloway, L. & Hubbard, P. (2001) People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life

(London: Prentice Hall).Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment – Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London:

Routledge).Jarlöv, L. (1999) Leisure lots and summer cottages as places for people’s own creative work, in: D. Crouch (Ed.)

Leisure/Tourism Landscapes: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, pp. 231–237 (London: Routledge).Kang, S. & Page, S. (2000) Tourism, migration and emigration: travel patterns of Korean-New Zealanders in the

1990s, Tourism Geographies 2(3), pp. 50–65.Kyle, G. & Click, G. (2004) Enduring leisure involvement: the importance of personal relationships, Leisure

Studies 23(3), pp. 243–266.Larsen, J. (2005) Families seen photographing: the performativity of tourist photography, Space and Culture

8(3), pp. 416–434.Larsen, J., Axhausen, K. & Urry, J. (2006a) Geographies of social networks: meetings, travel and communica-

tions, Mobilities 1(3), pp. 261–283.Larsen, J., Urry, J. & Axhausen, K. (2006b) Mobilities, Networks and Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate).Larsen, J., Urry, J. & Axhausen, K. (2007) Networks and tourism: mobile social life, Annals of Tourism

Research, 34(1), pp. 244–262.Lash, S. & Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage).Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso).Lorimer, H. (2005) Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’, Progress in Human

Geography 29(3), pp. 83–94.Löfgren, O. (1999) On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press).MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books).Mason, J. (2004) Managing kinship over long distances: the significance of ‘the visit’, Social Policy & Society

3(3), pp. 421–429.Massey, D. (1995) The conceptualisation of place, in: D. Massey & P. Jess (Eds), pp. 45–87 (Oxford: Open

University Press).McCabe, S. (2002) The tourist experience and everyday life, in: G. Dann (Ed.) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the

Social World, pp. 61–77 (Wallingford: CABI).McGlone, F., Park, A. & Roberts, C. (1999) Kinship and friendship: attitudes and behaviour in Britain

1986–1995, in: S. McRae (Ed.) Changing Britain: Families and Households in the 1990s, pp. 141–155(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Dow

nloa

ded

By:

[Gen

c, E

rtugr

ul] A

t: 14

:18

23 M

ay 2

008

34 J. Larsen

Miller, D. & Slater, D. (2000) The Internet (London: Berg).Molz, G. J. (2005) Global abode: at home in the world, mimeo, Lancaster University: Department of Sociology.Nazia, A. & Holden, A. (2006) Post-colonial Pakistani mobilities: the embodiment of the ‘myth of return’ in

tourism, Mobilities 1(3), pp. 217–242.O’Reilly, K. (2003) When is a tourist? The articulation of tourism and migration in Spain’s Costa del Sol,

Tourist Studies 3(3), pp. 301–317.Perkins, H. & Thorns, D. (2001) Gazing or performing? Reflections on Urry’s tourist gaze in the context of

contemporary experiences in the Antipodes, International Sociology 2, pp. 185–204.Pons, P. (2003) Being-in-tourism: tourist dwelling, bodies and places, Tourist Studies 3(3), pp. 47–66.Putnam, D. R. (2001) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon &

Schuster).Rojek, C. (1993) Ways of Escape (London: Sage).Rojek, C. & Urry, J. (1997) Introduction, in: C. Rojek & J. Urry (Eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of

Travel and Theory, pp. 1–19 (London: Routledge).Selwyn, T. (1996) Introduction, in: T. Selwyn (Ed.) The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism,

pp. 1–32 (Chichester: John Wiley).Shields, R. (1991) Places on the Margins: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge).Simmel, G. (1950) The metropolis and mental life, in: K. H. Wolff (Ed.) The Sociology of George Simmel,

pp. 409–424 (New York: The Free Press).Simmel, G. (1997a) The sociology of sociability, in: D. Frisby & M. Featherstone (Eds) Simmel on Culture,

pp. 120–129 (London: Sage).Simmel, G. (1997b) Sociology of the meal, in: D. Frisby & M. Featherstone (Eds) Simmel on Culture,

pp. 130–136 (London: Sage).Sutton, R. C. (2004) Celebrating ourselves: the family reunion rituals of African Caribbean transnational

families, Global Networks 4(3), pp. 243–258.Szerszynski, B., Heim, W. & Waterton, C. (2003) Introduction, in: B. Szerszynski, W. Heim & C. Waterton

(Eds) Nature Performed, pp. 1–14 (London: Blackwell).Travel Trends (2004) Travel Trends 2003: A Report on the International Passenger Survey (London: National

Statistics).Uriely, N. (2005) The tourist experience: conceptual developments, Annals of Tourism Research 32(3),

pp. 199–216.Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage).Urry, J. (2000) Sociology beyond Society: Mobilities for the 21st Century (London: Routledge).Urry, J. (2002a) The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (London: Sage).Urry, J. (2002b) Mobility and proximity, Sociology 36, pp. 255–274.Urry, J. (2003) Social networks, travel and talk, British Journal of Sociology 54, pp. 155–176.Wang, N. (1999) Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience, Annals of Tourism Research 26, pp. 349–370.Wellman, B. (2002) Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism, available at http://

www.chass.utoronto.ca/-wellman.Williams, D. & Kaltenberg, B. (1999) Leisure places and modernity: the use and meaning of recreational

cottages in the Norway and USA, in: D. Crouch (Ed.) Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices andGeographical Knowledge, pp. 214–230 (London: Routledge).

Williams, M. A. & Hall, C. M. (2000) Tourism and migration: new relationships between production andconsumption, Tourism Geographies 2(3), pp. 5–27.

Williams, M. A., King, R., Warnes, A. & Patters, G. (2000) Tourism and international retirement migration: newforms of an old relationship in Southern Europe, Tourism Geographies 2(3), pp. 28–49.