Story-weaving: homo narrans,popular culture and the role of stories in tourism

Abstract

This article proposes to understand popular culture-inspired tourism as a process of ‘story-weaving’. Exploring the role of stories from the perspectives of tour guides and visitors, we analyse the collaborative process in which biographical stories, places and histories become entwined. Drawing on Walter Fisher's ‘narrative paradigm’ and his understanding of humans as ‘homo narrans’ or storytelling animals, we argue that story-weaving goes beyond stories being packaged and sold to visitors by tour guides or shaping fan experiences of place. Through interviews with Scotland-based tour guides who run Outlander tours and with visitors as well as participant-based observations we unpack the dynamic nature of story-weaving and examine how visitors and tour guides participate in it as a way of engaging with and in tourism.

On the outskirts of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, the sun warms a large open field. Its flat and grassy features are indistinguishable from the surrounding farmland, yet this field holds a story which sets it apart from the rest of its countryside brethren. Raised stones interrupt the otherwise level landscape. The only structures in sight are a thatched-roof cottage and, in the distance, a large circular monument made of boulders. This field is not just a field, it is a moor. It is also a battlefield- and a graveyard. The stones are headstones, and the monument is a memorial cairn dedicated to the men who died at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. This battle between the Jacobites and British government troops marked the end of the Jacobite risings – a movement which fought to have the House of Stuart restored to the British throne. The aftermath of this battle ushered in one of the most difficult periods of Scottish history and left an indelible mark on the land and people of Scotland. Through the years that followed, governmental law and regulations saw the Scots subjected to cultural suppression, from the banning of the tartan, the restricting of the Gaelic language, the dismantling of the Scottish clan system, the clearing of lands for farming, and the forced deportation of Jacobites and their supporters to the British overseas colonies. We know this because the events of this day, and its aftermath, have been told and reinterpreted through historical documents, paintings, novels, songs, films and television series or, in other words, through stories.

In the words of Jonathan Gottschall, ‘we are, as a species, addicted to story’ (2012: xiv). This ‘addiction’ permeates our everyday lives, from recounting events of the day or reminiscing about our pasts to influencing what we do with our leisure time. We are endlessly engaging with stories, whether we are collecting older stories passed down and shared by others or creating new ones ourselves, and it is through stories that we make sense of the world (Berger, 1997; Gottschall, 2012). Stories take on many forms – they can be spoken, sung, written, played out, painted, watched or even worn. We rely on stories as a tool for learning, a way to feel connected and relate to others, to give colour to our everyday lives, and to connect us to culture, shared knowledge, and a sense of belonging (Benjamin, 1969; Berger, 1997; Cronon, 1992; Geertz, 1973; Reijnders, 2016). Stories also inspire us to travel and allow us to feel connected to places, people and events, real or imaginary (Lee, 2012; Reijnders, 2011, 2016).

This article focuses on the role of stories in tourism from the perspectives of tour guides and visitors who participate in popular culture-inspired tourism. In particular, we draw on a case study on Outlander tourism to Scotland. Outlander (1991‒) is a book series by Diana Gabaldon and as of 2014, a popular American television series. The story follows Claire Beauchamp Randall, a British World War II nurse, who travels back in time to 1740s Scotland after touching a set of standing stones in the Scottish Highlands. Claire falls in love with a Scottish Highlander named Jamie Fraser and together, they become entangled in several key historical ruptures of 18th-century Britain, including the Jacobite risings, the Battle of Culloden and the simmering conflicts in colonial North America before the onset of the American Revolution. The popularity of Outlander has led to a significant tourism boom to Scotland, and according to VisitScotland, most locations featured in Outlander ‘have seen double digit increased in attendance from 2013 to 2019’ (VisitScotland, 2022: 9).

Drawing on Walter Fisher's ‘narrative paradigm’ (1978, 1985) and his understanding of humans as ‘homo narrans’ or storytelling animals, the article uses the concept of ‘story-weaving’ to capture the collaborative process in which biographical stories, places and histor(ies) become entwined. Our use of the concept of ‘story-weaving’ is inspired by Couchie and Miguel's (2018) research on Indigenous knowledge systems. They use ‘story-weaving’ to capture the weaving together of the personal and the communal through oral traditions, personal stories, cultural practices and community experiences. We draw out a similar dynamic and collaborative process of interweaving different kinds of stories in the context of popular culture-inspired tourism and argue that story-weaving takes our analyses beyond stories being packaged and sold to visitors by tour guides or stories being understood as embedded mainly in fan experiences of place. Through interviews with Scotland-based tour guides, visitors and participant-based observations we unpack the dynamic nature of story-weaving and examine how visitors and tour guides participate in the process as a way of engaging with and in tourism.

