Tourism, Performance, and Place

Book excerpt: Drawing upon theories of landscape and performance, this work weaves together existing tourism literature with new scholarship to forge a geographically informed theory of tourism. Such a theory integrates the ways in which places are co-produced, circulated, interpreted, experienced, and performed for and by tourists, tourism boards, and even as everyday spaces. Bringing together theories of ritual, Peircean semiotics, ideology, and performance, the authors blend the often separate literatures of tourism sites and touristic practices. Whereas most tourism texts focus on a part of the 'tourism equation'-the tourism site, or the tourist experience-a geographic theory of tourism brings these constituent parts together in thinking about notions of place. Place processes are central to geography as well as tourism studies because tourism facilitates encounters with distinct locations. As this book argues, considering tourism as performative draws disparate areas of tourism theory together to better understand the ways tourism happens in and across places.