Artists' positioning in and creating authentic identities through place and tourism in New Orleans's Jackson Square

In this paper, I explore how artist identities are constructed in relation to processes associated with tourism and a tourist site in New Orleans. My analysis draws from literatures concerning art, tourism art, and artist identities as well as from Goffman's work on identity, particularly in relation to impression management through setting, appearances, and manners in front and back regions. Relying on archival and ethnographic data, I show how facets of the ‘venerated artist’ social identity, tourism, and a nostalgic historical geography have privileged the place of artists in Jackson Square's Pedestrian Mall and supported the construction of authentic personal and felt artist identities. However, in these same ways, potentially progressive cultural practices associated with art, place, and identities are foreclosed, creating a variety of exclusionary issues.     

Is a cluster a necessary condition for success? The case of Benidorm

This paper analyses the application of the cluster concept to tourist destinations using Benidorm as a case study. A questionnaire was administered to tourism firms based in Benidorm in order to determine whether this destination currently constitutes a tourism cluster or whether it possesses the ideal characteristics to become a cluster with the private agents' collaboration, that is, whether it is a potential cluster. The results obtained from this research indicate that Benidorm's success is not derived from the presence of a cluster due to a series of elements that prevent its existence. In this destination there is a need to strengthen cooperation between public and private agents (especially in those areas that determine the competitive advantage of the destination) and to design a strategy based on shared goals. Both of these elements are fundamental for the characterisation of a cluster.     

Mythic Geographies of Representation and Identity: Contemporary Postcards of Wales

This article explores how picture postcards contribute to the cultural production, performance and consumption of landscapes, places and identities. Drawing on cultural and critical studies, it scrutinises the postcard as a cultural text and as a site of cultural production. It begins by briefly reviewing the concepts of ethnicity and identity in relation to its case study country of Wales and suggests how its imagined communities and landscapes have a broad mythical structure that can be mapped across a series of discourses. It then outlines the study's approach to postcard analysis and locates the visual in social science research, confronting issues of interpretation, validity, sampling and reflexivity. The article subsequently presents a discourse analysis of a dozen contemporary Welsh-produced postcards from the archives of the National Library of Wales. In particular, it navigates the visual narratives that are privileging particular stories of place, culture and nationhood and analyses what is being invoked to epitomise contemporary Wales and what is being set aside in these postcard representations. It suggests these visual texts reflect an internal re-mapping of Wales that is celebrating the capital city of Cardiff as its metropolitan cultural core and marginalising alternative imagined communities of Wales, redefining them through spectacle and theatricality. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting how further analysis of such visual touristic texts could offer insights into the cultural production and consumption of identities, landscapes, and places.     

Tourism and social capital in Malaysia

This article explores the relationship between social capital and tourism in Malaysia. Social capital is a concept that has received particular attention within the social sciences. Despite this, scholars have relatively neglected whether and how tourism contributes to enhance levels of social capital. This is particularly true if non-Western societies, such as Malaysia, are referred to. Malaysia is a plural society that consists of three main ethnic groups, namely Malays, Chinese, and Indians. Considering the country's diverse socio-cultural fabric, social capital is a highly debated topic in Malaysia. Yet, there exists a paucity of data on how specific social practices, such as tourism, strengthen social relationships within Malaysian society. In an attempt to fill this gap, in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 Malaysians from the three main ethnic groups. The findings reveal that tourism is an experience that creates and strengthens social relationships among people irrespective of ethnic background. Overall, this article's contribution to our knowledge is twofold. First, the work on which this article is based contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the nature and meaning of tourism and post-tourism experiences. Second, it provides empirical material on non-Western tourists, who have been relatively neglected by tourism scholars.     

Research Note: Addressing Tourism Public Policy Issues through Attitude Segmentation of Host Communities

Resident attitudes are important in identifying the impact of tourism within communities and in determining local policy, planning and management responses for the development of tourism. Additionally, tourism policies established are vital for the marketing of cities, regions and countries. This paper examines tourism public policy, with particular reference to the importance of addressing host community interests and involving host communities in public policy decision making. It outlines a segmentation study undertaken on New Zealand residents' views on tourism and how these segments can be applied to tourism policy making.     

