What do you think?
Rate this book
The Tourist Gaze 3.0
The Tourist Gaze, Third Edition restructures, reworks and remakes the groundbreaking previous versions making this successful book even more relevant for tourism students, researchers and designers in the new century. The tourist gaze remains an agenda setting theory, incorporating new principles and research. Packed full of fascinating insights this new edition is fresh and contemporary, intelligently broadening its theoretical and geographical scope and providing a nuanced account which responds to various critiques. The book has been significantly revised to include up-to-date empirical data, many new case studies and fresh concepts. Three new chapters have been added which explore photography and digitization, embodied performances, risks, and alternative futures. Innovative and informative, this book is essential reading for all involved in contemporary tourism, leisure, cultural policy, design, economic regeneration, heritage and the arts.
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 11, 2019
This book begins by saying that although we live in a visual culture, where sight is by far the most important of the senses we possess in understanding our world, that world isn’t merely given and sight itself isn’t something that ‘just is’ – rather, we learn to see and the tourist gaze is a special case of our learning to see the world.
Actually, the tourist gaze is one that is given a series of ‘permissions’ that aren’t generally available in normal life (in fact, if not by law). And that is also the point of being a tourist, I guess, and of this book – setting out what is normal-life and what is tourist-life and what behaviours are appropriate to each. In normal life, because most of us live in cities, and most of the people we are in contact with in cities are strangers, who we are forced to be oddly close to, even while they will remain strangers, we have developed a series of self-protective behaviours to cope. One of those behaviours is a kind of disinterested, ‘aware but not alert’ gaze. The prop of choice previously had been the newspaper or book on a train – now it is the phone, perhaps even with earphones in too. Just as you never stare directly into the eyes of a stranger in a lift, you are meant to spend much of your time travelling between places in cities in an almost distracted way. You are meant to be cool in all senses.
The other city persona that is sometimes allowed, but is definitely coded male and has a long history of being male is the flaneur – the guy who walks about or loiters in the city both lost in his own thoughts and taking in the crazy rush of people and spaces. It has mostly been coded male because woman doing much the same were often viewed significantly differently, as endangered or prostitutes. The flaneur’s distraction is different in kind from the city dweller’s distraction – it is part of a journey of self-discovery and of understanding the city at the same time.
If you were to see someone taking a photograph of a door you would be likely to assume that they were a tourist. Tourists are allowed to notice things the rest of us are meant to remain disinterested in, or perhaps even uninterested in. For the local, the city is what it is – for the tourist the city is a place of difference and therefore everything is open for observation, investigation, evaluation and comprehension. The site is a text they must somehow seek to translate. The tourist attitude is one of near bewildered attention. Walk through a city with a local – just about any local – and they will never look up. I don’t mean in the sense of ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet’, but other than the eye level displays made for ‘window licking’ in the shops they pass, hardly a single local will ever tilt their heads up to see the tops of the buildings they are walking beside. That is something a tourist does do. Except that makes it sound as if what the local does is conscious – I don’t think it is, I think it is a by-product of the expectation of the local’s disinterest. If you are from Melbourne, a good way to experience this local blindness is to stand in the Bourke Street Mall and scan the tops of the buildings on both sides of the street. You might be surprised by them – how bizarrely out of place the tops of the buildings seem compared to the window displays at eye level – how 1890s they all look. But what you might also be surprised by is the fact you may never have ever seen these bits of buildings before – that you will see something that otherwise might have been hidden in plain sight.
In another book by this author he discusses how Wordsworth and Co changed the way we understood the Lake’s District in England – and made it a site of romantic contemplation and engaging with nature as the sublime. And how this was also based on learning to see, which needed to be taught to us via landscape painting – and poetry, of course. And this learning to see was a literal expectation. As Coleridge says:
“For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.”
This idea of learning to see gained a push with the invention of the camera, but the authors make it clear that that push went both ways. That the camera became virtually a necessary invention given the increasingly visual way we understood the world. They talk about people carrying with themselves concave mirrors while on tour prior to the camera. They would stand with their back to the site and hold up the mirror so that they could properly frame it – and therefore properly ‘see’ it. This isn’t all that different to the tourist today – where the stereotype involves wearing a camera like a necklace – although, this too is changing with the iphone being always available. This is certainly not something that is likely to move us away a visual dominated society any time soon.
The authors do understand that this notion of us being visual has its limits. We do go to places to experience them in our full bodies – bungy jumping in New Zealand, for instance. However, often what attracts us to the site in the first place are the sights that will be there and how we will be in amongst those.
