Reading from Leeds, 2016: ‘Lash, S and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs & Space. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage’: A diary.

Image: 'Dream' by Ling, 23 March 2007 (Flickr/Creative Commons)

FROM POPULATIONS MOBILITIES READING GROUP,

BAUMAN INSTITUTE, SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL POLICY, 
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

GROUP CONVENOR Professor Adrian Favell

Reflexive mourning

This post summarises impressions from my zillionth reading of a book that has shaped the way I approach the social world. Not having received formal sociological education, save my undergraduate travails into anthropological theory and subsequent personal investment during and then continuously after my PhD in multiple the social sciences, meant that I needed a stimulus and concrete human inspiration to proceed in uncharted territory. John Urry’s work provided this, amongst other intellectually sophisticated voices. This time I read Economies of Signs and Space in three phases/acts: first like a Lacanian dreamer, allowing my unconscious to pick what matters most to me and kill what does not; then as a collector of impressions, in John’s sociological fashion, to generate a meaningful repository of ideas; and finally, like a Foucaultian archivist, who does some violence to past realities. I hope that those who dip into this post forgive me for my custom and the fact that Scott Lash takes a back seat in this narrative – he too is of course very important in my current work and I know well that his contribution to Economies was pivotal. I guess this post is my own tribute to John. It produces thanatourist pilgrimage in conjunction with a friend’s posting on Facebook of photographs from John’s funeral and wake. I am almost sure he would have appreciated the performance.

 

It is rather difficult to summarise this 326-page book. Its conceptual, analytical and empirical span covers as diverse questions as those of (post)modern subjectivity, contemporary class transformations, the changing structures of capitalist accumulation, mobilities such as migration, travel, tourism and technologies, new social movements tied to new concerns such as environmentalism and the role of locality within global consciousness and globalisation processes. These are only few of the themes covered in this magnum opus. I would argue that in John’s case Economies contained the seeds from which his 21^st-century mobilities project grew and budded into a ‘paradigm’ embracing aspects of global socio-cultural transformations, as well epistemological frameworks connected to the development of science, technology and complexity. Poignantly, his latest interest in futures, concretised in the recent foundation of a centre at Lancaster University (Social Futures), will not be developed by him. But I would say that, in some respects, even this centre is laterally connected to the early vision of interconnected mobilities that he proffered in Economies in collaboration with Scott Lash.

Reminiscing on Economies’ archival roots

Before presenting some impressions from the book, a note is necessary on the conceptual background of the project. Like most ‘grand projects’, it did not spring out of nowhere but was connected to intensive intellectual deliberations over the status of late 20^th-century economic, socio-cultural and political changes in the UK and globally. I guess here the dreamer meets the romantic historian in me. But I strongly believe that place and context prove crucial coordinates in our reading of the book – that more specifically, we should try to understand its dominant discourses as a reaction to the impact of state and de-centred, organisational policies on local community, peripheral and central regions in increasingly globalised contexts. As a follow-up from The End of Organised Capitalism, Economies tried to respond to critics on the authors’ typification of economic ‘branching out’ of economies by country. The call to consider ‘dis-organisation’ was not of course to be taken literally, but this is precisely what a shallow reading of The End invited at the time. Gracefully, Lash and Urry proceeded to develop their thesis further in Economies – but of course the book does a lot more than this, as it provides a cultural outlook that was missing from The End.

As a self-contained project, Economies belongs to a vision of the future in difficult times for the British North, where Lancaster is located (in which both Lash and Urry were professionally based at the time). To understand who the authors’ immediate interlocutors were, one may inspect the short Preface, which is populated by a blend of people who were educated and/or worked in Northern regions of the country and went on to become internationally renowned scholars (such densely populated by names prefaces would become a norm in John’s books). Several of these names belonged to a Lancaster University sociology reading group on regionalism. One of them is today my colleague at Leeds. Again, this is crucial for our understanding of the overall thesis: as the authors themselves acknowledge indirectly in the latter parts of the book (Chapter on ‘Post-industrial Spaces’), the impact of Thatcherite policies on the North in the 1980s (largely held accountable for the rapid de-industrialisation of the region and the rise in unemployment) was connected at least in Lancaster (also in other parts of the North) to a political shift to the left.

 In reality, Thatcher came into focus in this picture for Lancaster a bit later but still with a vengeance. Mostly a pro-Conservative town, which experienced de-industrialisation from the 1960s and an extensive service growth sector, Lancaster became pro-Labour in the 1980s and 1990s, then also Green (these days we see a shift backwards in local elections, as if we come full circle). In the 1980s, when the regionalism group was active (see P. Bagguley, M. Lawson, D. Shapiro, S. Walby and A. Warde (1990) Restructuring: Place, Class and Gender. London: Sage, a much-cited book in Economies), the ward was Labour, slowly shifting from manual working to professional middle class and with an emerging activist ethos tied to the role of the public intellectual. There is a Frankfurt School ‘undercurrent’ that flows in Lash and Urry’s project that never surfaces in Economies, but, rest assured, it is flowing freely and generously, with all its pros and cons. This stream intersects and hybridises with third way voices. Giddens’ critical and creative use (‘reflexive modernisation’) in the book is not random; nor is the belief in the emergence of aesthetically-informed social action, which also manages to counter first generation Frankfurt School distaste for the popular aesthetic (in cultural industries). The authors were recording what was going on around them as much as they were reflecting on their own agential role in these new realities. I would argue that Economies’ overarching cultural and political discourse matches its authors’ already by that time established interests: Urry’s early concern with interest groups and revolution and later investigation into tourism-informed systems of mobility, and Lash’s earlier industrial/organisational sociology and later more culturally-orientated focus on social theory, modernity and the new cultural industries. The ‘shift’ in their collaborative work from purely political to socio-cultural processes as an economic overlay is filtered through a distinctively Simmelian reading of Marx’s second volume of Capital in Economies. Where Kantian aesthetics is used in conjunction with Baudelaire and Baudrillard’s poststructuralism to criticise Giddens’ ‘cognitive’ emphasis on reflexivity, Economies figures the most obvious (to me!) innovative fusion of Lash and Urry’s sociological vision. But more on this below.

Economy, culture and the moral sphere

In an overwhelmingly Marxist academia, Economies’ poststructuralist emphasis on cultural, rather than purely political, economy, was not received well. These days I make the extra mile to teach my students the difference between the two economies, stressing that the former is not Marxist but Marxian-inspired only! Economies innovates on this question but at the time many raised an eyebrow at its authors’ ‘culturalist’ discourse (an English anti-French malaise, in my opinion). Another thing that critics shunted aside was an emphasis on moral economies of mobility (one of John’s colleagues, Andrew Sayer, is a world expert on this subject). There is a number of key terms employed in the thesis, some of which return in different parts of the book. The term ‘economies’ in the title connects to Marxist political economy only to some extent, as the concern with processes of signification in contemporary markets stresses the novelty of reflexivity and hermeneutics in contemporary socio-cultural change. Also, the term ‘space’ suggests the presence of delinking of production and consumption from social milieus in line with Baudrillard’s dystopianism and urban sociology’s concern with place socialities. There is, however, also a less pessimistic note in such transformations, connected to new class formations: interpretation by the new reflexive subjects, the authors argue, is pivotal for social change and triggers creative innovation. There we detect the influence of Bourdieu’s sociology of distinction, rather than of Marx’s; also, of consumption rather than production practices.