Literature,cultural identity and the limits of authenticity: a composite approach

Although tourism scholarship has paid much attention to the concept of authenticity in relation to the homogenisation of tourism representation, this term has limits that curb its usefulness for analysing subtle interrelations of place, representation and identity. Some recent work has attempted to recuperate authenticity by associating it with experience and activity, however we suggest that the concept of cultural identity allows for greater attention to the fluid movements of social power relations that inform the tourist site. By undertaking a comparative analysis of three global tourist sites located in the Middle East (Jerusalem), North America (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) and Europe (Isle of Wight), this article discusses the politics of representation vis à vis identity as manifested in a spectrum of tourism‐related literature ranging from pamphlets, maps and guidebooks, to more creative approaches in contemporary novels and poetry. This comparative survey of literature explores questions of identity on several fronts: first, it prompts questions about how religious, historical and national identities are formulated in and through the tourist site; second, it leads to an assessment of a site's claim to status as a work of art that prompts aesthetic identification; and finally, it allows one to consider how other works of art — in this case, novelistic or poetic representations — both affirm and question identities presented by standard tourist literature. These alternative textual representations demonstrate not only how cultural identity as represented in the tourist site is an active site of struggle, but also present alternative politics of place and identity that enable a greater diversity of interpretations of the tourist site. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pajala as a literary place: in the readings and footsteps of Mikael Niemi

This paper concerns the relationship between literature and tourism, with specific focus on the Swedish novelist Mikael Niemi and his influence on local tourism development in his home municipality of Pajala. Attention is paid to how the success of Niemi's breakthrough novel Populärmusik från Vittula has turned Pajala into a well-known ‘literary place’, at the same time increasing tourism in the region. This paper discusses the literary meanings of Pajala by comparing two alternative ways of comprehending the idea of ‘Pajala as a literary place’. Pajala is approached as (1) a stage for the local and regional identities represented in Niemi's novel, and (2) a re-produced real-world experience for ‘literary pilgrims’, tourists wandering in the footsteps of Mikael Niemi. This paper also discusses the contradictions and disharmonies between these two literary worlds and the implications that these may have for local development strategies based on literary tourism.     

Public Choice and Tourism Analysis

This paper considers the potential of Public-Choice theory to serve as a means to analyse tourism policy. It introduces the central issues for understanding the study of policy and economic decision-making, bringing them together as a single coherent explanation of the role of government within the contemporary market system. In the context of tourism analysis, the focus is on the forces that explain why governments make particular types of decisions for the industry and the effect these have on the community's collective well-being. Policy can impact on a society's culture, its social order, its administration or its use of law, or any combination of these; but, largely it is about the economic welfare of the community. Much of the public decision-making system concerns who gets what, who should benefit and who should pay. The paper reviews the notion of government intervention to establish an 'interpretation' of economic policy-making in Western democracies, such as Australia, Britain or New Zealand. It argues that most policy issues, including tourism issues, derive from some form of failure in the market-place, where the tourism industry is but one component interconnected with many others. The paper expands the public-choice approach further by applying it to segmented markets, and the tourism industry itself, and provides an issue-based model that allows the tourism policy-making process to be explored, exposed and predicted.     

Catalysts for transformative learning in community-based ecotourism

This paper illustrates how community-based ecotourism (CBET) is a site of experiential learning which may encourage transformative learning for visitors. An experiential CBET curriculum is identified which is centred on ecotourists' nature, adventure and cultural experiences. In this curriculum, Nature Shock, Adventure Shock and Culture Shock serve as Concrete Experiences in Kolb's [1984. Experiential learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] experiential learning cycle, and may potentially act as disorienting dilemmas to stimulate transformative learning. These three types of disorienting dilemmas are discussed with reference to literature on wildlife and nature tourism, adventure tourism and outdoor education, and international volunteer tourism, respectively. Three empirical case studies of CBET in Southeast Asia are used to provide context to the discussion. Finally, the paper provides an elaboration of six pedagogical themes pertaining to how the transformative learning of visitors to CBET projects might be enhanced.     

Trust Between Culture: The Tourist

Trust between culture is a salient issue to tourism studies. But the effect of tourism on culture is disputed, and surrounded by a basic lack of trust. Tourists as well as hosts categorise 'others' by their most immediately functional role, which is economic. Yet difference is an unavoidable social fact and does not exempt one from the responsibility of social relationships. For tourism, simulations of 'the other' are desired but must be always kept distant. So difference is accentuated by commerce, maintained by role identification and exacerbated by the brevity of the tourist's encounter. Therefore, the social alchemy between host and tourist is marked with dominance, power and alienation. Trust is engagement with 'the other', a reflexive relationship of engagement over time. Trust can exist in the tourist's encounters when differential power relationships are recognised - and negotiated through sincere engagement and natural communication. Professionals and intellectuals as well as the tourist must take an active and sensitive role in fostering reflexive and engaging social relationships between culture.     

Freedom of movement for all? Unpacking racialized travel experiences

In today’s world, more people have the means and opportunities to travel freely compared to the past. Yet, the freedom of movement and the right to travel are far from being globally recognized as human rights. For some, the freedom of movement is overshadowed by one’s race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. When travelling across or even within borders, members of some groups may encounter discriminatory actions in the form of xenophobia, racism, and more recently, islamophobia. Increasing regulations and heightened security inevitably affect international tourism and travel. Drawing on our own travel experiences as tourists and tourism scholars of different racial backgrounds, we use this paper to explore the intersections of racism and tourism. Implementing innovative and improvisational methodologies, we unpack and interrogate the discourses that underpin racialized travel experiences. Our collective debriefings have been re-storied to further illuminate the importance of race in shaping tourism experiences, contributing to the lived frustration and discrimination at the borders and beyond. The insights gleaned from our experiences will contribute to the existing literature of tourism politics, and the discourse of racialized identities in travel and tourism.     

Red tourism: sustaining communist identity in a rapidly changing China

‘Red tourism’ is to exploit the historical heritage of the Chinese Communist Party for tourism development. Such tourism practice has been used by the nation state of China both to drive the country's economic growth and develop new patronage of the communist ideology among the young generation. From the broader context of China's economic and social changes since 1978 when the country started its open-door policy and economic reform, our paper attempts to examine ‘red tourism’ by analyzing how the nation state of China promotes the communist heritage through ‘red tourism’ in order to sustain the communist identity in a rapidly changing China. Research questions are raised to address the economic and social factors for the nation state involvement in ‘red tourism’: the specific roles of such involvement and the outcomes. Based on a case study, this paper presents how heritage is interpreted at a specific ‘red tourism’ site in order to portray a selective part of the communist heritage as a symbol of the Chinese nation. In so doing, ‘red tourism’ aims to serve the purpose of the nation state to sustain the communist identity in the continuing effort of developing a ‘socialist country of Chinese characteristics’.     

Pictures and prose: exploring the impact of literary and film tourism

While literary tourism has a long history traceable back to the seventeenth century, the considerable growth of interest and popularity in literary tourism research among academics and the tourism industry has been recognised only since the mid-1990s [Hebert, D. T. (1996). Artistic and literary places in France as tourist attractions. Tourism Management, 17(2), 77–85]; [Squire, S. J. (1993). Valuing countryside: Re?ections on Beatrix Potter tourism. Area, 24, 5–10]; [Squire, S. J. (1994). The cultural values of literary tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 21, 103–120]. With this in mind, this paper aims to investigate how tourism stakeholders can take advantage of the positive promotional impacts that a book and film linkage can have on specific destinations. It also examines how tourism patterns and trends in these destinations have been subsequently influenced and transformed. Within an exploratory case study mode, special emphasis will be placed on two international case studies (Ireland and Indonesia – in particular Bali) which have been associated with internationally recognised books and their subsequent blockbuster films. The findings suggest that both literary and film tourism have a positive effect on these destinations due to an increased growth in their tourism arrivals once the location was referred to in a book and afterwards used as the setting in the related film. This paper will add to the current knowledge base on film and literary tourism and create an awareness of the strength of this form of tourism for international tourism destinations.     