They also make the point that often what attracts us to a site is what it signifies. This goes equally well for something as large as Paris – the city of love – or as small as the location where Princess Di was killed. In fact, cities often spend years trying to create a ‘landmark’ that will attract visitors. In the 1970s in Melbourne there was literally an international ‘landmark competition’ for Melbourne. The designs were so absurd – a giant llama from Monty Python fans, for instance – that the prize was never awarded. The point is that all sites need something that explains what you are looking at. No site is transparent.
There is a fascinating discussion here on the nature of ‘authentic’ and how that might be rejected by tourists who actually just want inauthentic trash as a way of embracing modern ironic counter-culture. This is discussed in relation to Goffman’s idea of all the world being a stage – and so, the authentic tourists are promised ‘backstage’ experiences, but even these are constructed and therefore really also ‘staged’.
The last chapter is a must read. It discusses the likely futures we will have as tourists. Most of these are pretty dystopian. We have reached and probably passed peak-oil. The age of cheap transport is likely about to come to an end. It was fun while it lasted, but it isn’t clear what it will be replaced with. The move by Trump and Johnson towards isolationist visions and hate for the cultural other are likely to accelerate – and so travel would have to occur in an increasingly globally threatening world, and so might stop making much sense, even if you could afford it. It is hard to say, it might be that we create hydrogen planes and travel goes on – one of the interesting themes in this book is the notion that often ‘travel’ involves us becoming a child again – with hotels or tour guides telling us when to eat, when to piss, when to sleep, what to look at, what to ignore. We watch the Inca dances, but ignore the Inca women and children in rags begging in the streets. Our tour world being a bubble – protective to us, destructive to what we thought we had come to see.
The class differences of tourists here are also interesting – not least since mass tourism is generally seen as a lower class thing. You know the cliché: I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller. Except that the world is increasingly full and so the differences are really a matter of money and bullshit rapped in ‘Authenticity’ we are able to convince ourselves of because it cost so damn much it must be real.
The explanation of the history of tourism and how it changed given different modes of transport and different expectations of tourists is something I’ve barely touched on in this review – but it is about the best bit of the whole thing.
I should end with a snippet from another travel poem:
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.”
Actually, the tourist gaze is one that is given a series of ‘permissions’ that aren’t generally available in normal life (in fact, if not by law). And that is also the point of being a tourist, I guess, and of this book – setting out what is normal-life and what is tourist-life and what behaviours are appropriate to each. In normal life, because most of us live in cities, and most of the people we are in contact with in cities are strangers, who we are forced to be oddly close to, even while they will remain strangers, we have developed a series of self-protective behaviours to cope. One of those behaviours is a kind of disinterested, ‘aware but not alert’ gaze. The prop of choice previously had been the newspaper or book on a train – now it is the phone, perhaps even with earphones in too. Just as you never stare directly into the eyes of a stranger in a lift, you are meant to spend much of your time travelling between places in cities in an almost distracted way. You are meant to be cool in all senses.
The other city persona that is sometimes allowed, but is definitely coded male and has a long history of being male is the flaneur – the guy who walks about or loiters in the city both lost in his own thoughts and taking in the crazy rush of people and spaces. It has mostly been coded male because woman doing much the same were often viewed significantly differently, as endangered or prostitutes. The flaneur’s distraction is different in kind from the city dweller’s distraction – it is part of a journey of self-discovery and of understanding the city at the same time.
If you were to see someone taking a photograph of a door you would be likely to assume that they were a tourist. Tourists are allowed to notice things the rest of us are meant to remain disinterested in, or perhaps even uninterested in. For the local, the city is what it is – for the tourist the city is a place of difference and therefore everything is open for observation, investigation, evaluation and comprehension. The site is a text they must somehow seek to translate. The tourist attitude is one of near bewildered attention. Walk through a city with a local – just about any local – and they will never look up. I don’t mean in the sense of ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet’, but other than the eye level displays made for ‘window licking’ in the shops they pass, hardly a single local will ever tilt their heads up to see the tops of the buildings they are walking beside. That is something a tourist does do. Except that makes it sound as if what the local does is conscious – I don’t think it is, I think it is a by-product of the expectation of the local’s disinterest. If you are from Melbourne, a good way to experience this local blindness is to stand in the Bourke Street Mall and scan the tops of the buildings on both sides of the street. You might be surprised by them – how bizarrely out of place the tops of the buildings seem compared to the window displays at eye level – how 1890s they all look. But what you might also be surprised by is the fact you may never have ever seen these bits of buildings before – that you will see something that otherwise might have been hidden in plain sight.