Note how the book begins with an acknowledgment of Marx’s circuits of production as central to modernity. The two-tiered capital-flows that the authors proceed to discuss across different chapters (money, commodities, means of production and labour power) move through space and work across different temporalities. They clarify that they intend to concretise (in terms of context, geography and social practice) what Marx left abstract in his work as ‘production circuits’. Lash and Urry’s ‘circuits’ exceed those of money and embrace the human plasticity of social reality: they become constitutive of meaning-making as a creative but not a priori determined process. I cannot forgo the feeling that Schumpeter somehow affected their elaboration on this, but as he does not appear in the bibliography, I note this as my own suspicion.

There we have the beginnings of the theory of mobility, which in recent years moved through prominent critical readers of Marx – most notably, of course, Foucault and his conception of ‘governance’. Interestingly, Economies says little about ‘power circuits’ in governmental terms and even less about the biopolitical base of production, accumulation and consumption. It does stress, however, the role of race and gender in ‘Ungovernable Spaces’ (Ch. 6), but sidelines them in favour of class, poverty and inequality indicators in the ghetto. If space is important in the central thesis, time is even more important for the conceptualisation of contemporary transformations in work patterns and lifestyles. In chapters 9 and 10, which are dedicated to the analysis of time and mobility, we find the voices of both authors in unison, considering the temporal dimensions of technology as the organisation of the social. Though neither Urry nor Lash would become Foucaultians, again we see parallels with Foucault’s poststructuralist consideration of economic-come-political structuring of institutions and organisations. But of course Economies takes a decisive turn away from all this when it pronounces a post-Fordist separation of forms of capital as objects and labour power as subjects. The new consumer capitalism order, the authors argue, is based on the continuous production of signification from objects, with which subjects (who are now cast as both producers and consumers) struggle to cope.

What is ‘aesthetic’ in aesthetic reflexivity? (Not the senses! L)

As soon as we encounter Baudrillard’s dystopia, we are moved to a counter-argument and one of the book’s core theses: if such proliferation of meaning confuses, it also opens up possibilities for the reconstitution of community, subjectivity, work and leisure (a point notably figuring in Urry’s reflections on digital mobilities after 2000 and in his Mobilities (Polity, 2007)). This proliferation leads to the heterogenisation of space and contemporary life, providing the contours of a reflexive human subjectivity. There is an element of Giddensianism in this argument, but the idea that contemporary subjects reflect upon phenomena and material objects only cognitively is replaced in Economies with the progressive aestheticisation of production and consumption. Aesthetic reflexivity entails self-interpretation, rather than self-monitoring (as is the case with Giddens’ cognitive reflexivity), is self-hermeneutic and based on pre-judgements in Gadamer’s tradition of hermeneutics. Thus, ‘being-in-the-world’, being a cosmopolitan in everyday life, is externalised and shared with others through expressive practices that at least in socio-economic terms are manifest in product design. For Lash and Urry design enables aesthetic reflexivity both at production and consumption ends, but not in a Thatcherite ‘entrepreneurial individualism’ in the absence of society. Here I state what I think that the authors want to argue: design makes social cohesion possible in novel forms (subculturally, ethnically, neotribally etc.) through the pervasive and exponential use of information and communication structures. I think (and this is my interpretation) that Hollinshead’s () recent playful tribute to Urry’s contribution to the social sciences as the ‘harbinger of the death of distance’ can be connected to Economies’ discourse.

There are more influences the authors acknowledge in the formation of their argument – Charles Taylor’s take on the aesthetic/allegorical sources of the modern self, Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘effectively pre-cognitive understandings and classifications and the habitus’ (Economies, 7). But, as is the case with Bourdieu, they never resolve the conundrum generated by their passage from the cognitive to the aesthetic: both appear to belong to the domain of the conscious as hermeneutic products. Bourdieu never clarified whether habitus is a fully articulated product of the conscious layers of modernity – nor did he answer to elitist accusations concerning the material basis of social distinction. Instead, he devised a second term, hexis, to address the embodied and pre-conscious aspects of habitus. Economies does not fully resolve this gap either: its authors speak of pre-cognition in aesthetic reflexivity. But one wonders: how can we reflect before reflecting upon social reality? Another problem that follows from this black spot is the role of emotion in aesthetic reflexivity: if affect can be pre-cognitive (but largely useless at least in production processes), then emotion (the fully articulated feeling, ridden with intentionality) is certainly a crucial component in production and consumption circuits (hence in the hermeneutics of the aesthetic). Economies is full of sporadic references to affect but there is no systematic analysis of emotion, save some specific references to Hochschild’s Managed Heart that do little to address the question in its theoretical totality.

In fact, the emphasis on the significance of aesthetic reflexivity in the production of expert systems and new knowledge economies errs on the side of the conscious, so we are left we little to learn about the heart. I hope I am forgiven here, as this has been part of a long-standing interest of mine, partly inspired by this book. There is little clarification of Kantian aesthetics in Economies, leaving open a door to those hostile to the book’s thesis on circuits of production-consumption that places the visual at the top of an aesthetic hierarchy. Economies’ Kant ought not to be read as a proponent of the sensory aesthetic – unfortunately, the emphasis on design principles gives the impression that Kant is misread by the authors, when this may not be the case. Interrogations of the postmodern nature of aesthetic reflexivity by allegorical means (allegory transcends theological moralism but remains a moral project, as opposed to premodern symbolism, they claim) stand at the centre of the less structured, nearly anarchist, contemporary social formations. But, again, where is the emotional component in these new configurations? Note also, that new movements need symbols to communicate belonging rather than fully formed allegories – but, again, we fall back on a visual evaluation of aesthetic reflexivity. I would argue that to understand Economies’ postmodern ethos, visual hierarchies should give analytical way to pathial ones – after pathos or emotion – if we are to study for example the role of our 21^st-century individual and communal belonging.

Structure (in defence of agency J)

The book is divided into four parts. Here I have to work a bit in Foucault’s style, to guess who did what in the overall structure of the work, as well as what each bit contributes to the overall thesis. Again, I stand corrected by those who may have more first-hand knowledge on the book’s history. Part I examines theoretically the global economy of flows and the rise of postmodern reflexivity, with chapter 3 as its best exposition of the authors’ readings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens on expert systems and individualisation.

Part II looks at the structural conditions of reflexivity in chapter 4, through examples of production systems (Japanese, German and Anglo-American). The model/thesis of Economies is closely connected to the Anglo-American reflexive accumulation, which is seen as a corollary of reflexive consumption – in contradistinction to the German and Japanese highly modern reflexive production. Chapter 5 applies these models to culture industries (Scott Lash’s main interest at the time) to reflect on the ways these now function more as service industries. This observation links to the book’s main thesis: the main aesthetically reflexive agents in contemporary capitalist environments represent a service class that both produces and consumes. There is a strong Americanised edge in this aspect of the argument that I would attribute to Scott Lash. The following two chapters (6 and 7) read closer to Urry’s classical left-wing education (though work on industrial structuring in them is probably done by Lash), with a strong emphasis on the losers of reflexive modernity: migrants, the underclass and ethnic minorities. Here we see a strong emphasis on the moral economies of mobility that classical Marxist critics of Economies ignored.

In Part III chapter 8 looks at the intensification of design service provision in both public and private sectors and its consequences. Chapter 9 examines changes in conceptions and organisations of time (though, personally, I would have liked to see more clarification on how and if the two connect). The argument is that, especially changing work and leisure patterns led to the replacement of clock time by an increasingly instantaneous, glacial or evolutionary time, leading to reconfigurations of memory. This ‘speeding up’ argument became part of Urry’s later elaborations on mobilities. However, I do think the chapter places unilateral emphasis on the public domain, leaving private configurations of time and sociality largely unacknowledged. Clock time is still very present in the private sphere, where possible, and I fear that discarding its intimate presence may actually endorse rather unsavoury slides to social evolutionism. Whereas Economies’ argument on the aesthetic maintains a distinctively neo-Romantic ethos, this chapter re-rationalises contemporary life, bringing Giddens’ influence back into focus.

In Part IV Chapter 10 completes the argument with a focus on travel and the prevalence of risk. The claim that aesthetic modernisation is followed by a shift from ‘legislation’ to ‘interpretation’ (borrowed from Bauman’s (1987) thesis), both in expert systems and in lay environments, is also connected to the ‘end of tourism’ and the rise in combined mobilities. Chapter 11 deals directly with the role of localities and regions in globalisation processes. The reflexive demand to think globally but act locally is viewed as the core of contemporary global culture, increasingly dictating a shift from national to cosmopolitan patterns of civic belonging. The prevalence of informational flows and post-national networks of mobility usher humans to postmodern domains and patterns of belonging and action.

Brighter futures in dark times

And there you have it: a series of impressions on a book that was inspired by a collection of dreamers and concretised/written by two future leaders (as both of them would become). My personal engagement with John Urry – a sensitive, thoughtful and rather modest person for his status – suggested that, just like his other books, Economies must have been a project that spoke first from the heart, rather than the brain, but in a quiet tone. I am sure his globally spread students and collaborators will agree with me in one thing: that his intellectual engagement with social phenomena was always forward-looking, always in favour of opening closed doors and examining possibilities. His collaboration with Scott Lash yielded great results, as is the case when two highly creative minds meet. I hope that new strong leaders like John will emerge in the social sciences, as kind and creative as he was. I hope that they will also speak about John’s work in innovative ways, critically or not, in favour of better futures.

REFERENCES

Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hollinshead, K. (2016) ‘A portrait of John Urry – harbinger of the death of distance’, Anatolia, 27 (2): 309-316.

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. 

NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Thanatourism and Cinematic Representations of Risk

Thanatourism and Cinematic Representations of Risk

Screening the End of Tourism

By Rodanthi Tzanelli (University of Leeds, UK)

Series: Routledge Advances in Sociology

April 2016 | 240 pages | 7 B/W Illus

Hb: 978-1-138-65264-4: £85.00 £68.00*

20% Discount Available with discount code FLR40

Via Amazon at £85.00

www.routledge.com/9781138652644

For more details, or to request a copy for review, please contact:

Tom Eden, Marketing Assistant

tom.eden@tandf.co.uk

In today’s world, the need to eliminate natural and human-made disasters has been at the forefront of national and international socio-political agendas. The management of risks such as terrorism, labour strikes, protests and environmental degradation has become pivotal for countries that depend on their economy’s tourist sector. Indeed, there is fear that that ‘the end of tourism’ might be nigh due to inadequate institutional foresight. Yet, in designing relevant policies to tackle this, arts such as that of filmmaking have yet to receive due consideration.

This book adopts an unorthodox approach to debates about ‘the end of tourism’. Through twenty-first century cinematic narratives of symbolically interconnected ‘risks’ it considers how art envisages the future of humanity’s well-being. These ‘risks’ include: migration as an infectious disease; alien incursions as racialized labour mobilities; cyborg rebellion as the fear of post-colonial otherness; and zombie anthropophagy as the replacement of rooted identities by nomadic lifestyles.

Such filmic scenarios articulate the futuristic survival of community as the triumph of the technological human over otherness, and provide a means to debate societal risks that weave identity politics into unequal mobilities. This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in mobilities theory, tourism and travel theory, film studies and aesthetics, globalisation studies, race, labour and migration.

ENDORSEMENT

“Tzanelli’s thought-provoking new book masterfully uncovers the complexities which surround dark tourism, helpfully illuminating the deeper political reasons behind its global power to intrigue. Building upon her groundbreaking work on film tourism and pilgrimage, Tzanelli very originally considers popular movies like District 9 and 28 Days Later to provide viewers with virtual access to the possibilities which might exist for the future of humanity, through a reconsideration of its darkest pasts.”
– Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow

Of Muses and Darkness: The Poetics of Writing

Image: Frakieleon, 'True Colours', 2009, Flickr/Creative Commons

It has been almost three decades since the publication of Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture: The Poetics & Politics of Ethnography. Yet, the volume’s statement on interdisciplinarity as not just the act of ‘picking a theme or a subject’ but the decision of ‘creating a new object that belongs to no one’ (p. 1) still retains its relevance across the social sciences. Although Clifford is talking about ethnography and the ethics of partial truth excavation in scholarship, his observations certainly apply to writing as a form of agency upon the social in broader terms to date. His decision to expand on writing as a metaphor of ‘pilgrimage’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997) shifted debates on movement in phenomenological and interactive terms. In Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty First Century (2013) he also suggested that collective and individual subjectivities are processual and emergent; that we all are overdetermined in some respects by the presence of an interconnected network of cultures – so much so, that our own (auto)biographic rootings remain ever-shifting and malleable.

The lengthy reference to the politics and poetics of writing makes sense in the contemporary context of Western academia as this undergoes ideological changes due to the invasion of unregulated market ideologies in its informal ways of ‘doing things’. Looking past this polemics – possibly, also past any ‘publish or perish’ ultimatums (Colquhoun, 5 September 2011) – one discovers a world of barely visible networks of people striving to articulate what matters to them nd not for the sake of a Research Excellence Framework. With all the hassles of the academic job, putting an idea into words, shaping up an argument (or more than one) persist as values referring back to other values – amongst them the assaulted freedom of expression.

Writing is a dangerous act: not only does it release feelings and notions the author never manages to fully tame into texts – for, meaning always exceeds its original articulation – it puts us into indirect contact with other voices. My mental closets are full of significant others who fade or return in my desktop every time I type up a new idea. If, as de Certeau (1986) noted, spatial trajectories find a way to project their creators’ psychic world, then it is true that writing will always invoke and release some form of darkness. And by ‘darkness’ I refer to the innermost recesses of our intellect and heart, not to a chiaroscuro artistic exercise. As Neil Gaiman recently said, our stories should openly ‘[ask] whether any fictions should in fact be “safe places”, or whether their purpose should instead be to “hurt in ways that make [one] think and grow and change”’ (Kennedy, 25 October 2015).

A retired now colleague used to classify us into 'talkers, doers and writers'...

Photo: Aria Ziai, Flickr/Creative Commons

Scholarly writing in particular encompasses both the politics of friendship and the poetics of love. Friendship follows a code of paradigm affiliation, which binds scholars into the same dark space, coerces them to fumble their way around for the right words and to provide mutual support via all sorts of direct and indirect exchange. Here ‘exchange’ becomes interchangeable with ‘reciprocity’, as writers are supposed to be bound by a norm of mutual acknowledgment of sharing in intellectual projects. Where this is absent, the relationship dies before it grows into a stable and more permanent friendship. I am constantly engaging in such precarious exchanges, often guessing the identities of those who proclaim solidarity, retreating in disappointment for broken links with others, or building new unexpected connections. ‘Muses’ assume different form, context and content in my writing ventures, often via faint and fleeting interactions, indirect communications or textual sites I discover during searches. In such complex and interconnected virtual and terrestrial encounters, belonging remains emergent much like Clifford’s politics of belonging.

My sanity is dependent on my interlocutors's intellectual maturity

Image: Denise Krebbs, 'A Writing Six-Word Story', 2013, Flickr/Creative Commons

Nevertheless, there is also another side to this shared darkness that leads one down a more dangerous path and straight into the poetics of love. To explain, I refer again to Clifford’s original point about interdisciplinary writing (the decision of ‘creating a new object that belongs to no one’), which links to a direct quote from Roland Barthes’ work. Clifford is less interested in Barthes' interdisciplinarity however than in making a point about the interpretative nature of fieldwork in Malinowski’s ethnographic journeys. It is this bringing together of Barthes with Malinowski in Writing Culture’s introductory chapter that allowed Clifford to make an enduring ethical statement on authorial violence, creative representation and partial truth-making. Would the two scholars ever had looked eye to eye, if they had been brought together? Such synthetic referencing always involves the effacement of one’s original inspiration, even though the source’s acknowledgment is an act of love. Such violence might also creep up aposteriori, when manuscripts have already been published –especially when stylistic similarities or intellectual compatibilities eventually prompt new source-searching and writing. These occurrences are not uncommon in scholarly networks and coerce authors to readjust their cognitive panoramas, resort to accepting new significant others into their own dark field, or even explore new collective or individual opportunities of articulation. Ironically then, though the poetics of authorial love are dedicated to humanising ideas, they may have to resort to some dehumanising techniques, to objectify those we cite or acknowledge in our writings.   

References

Clifford, J. & Marcus, G. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, J. (2013) Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Colquhoun, D. (5 September 2011) ‘Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed’, The Guardian.

de Certeau, M. (1986) Heterologies, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Feminist Media Studio (2013) James Clifford discusses his new book 'Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century' with Trish Audette, doctoral student in Communication Studies, at the Feminist Media Studio, Concordia University, October 2013.

Kennedy, L. (25 October 2015) ‘Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman review – nasty surprises and bold recastings’, The Observer.

Book Launch, 06 October 2015, Social Sciences 12.25, University of Leeds

Mobility, Modernity and the Slum: The Real and Virtual Journeys of Slumdog Millionaire, Abingdon: Routledge.

Book Launch, 06 October 2015, Social Sciences 12.25, University of Leeds

Routledge link here

£34.99 eBook available for individual purchasers, which can be ordered through VitalSource in November.

There is also currently a £41.99 Kindle version on Amazon.

I started writing this book as a contribution to the way different mobilities intersect behind a movie. My focus was Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, a highly successful enterprise created by an international community of artists spanning continents and cultures. The film is a straightforward story of a youth from the slums of Mumbai, his struggle to earn a living, self-educate, win back his childhood love and finally make it out of poverty. Thanks to his knowledge on facts based on personal experiences of exclusion, ethnic persecution and inequality, he wins on a quiz show and becomes a millionaire.

The film weaves a rich intertextual web of cinematic narratives from different eras, thus serving as a scholarly spyglass into the ways the city of Mumbai and India struggled through modernisation. However, as I researched more into the film, its production, reception and reproduction in other cultural circuits controlled by the Indian state as well as global media and tourist networks, the film itself became more a cosmetic starting point, albeit an important one. Note that the book’s summary stresses that the film became tangled in many controversies around India’s destiny in the world: it inserted Mumbai into various financial, political and artistic scenes, increased tourism in its filmed slums, and brought about charity projects in which celebrities and tourist businesses were involved. As such, it served as a global example of a ‘developing country’s’ uneven but unique modernisation according to Western standards.

The presence of Western standards in the whole cycle of Slumdog Millionaire’s inception, production and reception suggested that I don’t deal just with a piece of art but with a controversial case of invisible colonisation. That the application of Western representational methods for the city of Mumbai and its histories of ethnic integration and conflict in its slums presents us with an example of what decolonial theorists call ‘the captive mind’. This impossibility to narrate the past of a culture and imagine its futures outside Western modernity and modernisation was shared to a great extent by the makers of Slumdog Millionaire and their represented cultures, the slumdwellers. With all their good intentions to support India’s disenfranchised groups, the makers of SM were also trapped into their old roles as invisible colonists. They contributed to reproductions of the captive mind, willingly as philanthropists or volunteers and unwillingly as artmakers on whose work tourist business capitalised to sell Indian slum tourism. As much as their activist spirit produced a vision of Mumbai as a city of slums, a city of ruins, a dark city, the happy ending of the film also suggested alternate futures. But not outside capitalism and neoliberal policy-making. And not completely outside the histories of slum tourism and its beginnings in European industrial urbanisation, the tourist flanerie of journalists and philanthropists in shantytowns as well as its coincidence with colonial racism and domestic debates on welfare policies on poverty. Slumdog Millonaire’s visions of modernity simply excluded alternative knowledge systems from representations of Indian culture in film, e-tourism and on-site tourism in its filmed slums.

Was this a problem or a solution for the already excluded slumdwellers in India? Was it that bad to have someone interested in their fates from the West? The book does not offer straightforward answers, only different interpretations of harm, charity and benevolence. Reminding us that racism, exclusion and trafficking are also in the eye of the beholder, that victims can be perpetrators of inequality; that our scholarly interpretations contribute to the production of socio-cultural identities.

In short then, this book is about the ways different media regimes, including those of film and digital tourist industries shape the image of places. As what we call ‘worldmaking agents’ the original makers of such images do not necessarily hold control over these representations which enter global capitalist circuits, may instigate nationalist reactions even by the very disenfranchised they support or end up serving the political interests suspect interest groups. As such, the book aspires to advance debates on representations of place in the context of an all-consuming Western modernity, which constantly excludes consideration of intersectional inequalities based on race, gender, class and status as malleable conditions. Bringing together state-of-the-art tourism theory, work on professional migration flows and debates on decolonisation it suggests that mobilities continue to operate on the logic of Western knowledge systems for better or worse. 

Slumming through recession: Grexit scenarios of tourism

The result of the recent referendum in Greece over its – depending on whom you ask – future in the Eurozone has shaken most natives, confused diasporic Greeks who could not vote from abroad and angered those less sympathetic to the Greek cause. I think that there is enough to-ing and fro-ing in the cybersphere on the so-called ‘Grexit’ these days, so I will not add further comments. My observations relate to a lateral issue: it concerns what glocal responses (as in Robertson 1995) to troika policies did to alter the country’s image as a tourist destination (for critics of such market policies, it helps to remember that as is the case with other island states, the Greek economy depends on tourist flows to the date). Connected to this question is how foreigners came to view the country as a ‘host’ more generally over the last two years or so.

Like most, I too remain confused. One of my latest Facebook travels revealed a link to a video in which Greek students from Birmingham dance in the rhythms of Zorba the Greek on campus – a rather bizarre reaction to the definitive ‘No’ that the ‘Greek people’ had delivered to its ‘EU oppressors’ only a few hours ago (the actual video dated from 2012 and was posted on You Tube on the Greek Independence Day– see Mack, 25 March 2012). I compared this to the dancing and celebration scenes at Exarchia when the first referendum voting results were announced (No Comment TV, 06 July), and wondered how the coupling of such desperate defiance with performances of the most touristified Greek music would appear to a visitor’s eyes. The surrealist gusto Greeks display has various, unseen at this point, consequences, possibly exacerbating stereotypical conceptions of Greek habitus and streamlining those back into a rejuvenated, if not radically redefined tourist market.

Let me backtrack a bit to explain this potentially surreal effect: I am sure most of us remember the political background of 2008 (see Wikipedia, undated on ‘Ta Dekemvriana’, including Greek anti-government protests after Nea Dimokratia’s failure to restructure the country’s labour markets (Papadimitriou 2009: 51-2; Tzanelli 2011: chapter 6) – further challenged from 2010, when the Greek economy experienced another dip that would push the country to borrow more, accumulate a debt impossible to repay and, finally, under a left-wing government, respond to its debtors’ threats with proposals to exit the common EU currency and the EU itself. There is so much media talk about the proliferation of disorder and fostering of all sorts of terrorism in the country; booking your package holiday to a Greek island is a de facto bad idea. To mobilities academics like myself this might suggest that we have eventually reached the ‘end of tourism’ as a political reality. Public frustration has proceeded to remove the glossy veneer from the country’s cosmetic cosmopolitanism (Nederveen Pieterse 2006) – a veneer in earnest also necessary for engaging with other cultures, including the alleged ‘superficiality’ of touring and media arts – leaving its ‘skin’ blemished by centuries of foreign interference, ‘bare’, like the lives of its disposed citizenry. So, the neoliberal cage seems to have been exchanged with one of sheer terror. 

If not cautiously unpacked, such statements merely reverse Fukuyama’s (1992) reflections in the End of History, the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government that shunts radical alternatives in a conservative deadlock: either our history terminates in evolutionary terms, or extremism terminates its industrial human capital. There are other voices that argue that tourism has ended in new global environments of mobilities in the sense that we cannot separate it from other forms of spatio-temporal and functionally differentiated movements, such as migration, business travel, technological services, skills and the like – that we live in the age of nomadology (Hannam 2008; Hannam et.al. 2006). Unfortunately, observations that tourism ends where terrorism and other forms of social conflict thrive (Korstanje and Clayton 2012) are very close to contemporary Greek realities.

From the start of the global recession the end of Greek tourism manifested itself in bundles of endogenous (strikes and protests against cuts, welfare retrenchment and poverty-induced troika policies as well as rising levels of xenophobia against both tourists and migrants) but also exogenous (terrorism allegedly exclusively of alien origins) mobilities. All of them retain the nomadological attributes of strangeness – referring to both privileged and disenfranchised aliens. Gone were the peace of some island beaches, upon which tourists would now increasingly find migrants (alive or dead) washed ashore (usually from Greece’s archenemy-state, Turkey) (Bearden, 29 May 2015); Acropolis tours for cultural tourists, who would be blocked by labour strikers and protesters against heritage privatisation (see Smith, 27 January 2011 and 16 March 2014); and luxury urban tourisms that hordes of homeless beggars and emergency food provision stalls would disrupt with invocations of consumerist guilt. Contemporary Greek social landscapes tend to be at odds with otherwise persistent tourism trends in the country (beach and heritage holidays), when one thing is sure: the clash is here to stay. The (justified) fear is that Greece might enjoy short tourism renaissances (Lowen, 25 June 2014), but its slide into a ‘Third World’ purgatory will eventually coerce it to redefine its global market presence. And given constant invocations of Second World War ‘debts’ (that Germany refuses to discharge) by both the country’s leadership and common folk, it seems that recession promoted a resentful retrenchment into past suffering that matches so well its contemporary landscapes of homelessness and poverty.  

Let me be clear: I have no interest in contributing in post-neoliberal redefinitions of Greek tourism, but plenty in providing glimpses at alarming prognostics. The aforementioned performative protests already sit comfortably at a crossroads between dark (of war, famine and suffering) and slum (poverty and normally urban) tourisms in that they have become the country’s enduring representational core in global media platforms (Gopal, 31 March 2015). In many ways, global audiences have already become ‘trained’ to gaze on Greek poverty, with all the ethical issues this may provoke (Baptista 2012; Tzanelli 2015). It feels as if global reporting on the crisis portrays a society at its final gasp, ready to be sacralised in marketable images of begging, death and ‘endemic’ terrorism. But do global audiences really care? Bauman’s (2007) argument that any attempt to sacralise dying as a spectacle is the prelude to the represented tragedy’s neglect, should prompt a response from the Greek governing centre. But what sort of response – and can this escape capitalist exploitation? There could be coordinated efforts to connect such spectacles of poverty (the ‘staple’ of global press reporting) to progressive trends of social tourism – to employ the poor to engage with visitors. But currently, there is no such thing in Greece. What would also be absent from such an ‘exercise’ would be globally coordinated volunteer tourist education - or, more correctly, ethical political consumption, given that volunteerism is as problematic as its slum tourism counterpart. Of course, the post-neoliberal frame in which Greece is asked to operate in market networks does not necessarily accommodate ethical terms on consumption of such ‘spectacles’ – in any case, a controversial move.  The very premise that the poor can benefit from work in tourism is so tightly associated with experiences of (neo-) liberal rhetoric and capitalist exploitation that radical movements such as those promoted by Syriza would shy away from it. Others may rightly point out that any sort of ‘touristification’ would not support dewesternising, decolonising projects, only strengthen the EU bondage (Mignolo 2000). And what about alternative voices?  It is additionally questionable if the current budding of urban and rural cooperatives (Nasioulas 2012) as well as a promising solidarity movement in Greece (Henley, 23 January 2015) can find profitable and fair introduction in local tourism, or support nation-wide policies of self-government in the Zapatistas model of development.

Self-governance is a scarce resource that has to be earned – in the Zapatistas’ case, with revolution that is not always peaceful or contextually advisable. But social tourism has to be for the poor and not poor in cultural resources - otherwise those in poverty join racist value hierarchies from the back door. In addition, tourism is often consigned to inessential policy prerogatives in (non)developing economies and ‘Third World’ experimentation focuses on hard industries and policies instead. But is this restructuring of local markets perhaps a partial solution - or have social and geographical inequalities in Greece deepened, irrevocably tying the mobility of its social landscapes to nodes of business and governance managed only from afar?

References

Baptista, J.A. (2012) ‘Tourism of poverty: The value of being poor in the non-governmental order’, in F. Frenzel, K. Koens and M. Steinbrink (eds) Slum Tourism. London: Routledge, 125-143.

Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity.

Bearden, L. (29 May 2015) ‘British tourists complain that impoverished boat migrants are making holidays “awkward” in Kos’, The Independent. Available from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/british-tourists-complain-impoverished-boat-migrants-are-making-holidays-awkward-in-kos-10281398.html (accessed: 23 June 2015).

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Gopal, A. (31 March 2015) ‘What austerity looks like inside Greece’, The New Yorker. Available from http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-austerity-looks-like-inside-greece (accessed 23 June 2015).

Hannam, K. (2008) ‘The end of tourism? Nomadology and the mobilities paradigm’, in J. Tribe (ed.) Philosophical Issues in Tourism. Clevedon: Channel View.

Hannam, K., Sheller, M. and Urry, J., 2006. Editorial: Mobilities, immobilites and moorings. Mobilities, 1 (1), 1-22.

Henley, J. (23 January 2015) ‘Greece’s solidarity movement: “it’s a whole new model – and it’s working”’, The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/23/greece-solidarity-movement-cooperatives-syriza (accessed 23 June 2015).

Korstanje, M.E. and Clayton, A. (2012) ‘Tourism and terrorism: conflicts and commonalities’, Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 4 (1): 8 – 25.

Lowen, K. (25 June 2014) ‘Tourists return as austerity-hit Greece emerges from crisis’, BBC News. Available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27989995 (accessed 23 June 2015).

Mack, N. (25 March 2012) ‘Birmingham Zorba's Flashmob - Official Video’. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U2bdXZzel0 (accessed 08 July 2015).

            Mignolo, W.D.  (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.      

Nasioulas, I. (2012) ‘Social cooperatives in Greece: Introducing new forms of social economy and entrepreneurship’, International Review of Social Research, 2 (2): 141-61.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2006b) ‘Emancipatory cosmopolitanism: Towards an agenda’, Development and Change, 37(6): 1247-57.

No Comment TV (06 July 2015) ‘Greek referendum: “No” supporters celebrate in Athens’ streets - no comment’. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtxIq2dyiDU (accessed 08 July 2015).

Robertson, R. (1995) ‘Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage.

Smith, H. (27 January 2011) ‘Greek communists storm the Acropolis in bailout protest’, The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/jun/27/greek-communists-storm-acropolis-bailout (accessed 23 July 2015).

Tzanelli, R. (2011) Cosmopolitan Memory in Europe’s ‘Backwaters’: Rethinking Civility. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.

Tzanelli, R. (2015) Mobility, Modernity and the Slum: The Real and Virtual Journeys of Slumdog Millionaire. New York & Abingdon: Routledge.

Wikipedia (undated) ‘Ta Dekemvriana’. Available from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greek_riots#Criticism_of_the_Government (accessed 08 July 2015).

Rodanthi is currently co-authoring an article with Maximiliano Korstanje on the effects of troika policies on Greek epistemologies of well-being.

What is 'cinematic tourism'? A mock undergraduate essay-definition

This draft has been created for my SLSP2160 (Tourism & Culture) undergraduate students as a sample answer to part of an essay question. It can also be treated as a Wikipedia-style entry, which has nevertheless (openly) been created by an academic expert in the field. If you use it in your own essay or academic work, please note that its discourse is by no means exhaustive of the (rapidly growing) literature in the field.

Cinematic tourism: Definitions

It has been noted that especially over the last couple of decades, an increasing number of tourists began to visit destinations featured through films or TV series which are not directly related to tourism promotion campaigns. Many tourists also began to form tourist fan communities online and in filmed locations. This mass phenomenon is known by different terms, including ‘cinematic tourism’, ‘film-induced tourism’, or ‘movie-induced tourism’. All these terms forge links between tourism in new blended forms (e.g. visiting filmed locations to experience the cinematic story and to learn about the filmed location and its culture, or simultaneously engage in other types of tourism) and a particular medium (cinema and film).

Cinematic and film/movie-induced tourism are both interdisciplinary academic subjects and emerging agendas for business and policy-making concerning the management if tourist destination images and reputations. Although film-induced tourism is more connected to business studies rather than social science theory, it is by no means conceptually irrelevant to sociologists and tourist theorists. By the same token, although cinematic tourism traces its roots in social and cultural theory, it is practically applicable in business and management studies and state policies. Both terms, and especially that of cinematic tourism, are concerned with contemporaneous types of tourism we associate with the dawn of the 21^st century and are connected to advanced forms of technology such as cinema and the Internet. Their chronological anchoring presents cinematic and film-induced tourism as part of late modernisation processes and the era of late modernity or postmodernity.

Cinematic tourism is a phenomenon connected to globalisation: not only does it presuppose particular forms of technological advancement (in old and new media), it also promotes tourist connectedness, cultural hybridisation as well as economic mergers and development. (Post)modernisation processes (including industrialisation, technological progress, automobilisation and urbanisation) enabled the growth of entertainment industry and international travel (Hudson & Ritchie, 2006b). At the same time, they suggested the convergence of tourist and media businesses located in different parts of the world and operating independently from each other. Let us not forget that not only do cinematic narratives tend to romanticise communities and landscapes, they are also themselves industrial products of the city, which is a major outcome of late modernity. Cinematic tourism builds on such romanticisations, disseminating particular ideas and practices to every part of the world.

Scholarly debates

As noted above, terminological precision determines emphasis in the content of academic studies. For example, Tzanelli (2004, 2007, 2013) prefers the term ‘cinematic tourism’ and ‘cinematic tourist’, arguing that these

Are not uniform conceptual tools, but theoretical models internally differentiated by the moves and motions of travel through and after film, as well as the cinematic production of travel and tourism.The Hollywood model of the tourist exists within cinematic texts, in the movies that we watch: it suggests ways of consuming places, enjoying and “investing in” (for educational purposes) our holiday time. At the same time, touring through cinematic images produces a second type of tourist who uses the power of imagination to explore the world. This version of the tourist corresponds to the movie viewer, who “reads” and consumes film. The surplus meaning of a film enables audiences to travel virtually, to experience the filmed locations at a distance: thus the impulse to visit these locations originates in the imaginary journey on the screen. A third version of the ‘cinematic tourist’ is created when a tourist industry is established in filmed locations, through the products that tourist industries offer when they exploit the film’s potential to induce tourism. There is also a fourth type of cinematic tourist that completes the imagined journey of movie watchers. This is the tourist in the flesh, who visits places because they appeared in films, and whose experience of travel may be influenced by film and the attractions that the tourist industry has to offer. The interdependency of these types is not fixed: filmed locations are also visited by tourists who never watched movies and watching a movie will not necessarily result in visiting the filmed place’ (Tzanelli 2007/2010: 2-3).

Tzanelli therefore builds a theoretical and analytical model that includes a variety of cinematic tourists such as

1. Cinematic actors/agents

2. Film characters

3. Film audiences

4. Web surfers of cinematic stories (for example, users and visitors of official film websites but also users of other tourist websites linked to the film that inspired tourist visits)

5. Visitors of filmed locations

She further explains that different types of tourism and tourists are condensed in ‘cinematic tourism’, and that not all of them are covered by the ‘film-induced tourism’ model.

•       Representations and simulations of tourist mobilities within cinematic texts (heroes in film as tourists)

•       The act and performance of film viewing and interpretation (by audiences)

•       Virtual travels and constructions of ‘tourist’ online (web surfers for relevant films, Internet business)

•       Film viewing that transforms into embodied visits of the cinematic stage (fans visiting filmed sites)

•       Film acting and directing as part of model (location-hunting, embodied presence in filmed sites) (Tzanelli, Tourism and Culture SLSP2160, 2012)

This typology highlights the complexity of global cultural industries and the ways in which different industries (tourism, media and film) may converge. Such contingent, loose connections are termed ‘sign industries’ (Tzanelli 2004, 2007/2010) – that is, industries promoting business through groups of signs that acquire the same meaning  (e.g. The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) cinematic trilogy or the Harry Potter Films) are connected and marketed in relation to particular places (New Zealand, England) and foster particular tourist rituals (e.g. visiting filmed sites, buying film and music products, or the original literature on which films are based as part of the cinematic myth). Hence, sign industries participate in the creation and modification of collective and individual imaginations (of film audiences and tourists, but also the filmed localities, nations and nation-states).

Tzanelli’s models of cinematic tourism and the sign industries are connected to John Urry’s (2002; Urry and Larsen 2011) conception of the ‘tourist gaze’, which is by turn inspired by Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism. For Urry there are systematic ways of ‘seeing’ tourist destinations that are rooted in Western occulocentric (= visually centred) practices, and which produce discourses of modernity. Hence, visual culture is for Urry essential for the construction of the tourist experience as much as it contributes to the maintenance and expansion of tourism as an organized system of leisure. Though Tzanelli regards the visual as essential component of cinematic tourist imaginations she also stresses the significance of other senses in the production of film (audiences and fans), virtual (web surfers) and actual (visitors of filmed locations) tourisms (see Tzanelli 2013).Her other emphasis on hyperreality, which is borrowed by Baudrillard’s conception of simulacra and simulation, is also shared with other sociologically orientated scholars, such as Stijn Reijnders (2011a & 2011b), who studied the multimedia character of tourism connected to blockbusters and popular films and TV series such as Inspector Morse, Dracula, The Lord of the Rings or The Da Vinci Code.  

Other new research on cinematic or media tourism suggests that tourism institutions connected to national centres or regional and global business networks must pay closer attention to the rituals and practices of cinematic tourists: Peaslee (2010, 2011) investigated the experience of visitors to the ‘Hobbiton’ (Matamata) location site in New Zealand that was included in the production of The Lord of the Rings films. Peaslee, who stands between Tzanelli’s emphasis on media structures and tourist agency and Reijnder’s emphasis on tourist experiences, developed a thesis from Couldy’s (2003) work on media centres and bounded spaces that he applied to his fieldwork in New Zealand. After participant observation of several tours of the Hobbiton attraction and in-depth interviews with visitors and guides, he concluded that attitudes toward and behaviours within this tourist attraction are indicative of an embodied assent to a particular kind of media power. Tourists and tourist hosts in Hobbiton (Matamata) must be examined as actors responding to a repeating discursive structure that, by creating boundaries and sanctifying spaces, canalizes attitudes, behaviour, and movement.

‘Film-induced tourism’ demarcates a narrower subject area than ‘cinematic tourism’. Beeton’s (2005: 5-8) definition refers to the ways historically tourism borrowed from artistic uses of the picturesque (an idea originating in Seaton’s [1998] analysis of visual media and tourism) and contemporary creation of tourist markers for the development of tourism in filmed sites (a comment originating in MacCannell’s [1989] consideration of staged authenticity in tourist settings). Beeton is concerned about the impact of tourism can have on localities. She argues that ‘tourism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction’ (Beeton 2005: 12) because it can lead to environmental degradation and community disintegration. Debating the problem from a destination-marketing point of view, Beeton argues for organized and sustainable development strategies These preliminary observations are also relevant to Tzanelli’s ‘cinematic tourism’ model, but their empirical analyses differ, with Beeton being more geared towards marketing imperatives and less on critical theory. All the same, the study of both concepts is compatible rather than adversarial.

An example of film-induced tourism would be travelling to New Zealand because of the desire to see the movie sets and landscapes featured in The Lord of the Rings movies (Tzanelli 2004; Beeton 2005; Roesch 2009).Though early studies of this phenomenon highlighted the enhancement of memories of location and film experiences through associations with the films’ actors, events and setting (Riley & Van Doren, 1992), scholars did not examine actors and directors as ‘tourists’. Film-induced tourism was defined solely in terms of tourist visits to destination featured on television, video, or films (Beeton, 2005; Hudson & Ritchie, 2006a).  Otherwise put, travellers in search of filmed sights are film-induced tourists (Butler, 1990; Busby & Klug, 2001). Butler (1990) suggested that ‘films can influence the travel preference of those who expose to the destination attributes and create a favourable destination image through their representation’ (Rewtrakunphaiboon, 2009: 2). Hence, film-induced tourism tends to focus on the ways marketing efforts and previous travel influence destination choice by rationalising individual decision-making processes (Iwashita, 2003; Iwashita, 2006). It is not coincidental that film-induced tourism is methodologically connected to social disciplines such as psychology that measure decision-making variables of less importance in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, which focus on collective action.

Impacts, benefits and consequences

There is a stream of film-induced tourism studies that ascertain the impact of cinematic and digital cultures on people’s perceptions of place and culture. For example, O’Connor (2010) argues that since young people spend much of their leisure time watching TV or surfing the Internet, this exposure will have an impact on their perception of certain destinations. Sellgren (2011) also claimed that the movie Lost in Translation led to a positive image of Japan in the minds of the students who had participated in a discussion round about this movie. Such studies connect to earlier media theory that infers consequences from supposed causes (e.g. hypodermic model). In any case, they contribute less to understandings of collective social action and to tourism theory. A more amenable example is provided by Croy’s (2011) investigation of the role of film in broader tourist decision making, and the influence and management of this process. Croy (2011) highlights the use of film images to align potential tourists to the destination’s ideal image. Like others, he argues that films influence activities and routes when at the destination (Macionis and Sparks, 2009). Whereas he claims that films are incidental in the production of tourist industries, they are a tourist activity and contribute to regional economies (Croy and Buchmann, 2009).

The impact on regional and national economies and cultures is significant. As Tzanelli (2004; 2007: chapter 3; 2013: chapter 2) explains, not only did The Lord of the Rings revamp New Zealand’s cultural profile as the ‘New Middle Earth’ (rather than a peasant country, it also generated urban tourist and media traffic from the U.S. and the U.K. while strengthening the ties between New Zealand’s  artistic leadership (LOTR director Peter Jackson) and other transnational artists (e.g. Guillermo del Toro’s involvement in the Hobbit trilogy) and creative urban centres (e.g. LA acting as a Hobbit media hub). In addition, (hosted) journalists’ reports on filming locations, and the well-known actors and directors prompted to report on their location experiences (Croy, 2011: 162). Generally, film-induced and cinematic tourism can revitalise regional/rural communities and increase tourism to urban centres, with Auckland as an example in point (Beeton 2005). An interest in the nation and its positive image can eventually lead to an actual visit to the country as is the case with the increased Japanese interest in touring the UK (Iwashita, 2006). In addition one may argue that cinematic tourism has become one of the all-weather attractions that counter problems of seasonality in the tourism industry, as is the case with some filmed Australian rural areas (Beeton, 2004).

The environmental benefits and problems connected to cinematic tourism are many. There is no doubt that film can act as a sort of knowledge repository for certain aspects of the country such as nature: the natural beauty of filmed landscapes increases the cultural value for the film location. However, especially protected natural destinations can be damaged by filming or be deemed to be ‘in danger’ of destruction. Whereas such fears are not always true, they can act as activist trigger that obstructs both the development of the filmed region and the reputation of the state to which this belongs. One such example is the film The Beach (2000, director Danny Boyle), which was used by Internet tourist providers for the promotion of Thailand as a travel destination. Various environmentalist groups highlighted that the adaptation became complicit in the advertising of the country as an ‘Edenic destination’ for

Westerners. This was achieved through the organisation of protests when 20th Century Fox

decided to ‘conform’ the area in which the movie was filmed (Phi Phi Leh of Krabi area) to

images of tropical tourist paradises. What was obscured in this case was the problematic political environment in which film industries had to operate: coerced to negotiate with a state that invited foreign capital but paid little attention to local development, not aware of the areas’ racist histories of migration, and assuming the role of stereotypical Western outsiders, resulted in their scapegoating by activists (Tzanelli, 2006). The events seemed to have acted as a learning experience for the artistic contingent, with Boyle especially becoming implicated in beneficial community development projects in the context of his later film, Slumdog Millionaire (2009).

It must be noted that, increasingly, artistic communities become implicated in such projects even independently from – if not against - any tourist imperatives. In search of interesting locales to photograph for the forthcoming film Avatar (2009, director James Cameron), computer generating image professionals stumbled upon the tribes of the Amazonian rainforest whose culture and livelihood face extinction due to a government-backed multibillion project to build the Belo Monte Dam. ‘Director Cameron, producer Jon Landau, and the crew joined forces with anthropologists, tribesmen, regional, and (trans)national activists to cancel these plans. […] Cameron himself appears in one open-access video —promotional of his relevant documentary—confessing that he always wanted to travel to Brazil’s virgin territories (A Message from Pandora, n.d.). Elsewhere, he is depicted amongst indigenous populations like Avatar’s soldier Jake or an ethnographic traveller-investigator, uncovering evidence of coordinated crimes against localities. Avatar actor Sigourney Weaver’s video adopts a humanitarian style (Amazon Watch, 2011), prompting viewers to sympathize with the cause.’ (Tzanelli 2013b: 2). Such initiatives clash with tourist growth of regions in the name of humanitarian or environmental causes – only this time, the architects are not the localities but artistic leaders.

Film tourism is a medium that communicates a wide range of cultural meanings and values tied to filmed lands and venerated national artefacts. There is no doubt that heritage sites serving as film locations gain popularity after the film (Busby & Klug, 2001). However, once a heritage site becomes part of the cinematic and tourist imaginary, conflicts may arise. ‘Heritage sites’ incorporated in films, include both tangible (architecture, monuments and museum artefacts) and intangible tokens (histories, literatures and ideas). Again, both localities and nation-states may react to such cultural ‘intrusions’ in varied ways. For example, the cinematic adaptation (2001) of Captain Corelli’sMandolin, a novel by Louis de Bernières, was met with various responses in the filmed places of the Greek island of Kefalonia (Tzanelli 2003; Tzanelli 2007/2010: chapter 4). Like the novel, the film was set against the historical background of the Greece’s Axis Occupation, ‘the operation of Greek Resistance, and civil strife between the Greek communist fighters of EAM/ELAS (National Liberation Front/Greek People’s Liberation Army) and anti-communist forces’ (Tzanelli 2003: 220). While generating instant tourist traffic, with Hollywood fans flocking in to see the filming and the actors, and also subsequent tourist visits to its beaches, its natural areas and the Second World War Memorial to the fallen Italian soldiers, local communist veterans felt offended by this commercialisation and the town of Sami responded negatively to the culture industry with protests and supplications to human rights institutions to ban this ‘plundering’ of heritage (also Tzanelli 2007/2010: chapter 4).

The response was different when My Life in Ruins/Driving Aphrodite (2009, director Donald Petrie) was shot in the Acropolis. ‘The idea of “hard bargaining” defined the actions of Greece’s powerful Archaeological Council (KAS) in 2006-7, when Greek-Canadian actress Vardalos managed to obtain permission to shoot her new comedy […] Since the 1960s, when the The Guns of Navarone and Zorba the Greek used Rhodes and Crete as backdrops, no major film was shot in the country. The fact that recent Hollywood blockbusters Troy, Alexander the Great and 300 (all related to Hellenic history) were filmed elsewhere has to do with Greek anti-Americanism dating back to the junta (1967-74) and the lack of tax alleviations the government was prepared to give to filmmakers. Yet, […] despite Greek warnings that no ancient stone should be moved and no cinematic enhancement should be made to the archaeological site, Vardalos’ enterprise was supported by the Ministers of Culture and Tourism and the Greek Film Centre whose website today proudly hosts photos of the shooting (see H.F.C.O. website)’ (Tzanelli, 2008; Tzanelli, 2013a: chapter 4).

The uses of tangible and intangible heritage in films that induce tourism inevitably tap on questions of propriety or even public morality, as is the case with The Da Vinci Code cinematic adaptation (2006, director Ron Howard) of Dan Brown’s novel. The film came to operate as a ‘node’ for European capitalist networks of corporeal and virtual travel, assisting in the production of a new type of commercialised ‘pilgrim’ that democratised tourism to old heritage sites in Europe (Tzanelli, 2010). There were however reactions to such trends both by the French public and even Catholic constituencies that objected to the uses of religion in the story (Tzanelli, 2013a: 63-93). Therefore, careful planning is necessary both for the selection of projected filmed landscapes and the granting of permissions to film them. The same caution applies to tourism business that capitalises on sich commercialised pilgrimages: for example, an ethnographic study of James Bond tourism by Reijnders (2010) suggests that such consumptions of cinematic plots might become interwoven with patriarchal notions of masculinity, as visiting filmed sites allows fans to embody glamorised understandings of manliness.

Sociological and anthropological studies of this intersection between tourism and cinema are work in progress. Graml (2004) has shown for example that the budding Sound of Music tourism in Austria in places such as Salzburg is treated with suspicion by locals who dissuade visitors from joining independent tours to filmed locations when in America Austrianness is defined by such films. While most Austrians presumably concede that Sound of Music tourism is important for the country’s GDP, they consider the film to be a typical product of Hollywood cinema that, unfortunately, manages to drown out the real Austrian heritage embodied by Mozart. In the Greek island of Skiathos that served together with the neighbouring Skopelos as the cinematic stage for the musical Mama Mia! (2008), there is an uneasy coexistence of local and national traditions and the tourism that is attached to them on the one hand, and postmodern simulations of the musical’s story on the other. Tzanelli (2011) suggests that this informs generational dissonance (with younger entrepreneurs more amenable to cinematic tourism) but also the ubiquitous disconnection of peripheral areas from the national centre that for structural reasons fails to support local development, allowing regional rivalries to grow. In this respect, ‘cinematic tourism’ is never limited to academic and scholarly scrutiny but informs practices and policies of national and transnational institutions such as UNESCO.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations. New York: Semiotext.

Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Harbour: University of Michigan Press. ISBN-10 0472065211, ISBN-13 9780472065219. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9Z9biHaoLZIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Baudrillard,+J.+(1983)+Simulations.&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l-MAUvGqBM2N0wXwyoHgBA&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed August 2013).

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