Location Shooting and the Filmic Destination: Transylvanian Myths and the Post-Colonial Tourism Enterprise

In this study, we examine a contested tourism proposal in Romania, Dracula Park, and its attempts to balance the indigenously produced history of the region with the powerful myths imposed by European and American filmic and literary influences: Bram Stoker's Dracula and the ‘heritage films’ it spawned. While the project was recently announced to be abandoned, the Romanian discourse on Dracula Park offers an avenue for a post-colonial critique which we explore in the context of globalisation, place, identity and various texts of the culture industry. A film-location-tourism spectrum helps illustrate some of the issues raised in this paper. Dracula films and Dracula Park (DP) occupy a problematic spot on this continuum, as myth and history are mediated around a real Transylvania by local-global cultural intermediaries. This helps us situate the political economy of tourism in settings like post-socialist Romania. We argue that the literary-film-DP example shows tourism as a postcolonial enterprise of a globalised culture industry. This industry, of which tourism is a part, not only shapes touristic spaces in ex-colonies within the developing (lesser developed) world, but also constructs identities and heritage in peripheral spaces within the cultural coloniser's Europe.     

The role of Government in the development of tourism in Kenya

This study uses the case study of Kenya to analyse the role of government in the development of tourism in the Third World. Usually, government involvement in the development of tourism reflects on the uniqueness and peculiarity of the tourism industry. By its nature, the development and provision of tourism product involves diverse stakeholders and activities. In the diverse socio‐economic situation, it is usually the government that has the required social and political capacity and legitimacy to bring together and co‐ordinate the activities of diverse and different interest groups which are involved in the development of tourism and, also, establish the required level playing field. In this regard, as probably is the case in most less developed countries where tourism is a major socio‐economic activity, the Kenya Government has, over the years, played a crucial role in the development of the country's tourism industry. Particularly, during the exploratory stage of tourism development in Kenya, it was government involvement that helped lay the required groundwork and, as a consequence, jump‐started the rapid development of the country's tourism industry. However, in recent years, particularly in the 1990s, Kenya's tourism industry is confronted with serious problems including declining international visitor arrivals and decreasing tourism revenues. Ironically, the same government that played a crucial role, especially in the initial development of the country's tourism industry, is currently being blamed as being responsible for the industry's current poor performance. Thus, this study will also examine the underlying factors responsible for the current downturns in Kenya's tourism industry and how they relate to the role of government in the development of tourism. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Advancing tourism research through multilevel methods: research problem and agenda

Tourism research often encounters social phenomena and research problems that involve multiple levels. However, most researchers assume that the phenomena exist in a single level and perform analyses that do not reflect the hierarchical nature of social dynamics. This article heeds the call from Current Issues in Tourism by illustrating multilevel methods and proposing an agenda for multilevel research. In particular, this article seeks to reconcile the limitations of single-level analysis and to delineate how multilevel methods could be applied in tourism research. It further seeks to advance tourism theories by introducing more complex multilevel design with broader applications in various tourism settings. This article presents two common tourism research scenarios, critiques their limitations, and proposes how multilevel methods could not only address these limitations, but also how they could advance tourism theories. An empirical study is offered to demonstrate multilevel design and analytical techniques.     

Negative Image? Developing the Visual in Tourism Research

Today, knowledge about the world is increasingly articulated visually and the ocularcentric nature of tourism is widely recognised by tourism 'professionals' and academics, as well as by tourists and 'locals'. This article examines the role of visual evidence in tourism research and takes as its starting point the convolution of 'looking', 'seeing' and 'knowing' in western culture. It then considers the 'status' of image-based research in the social sciences with particular reference to tourism studies. It is suggested that the recent interest in the so-called 'pictorial turn' heralds new opportunities for tourism researchers to embrace emerging visual methodologies and in this regard the utilisation of video in tourism research is briefly explored.     

Institutional Factors Influencing the Size and Structure of Tourism: Comparing Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

This paper explains why neither Maine, USA's comparatively laissez faire economic and land use institutions, nor Dalarna, Sweden's more heavily regulated economy, seems well designed to make tourism a powerful economic development engine. The paper focuses on three clusters of institutions that have a major influence on tourism's scale, economic structure, and long-term sustainability. Labour laws and labour market institutions are important determinants of tourism employment, job quality, product mix, production methods, and regional competitiveness. Land ownership and property rights influence both the incentives facing landowners, tourists, and tourism businesses and stresses on ecosystem carrying capacity. Commodity taxes affect the absolute and relative prices of various tourist services and, via feedback effects on demand, influence tourism's aggregate scale, activity mix and transportation/location patterns. The paper employs institutional contrasts between Dalarna and Maine to frame hypotheses that will guide a larger comparative study of sustainable tourism in forest regions. Perhaps most controversially, we hypothesise that Sweden's venerable right of common access (allemansrätten), as currently implemented, impedes sustainable tourism development. An appendix sketches the current state of tourism in the two regions.     

Urban transformation and diffusion of tourist practices: visiting Alcântara at the turn of the twentieth century

This article examines the effects of tourism on the transformation of the perception of the urban world. I aim at exploring the role that tourist practices have played in the evolution of the organisation and uses of urban spaces or, in other words, in the way the city has been experienced and lived. The development of tourist practices and situations has contributed to framing the discontinuous progress of urbanisation. To better understand this process, I propose to move beyond exploration of specific tourist contexts and places, and to think about the complex relationship between, on the one hand, the material and social arrangements of the city, and on the other, the discourses and representations produced around it. My research draws on a specific case study, namely: The transformation of representations of the Alcântara neighbourhood in turn-of-the-century Lisbon, from an industrial suburb to a popular and ‘urban’ place [Vidal, F. (2006). Les habitants d'Alcântara. Histoire sociale d'un quartier de Lisbonne au début du XXe siècle [The inhabitants of Alcântara. A social history of a Lisbon neighbourhood in the early twentieth century]. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion]. During the turn to the twentieth century, Alcântara became ‘visible’ and ‘visitable’. The former industrial suburb was thenceforth perceived as a pleasant and urban place, both in a practical way (patent, for example, in the experience of walking down the streets or of visiting industrial sites) and in a symbolic way (through the construction of neighbourhood identities and heritage policies).     

Women's travel writing and the legacy of Romanticism

Women's travel writing reveals how literary and artistic discourses influence the way we read and write about journeys. This paper considers the way women's travel writing has adapted to, and adopted, the discourse of Romanticism, from its beginnings as a philosophy of political and sexual revolution, individual freedom and escape, to a more diffuse sense which has infiltrated modern attitudes to travel. We consider a classic travel text from the Romantic period, and discuss its legacy. Adopting Buzard's argument [(1993). The Beaten track: European tourism, literature and the ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918. Oxford: OUP], we consider how travel changed through the long nineteenth century. We discuss how the twentieth-century Romantic attraction of travel is marketed through the tourist industry as one of the main reasons to get away from it all and discover the ‘authentic’: this desire is reflected in travel texts. Recent writing reflects the influence of Romanticism by celebrating the individual as a wandering free spirit on a self-quest, whose writing is ‘authentic’, spontaneous and confessional: that is, the legacy of sensibility. We conclude that Romanticism has left a dual legacy for travellers, of political commitment and inner journey. Authors discussed include Mary Wollstonecraft, Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird and Sara Wheeler.