In another book by this author he discusses how Wordsworth and Co changed the way we understood the Lake’s District in England – and made it a site of romantic contemplation and engaging with nature as the sublime. And how this was also based on learning to see, which needed to be taught to us via landscape painting – and poetry, of course. And this learning to see was a literal expectation. As Coleridge says:
“For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.”
This idea of learning to see gained a push with the invention of the camera, but the authors make it clear that that push went both ways. That the camera became virtually a necessary invention given the increasingly visual way we understood the world. They talk about people carrying with themselves concave mirrors while on tour prior to the camera. They would stand with their back to the site and hold up the mirror so that they could properly frame it – and therefore properly ‘see’ it. This isn’t all that different to the tourist today – where the stereotype involves wearing a camera like a necklace – although, this too is changing with the iphone being always available. This is certainly not something that is likely to move us away a visual dominated society any time soon.
The authors do understand that this notion of us being visual has its limits. We do go to places to experience them in our full bodies – bungy jumping in New Zealand, for instance. However, often what attracts us to the site in the first place are the sights that will be there and how we will be in amongst those.
They also make the point that often what attracts us to a site is what it signifies. This goes equally well for something as large as Paris – the city of love – or as small as the location where Princess Di was killed. In fact, cities often spend years trying to create a ‘landmark’ that will attract visitors. In the 1970s in Melbourne there was literally an international ‘landmark competition’ for Melbourne. The designs were so absurd – a giant llama from Monty Python fans, for instance – that the prize was never awarded. The point is that all sites need something that explains what you are looking at. No site is transparent.
There is a fascinating discussion here on the nature of ‘authentic’ and how that might be rejected by tourists who actually just want inauthentic trash as a way of embracing modern ironic counter-culture. This is discussed in relation to Goffman’s idea of all the world being a stage – and so, the authentic tourists are promised ‘backstage’ experiences, but even these are constructed and therefore really also ‘staged’.
The last chapter is a must read. It discusses the likely futures we will have as tourists. Most of these are pretty dystopian. We have reached and probably passed peak-oil. The age of cheap transport is likely about to come to an end. It was fun while it lasted, but it isn’t clear what it will be replaced with. The move by Trump and Johnson towards isolationist visions and hate for the cultural other are likely to accelerate – and so travel would have to occur in an increasingly globally threatening world, and so might stop making much sense, even if you could afford it. It is hard to say, it might be that we create hydrogen planes and travel goes on – one of the interesting themes in this book is the notion that often ‘travel’ involves us becoming a child again – with hotels or tour guides telling us when to eat, when to piss, when to sleep, what to look at, what to ignore. We watch the Inca dances, but ignore the Inca women and children in rags begging in the streets. Our tour world being a bubble – protective to us, destructive to what we thought we had come to see.
The class differences of tourists here are also interesting – not least since mass tourism is generally seen as a lower class thing. You know the cliché: I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller. Except that the world is increasingly full and so the differences are really a matter of money and bullshit rapped in ‘Authenticity’ we are able to convince ourselves of because it cost so damn much it must be real.
The explanation of the history of tourism and how it changed given different modes of transport and different expectations of tourists is something I’ve barely touched on in this review – but it is about the best bit of the whole thing.
I should end with a snippet from another travel poem:
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.”
November 19, 2012
A necessary read for any travel, tourism, recreation or culture student. This is the updated version with more critique of our visual / photo culture. Excited to begin reading once it arrives!
December 27, 2018
Never thought of it that way. Interesting but uninterested.
April 16, 2021
Very informative and centered about many different aspects concerning the tourism.
November 14, 2023
Thank god! I now know how to look at things when I go on my hols - thanks John!!
October 9, 2024
Incredibly important for all students doing fieldwork around tourist sites and ethnography.
February 3, 2025
DNF page 48.
Read
May 20, 2026Kind of want to read the first two editions to compare them
January 20, 2016
Aika uuvuttava luettava loppujen lopuksi. Osa tekstistä oli pakko vain selata läpi. Ei tarjonnut varsinaisesti mitään uutta, mutta ihan mukava muuten. Kyllä tästä nyt jotain pointteja oppimispäiväkirjaan löysi.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews