Moving bodies and the staging of the tourist experience

This article looks into guided tours as an exemplary kinesthetic consumption experience and focuses on the work of tour guides as influential agents who participate in the tourism staging of the destination. As opposed to the overwhelming emphasis placed on the discursive construction of tourist places, my analytic lens is the moving body and its manifold engagement with the surrounding space. Grounded on fieldwork at a National Military Park, I provide insight into three clusters of strategies of body-space staging: spatialization, emplacement, and regulation. I also extend existing knowledge on the staging of tourist experiences by theorizing the construction of a tourism stage as an aggregate of three overlapping and intertwined staging modes: communicative, material, and body-space.