Theoretical framework: Framing popular culture stories in tourism

As argued by Hartley and Potts (2016), storytelling is a fundamental mechanism in which human knowledge is created, transmitted and transformed. Cultural groups, or ‘demes’, emerge as a result of this adaptive process, and narratives are central to human understanding, identity and social structures. In other words, stories make culture. One of the main ways that stories are transmitted is through popular culture or ‘culture produced in the everyday lives of ordinary people’ (Seaton and Yamamura, 2015: 5). Mediums such as film, television, literature and music, act as a prism through which stories, both real and imaginary, are created, interpreted, told and reimagined (Lundberg and Ziakas, 2018; Seaton and Yamamura, 2015). Our desire to know and to feel connected to stories can lead to the creation of affective bonds with particular media and help us to understand ourselves as individuals as well as build communities around a mutual sense of attachment to a particular story with others in both digital and physical spaces (Edensor, 2002; Gray et al., 2017; Hartley and Potts, 2016; Hills, 2002; Jenkins, 2007). This is especially the case in the digital age where individuals can upload and transmit their own stories with relative ease or locate themselves within dominant stories to tell their own versions (De Fina, 2016; Jenkins, 2007; Maher, 2021; Rainie and Wellman, 2012).

In the context of popular culture-inspired tourism, scholars have shown that stories which are transmitted through popular culture can motivate us to travel to destinations related to these stories (Aden, 1999; Graburn and Yamamura, 2020; Lexhagen et al., 2023; Linden and Linden, 2017; Reijnders, 2011; Seaton and Yamamura, 2015). Following this thread, a key concern centres on how fictional stories inspire different readings of a place (Beeton, 2016; Brooker, 2007; Reijnders, 2016). For example, Brooker (2007) and Hills (2002) explore the links between place and the stories mediated through popular culture which are then mapped onto these spaces. Concepts of ‘cult geographies’ (Hills, 2002) or ‘imaginary geography’ (Lee, 2012: 52) are important here. In her research on Harry Potter tourism, Lee observes that stories encourage a ‘re-imagining of the landscape where (f)actual and imaginary geographies’ co-exist.

A place-focused analysis of popular culture tourism is central to many other case studies in tourism, media and cultural studies, whether this be on marketing strategies of travel destinations (Beeton, 2016; Martin-Jones, 2014), visitor experiences (Lundberg and Lexhagen, 2014; Waysdorf and Reijnders, 2017), forms of fan pilgrimage (Brooker, 2007; Couldry, 2007; Geraghty, 2018; Williams, 2018) or the impact of tourism on local communities (Lundberg and Ziakas, 2018). There is also an understanding of how popular culture media can lead to visitors becoming ‘co-producers’ of tourism in these spaces (Richards, 2021; Urry and Larsen, 2011: 206) and even act as protectors in helping to preserve historical landmarks (Garrison, 2020). In these instances, the role of imagination plays a central role in the visitor's impression of a place and influences how an individual engages with a particular place (Reijnders, 2011; van Es et al., 2021).

Most of this literature focuses on how destinations featured in popular media (stories) create an image of a place (Martin-Jones, 2009; Smith, 2015; van Es et al., 2021) and how the tourism industry both organises and directs tourists’ perceptions of locations, as embodied through the ‘tourist-gaze’ (Urry and Larsen, 2011). Stories – especially the dynamic processes of storytelling – are secondary to place in that perspective. Only recently has there been an attempt to understand how, and why, stories come to have such a powerful significance for consumers and prosumers (those who both produce and consume, see Toffler, 1980) in tourism and cultural studies. Scholars such as Reijnders (2016) and Moscardo (2010, 2020) note the lack of engagement with the role of stories beyond visitor experience and place-making, and call for a more in-depth study of the role that stories play in tourism. Where Reijnders emphasises the need to explore the role of stories in relation to ‘the concrete practice of imagination in individual readers/viewers’ (2016: 676), Moscardo shares a wider criticism of current tourism discourse. She notes that:

tourists are driven by opportunities to create and tell stories from their experiences, create their own stories and tell stories to others, making stories a central element, not just of destination promotion, but of tourism as a whole system. (2020: 2)

We follow this call to attend to stories but foreground the dynamic process of story-weaving. ‘Story-weaving’ highlights that stories are not passively consumed but actively engaged in, told and re-told, as well as interwoven with one another (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]). In their research on Indigenous knowledge systems, Couchie and Miguel (2018) argue that stories and storytelling make up a process of ‘story-weaving’. They use the concept to grasp how the personal and communal are woven together into a unified narrative structure through oral traditions, personal stories, cultural practices and community experiences. Story-weaving has also been described in other contexts. It was analysed a way of creating ‘story-forming’ communities, for example through Christian liturgy (Golemon, 2010), or described as a methodology in digital storytelling that allows for vulnerable people to generate their own stories (Ogawa and Tsuchiya, 2017). The concept has not, however, been applied to tourism, and the existing literature does not fully address how histor(ies), biographical stories, imaginaries and personal stories are interwoven in the practice of popular culture-inspired tourism. How do visitors engage with the wealth of personal stories and histories that intersect with the media they are pursuing? What role do tour guides play in weaving these stories? How do tour guides’ personal stories interweave with the stories they feel visitors want to hear? As will be explored later, Culloden is a place where a fictional narrative (Outlander) intersects with that of the real events that took place at the Battle of Culloden. As such, it offers a lens to explore how tour guides and visitors alike weave their own tapestries of stories from the personal, the historical and the imaginary.

Our understanding of ‘story-weaving’ builds not only on Couchie and Miguel (2018) but draws from Fisher's understanding of human beings as ‘homo narrans’- or ‘essentially storytellers’ (1985: 7). Fisher (1978, 1985), a prominent communication scholar, first introduced the concept of human beings as storytellers through his development of the narrative paradigm. His alternative view of human communication draws on Burke's (1963) understanding of humankind as symbol using animals to argue that humans are storytellers, and decision-making and communication processes are bound to good reasoning (i.e., a good story) rather than logical arguments. He argued that good reasoning, or good stories, are shaped by ‘matters of history, biography, culture and character…’ (1985: 7) with stories which speak to an individual's values, experiences and world views being more persuasive. This aspect highlights that stories are woven from different threads, spanning histories, biographies and the imaginary. The process of weaving stories is not only dynamic and thus subject to change but also collaborative in its nature, as it spans both the personal and the communal (cf. Couchie and Miguel, 2018). While Fisher situated the narrative paradigm in the context of moral arguments, the concept of valuing narrative storytelling and humans as storytellers can be applied to understanding the role of stories in tourism and cultural studies. Making a wider contribution to the role of stories and story-weaving in tourism, we adapt Fisher's paradigm to answer the question of why stories, especially those transmitted through popular culture are so important for tourism. We will look at the role of story-weaving in the tourism ecosystem, first as a process of sharing multiple stories, then as a means of connecting stories to individual biographies, and finally as a connection between stories, tourism and place.

Methods

The data presented throughout is derived from ethnographic field research conducted in May 2017. The primary author participated in a one-day Outlander bus tour in the Scottish Highlands as part of an Outlander weekend fan event. This included a visit to the Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre. The tour had about 25 participants and lasted approximately 8 hours. The primary author draws on her field notes from that tour as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews conducted after the tour with eight tour participants in order to gain an understanding of their experiences. A further six semi-structured interviews with independent Scotland-based tour operators running Outlander tours were conducted in 2021 as a part of a Horizon 2020 project. The tour operators were small, independent business owners who were selected due to being based in Scotland and providing Outlander tours. Throughout the article, the owners of these tour companies will be referred to as ‘tour guides’ as these individuals were interviewed in their capacity as guides. Each interview lasted approximately 1 hour and was carried out online (e.g., via Microsoft Teams, Zoom or WhatsApp) due to the then-ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. The names of the visitors and tour guides were pseudonymised.

Story-weaving and popular culture

On a bright May morning in 2017, 271 years after the battle, a white and orange coach bus turns down a long drive, passing a sign that reads ‘Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre’. As the driver cuts the engine and the doors to the bus open, a group of 25 women pile out, talking excitedly to each other. The energy of this group is jovial, and the excitement for the day ahead is palpable. These are fans of Outlander, a historical fantasy book series by Diana Gabaldon and, as of 2014, an American television series adaptation.

On this May day, these visitors are taking part in a day tour to sites featured in Outlander, and Culloden is the first stop along the way. There is one stone marker in particular that these visitors are eager to see- the Clan Fraser stone. This memorial marker is a pilgrimage site for Outlander fans as the fictional character, Jamie Fraser, fought and, for part of the story, is believed to have died at Culloden. The tour guide calls the group to order and theatrically exclaims, ‘Scottish history is filled with blood, guts, massacre and mayhem much like Diana's books!’ After giving a brief overview of the events leading up to the battle, the guide warns the group that she may cry because she is so moved by the story of the battle. She follows up by cautioning the group against leaving any tokens around the stones and leads the group on.

Extract from field notes, 19 May 2017

In Scotland, the emergence of the tourism industry from contemporary popular culture has a long history. The literary works of Scots author Sir Walter Scott encouraged a significant influx of tourism to the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century and earned Scott the title of ‘father of Scottish tourism’. Popular culture-induced tourism remains a primary form of tourism in Scotland today, with the popular media inspiring tourism changing as new media (i.e., stories) are generated and old ones replaced as interest in a particular media wanes. Examples of this can be seen with the ‘Braveheart-effect’ and the ‘Outlander-effect’: these two phenomena describe the socio-economic impact of the Scotland-focused Hollywood war epic, Braveheart and the historical fantasy novel and television series Outlander on Scottish tourism. Both have encouraged millions of people to visit the country and visit the land that inspired these stories.

With the tourism boom that Outlander has caused in Scotland, places, such as Culloden Battlefield have reported a 111.6% increase in visitors over a 5-year period (VisitScotland, 2022). The popularity of Outlander and the increased demand for Outlander-themed tours has resulted in the creation of new tour operations. This is the case for Jeremey who remarked that he has ‘built a business off the back of Outlander!’. The events and aftermath of Culloden feature heavily in the Outlander storyline as the main plot in book two of the series and is a thread that carries throughout the entire meta-storyline of the series. Plucking the threads of Culloden from the wider Outlander story, tour guides use the main narrative as a hook to attract business and in some cases, create a new product. Richard, who discovered Outlander in the early 2000s after a client requested to visit Culloden, sought to weave together themes of Outlander with other Scottish stories:

I started taking [the story] away, trying to figure out ‘how do I get this into a business?’ … I was trying to tailor it around the themes of the book- witchcraft, Jacobite risings, Highland history of the clans and so forth.

When the television show was aired in 2014, tour guide Euan similarly turned to story-weaving as he realised the potential of a new market:

I spoke with [my guides] and I said ‘Listen, I just heard they are going to be bringing a television version of Outlander. That thing- that's going to go stratospheric. And most people haven’t realised it yet. We need to get ahead of the curve. We need to start offering a two-day, a three-day and a four-day tour at the very least’.

Here Richard and Euan are identifying the story of Outlander as culturally significant due to the popularity of the story. In producing new businesses and tour packages around Outlander these guides are interpreting and reinterpreting the stories found in Outlander and, as noted by Lundberg and Ziaskas, ‘thereby rendering new meanings that foster emotional or ideological attachments’ (2018: 5). Their practices of story-weaving, however, go beyond marketing places and stories (Smith, 2015; van Es et al., 2021). We found that the guides are not just focusing on reinforcing a singular Outlander-centric story. Instead, they use Outlander as a storytelling device to weave in different stories (Hartley and Potts, 2016; Lee, 2012). This was made clear by Richard who was thinking about the themes he could interweave with Outlander. Euan's weaving of Outlander into his tours was also guided by a desire to expand upon the elements found in one story and weave in a richer story. As he explains:

It is not just all about platforming business. Well, not for me anyway. It provides a perfect springboard into being able to broaden and deepen [visitors’] thirst for knowledge… Outlander, because of the enthusiasm and the passion that it engenders, it is the perfect springboard for taking what is, in essence, a sketch and making it into an oil painting.

Much like Euan seeking to broaden visitor's thirst for knowledge and using a new market niche to share Scotland's stories, Jeremey is acutely aware of how pervasive fictional stories can be, noting that while people may initially visit Scotland because of Outlander, ‘the tour really brings it home for them and so they fall in love with Scotland even more’. Here Euan and Jeremey are examples of how guides actively engage in story-weaving to not only generate business, but to also share their own readings of Scottish stories. They weave in those threads that have personal importance to them. This will be explored further in the following section.

Story-weaving (hi)stories

Continuing down the walkway and onto the field, the group take in their surroundings. A rainy day in these parts, the tour guide explains, would see this open space quickly transform into a damp bog. The weather on this day is a strange companion to the story being told. Where the guide paints a picture of freezing temperatures, boggy terrain, rain, snow and fog with low visibility on 16 April 1746, the weather that greets the visitors is warm and sunny except for the occasional cloud and birdsongs can be heard, carried on a gentle breeze. As the group walk onto the moor, the guide continues to interweave the plot points of Outlander with the events that unfolded on the moor. Where Jamie ultimately survives Culloden, she explains that most are not so fortunate. Lasting just under an hour, the battle saw the deaths of nearly 2000 Jacobite soldiers compared to around 50 government soldiers. Those who were wounded and survived the initial battle were later executed or imprisoned and faced penal transportation. The guide leads the group towards one particular stone that has flowers and painted rocks placed around it, the stone reads ‘Clan Fraser’. The group's excitement, where once palpable, is noticeably lessened by the other stories of carnage and violence. The guide ends the guided tour segment with a reminder to return to the bus on time and leaves the group with a final comment: ‘The events of Culloden would be considered a form of genocide if it happened today with its aftermath as a war crime’.

Extract from field notes, 19 May 2017

Stories, such as ones transmitted through popular culture, become interwoven with other narratives. This does not always happen without friction. Tour guide Adam felt that the weaving of particular stories transmitted through popular culture can obscure other threads. In speaking to Scotland's representation through popular culture stories, Adam remarks that Scotland:

has this habit of presenting herself, you know, as the beating heart of mythical history and so all I want to do is make clear that I feel that there's this gigantic chasm … between Scotland as it is cast or shown and how Scotland actually is.

This echoes Geertz's (1973) emphasis on the interpretive nature of storytelling and how humankind is bound to representations which are symbolic or mythic in nature. A human being, he argues, ‘is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself [sic.] has spun’ (1973: 5). These webs of significance- woven tapestries of stories- illuminate some experiences and background others.

However, story-weaving can also create a space to experience new, sometimes conflicting narratives of the same event (Couchie and Miguel, 2018). This was the case for Ruth, a visitor on the tour, who was presented with a story about Culloden which challenged the narrative of her English educational upbringing:

I went to an English school, and it was all about these rebellious Scots who were justly defeated by the Glorious Duke of Cumberland. To see the way the Scots were treated in the 1700s, I am not surprised they wanted an end to English rule. The devastation of the Highland Clearances and what the Scottish people went through after Culloden is just heart-breaking. It really made me think about our history and again how different perspectives can be sold to the masses based on the bias of the person telling the story.

The interpretative nature of storytelling is noted in tour guiding. Much like the tour guide at Culloden referring to the events of the battle as a ‘genocide’ and aftermath, a ‘war crime’. The story-weaving occurring here is ultimately impassioned opinions of an individual, one who is crafting their own ‘web of significance’ (Geertz, 1973: 5). Other guides seek to strike a balance, acknowledging the more contentious readings of histories through weaving together different stories. This was noted by Richard, who as a guide, makes it a point to provide his guests with a comprehensive understanding of the political landscape around Jacobitism, even if the stories he tells do not sit within the standard marketing strategy of VisitScotland, Scotland's national tourism board and may surprise his clients. As he explains:

I think it's a balancing act. … A lot of issues around slavery and stuff, that's all tied into the Jacobites as well. And generally, a lot of my tour guests are shocked. You drive around Edinburgh, and you explain who these people are and where they made their money and stuff. You don't pull any punches, and you don't sugar-coat it, because there's nothing there to sugar-coat in the first place. But obviously, that doesn't sell very well in terms of VisitScotland. They won't say, ‘Oh! come to the land of slavers!’. That's not a good tagline.

Jeremey also seeks to mediate the stories he delivers to his clients however, where Richard seeks to balance the story of Culloden and Jacobitism through one singular narrative, Jeremey keeps different ‘histories’ of Scotland:

The filming locations- don't they have a lot of history. Technically they do, but it's not history related to Outlander. They have their own history. So there's two different set of histories we deliver. There's location history and then the context of how that location fits with the storyline- which is kind of fictitious history and it has its basis in Outlander and includes the real history of the Highlands.

Where some visitors are shocked by the stories their guides share, others are uninterested with Adam remarking ‘You’ll take them around all sorts of fascinating sites and honestly, it looks like they’re being shown around the tax office in Glasgow Central!’. Jeremey and Adam's experiences echo Urry and Larsen's notion of the tourist gaze (2011) and Hague's (2014) critique of Scotland's mediatized representation. This form of story-weaving also speaks to an American gaze where different ‘versions’ of Scotland are transmitted through American popular culture with the popular narrative resulting in an ‘American romance version’ of Scotland (Hague, 2014: 183). Adam's experience is not uncommon, with Waysdorf and Reijnders (2017: 187) research into Game of Thrones tours to Croatia and Northern Ireland finding that fans were only interested in certain ‘kind of histories’ which could be related to the pseudo-medieval setting of the series. Their clients are interested in a particular type of engagement with stories, framing their experience, and their own story-weaving process, only within the context of Outlander. This can go further into what Waysdorf and Reijnders refer to as the ‘hyperdiegetic realm’ (2017: 173) where the visitor seeks out places where the story takes place and imagining themselves within the story, weaving a tapestry of stories that includes very few threads from their personal lives and other histories.

Weaving personal stories

The visitors are silent as the guide moves away from the group. After a moment, one visitor pulls out her camera and quickly asks another member of the group to take her photo. After handing off her camera, the woman bends down and sits next to the stone. She situates herself, adjusts her Outlander t-shirt, and smiles. Once her photo is taken, the woman reclaims her camera, inspects the pictures, gives a quick ‘thank you’ and heads off back down the trail to the entrance and towards the waiting bus. The remainder of the group hovers near the stone in silence. A few visitors crouch down, taking a picture of the stone with the occasional act of gently laying a hand on top of the cairn, as if in reverence. As it gets nearer to the appointed departure time, the group of visitors lessens. Another moment passes and one of the remaining women breaks the silence. ‘You know. It's strange to think that if Culloden hadn’t happened- the American Revolution may not have taken place’. She pauses again, lost in her own thoughts. ‘Or that my ancestors may have never come to the American colonies’.

Extract from field notes, 19 May 2017

The process of weaving stories together speaks to Benjamin’s (1969 [1936]) understandings of stories being based in experiences which are connected to other experiences and in the process, reworking stories. This process of story-weaving is undertaken by both the visitor and the guide- with each individual weaving together their own story from their experiences. When speaking to visitors, it was a common occurrence to have visitors relate the places and stories they had heard back to their own biographies and the stories they have woven around their identities, not only as fans but as individuals. For Jeanne and Kate, the events of Culloden is interwoven into their personal biographies. As Jeanne explains:

I am an Outlander fan because of the story of Culloden and what impact that very battle had upon my present circumstance of birth being a citizen of the United States of America. My five-time great-grandfather entered [the American Colonies] due to the Clearances. A direct result of Culloden.

Kate's family were bound to Culloden on both sides. As she remarked:

my husband's family on both sides fought in Culloden which is just you know gut-wrenching when we actually went to Culloden. It is heart-breaking to think, you know. …[T]hat kind of history becomes personal for you when you study your own family.

Rhonda also weaves the events of Culloden to her personal biography and weaves together the stories of Culloden with that of her family hi(story). She noted that she initially connected with Outlander because she saw a bit of her own family history reflected back in the story. Like that of the Fraser family in Outlander, Rhonda's husband's family also were Scots who made the journey to the American Carolinas. In her view, Rhonda's visit to Culloden was part of a wider quest to ‘make [the trip] my mecca to Scotland’.

Story-weaving experiences

‘Was it everything you thought it would be?’ the tour guide asks as the visitors make their way back aboard the tour bus and find their seats.

‘No!’ a voice shouts. It comes from a woman, who if laughter is heard, she is usually the source. The woman halts in the aisle and turns around to face the guide.

‘No’. she says quieter, but firmly. She pauses thoughtfully- searching for the right words. ‘It was more…moving’.

Extract from field notes, 19 May 2017

Where Rhonda, Kate and Jeanne were able to weave the stories of Culloden to their family history and therefore have an emotional experience at Culloden, others came away with a new perspective on the events of Culloden that were entirely linked to their experience of visiting the site. This moving experience was echoed by Louisa, who when reflecting on her experience at Culloden, recounted:

I didn’t speak a whole lot during that day because… It came to me that people were buried in the ground and stuff like that. Our guide …was telling us all [the Jacobites] did the battle and everything barefoot and freezing and uh, in the water and stuff like that. So, yeah, that was a little bit moving.

The experiences of hearing a story do not remain in a vacuum. Stories are heard, felt, woven together and shared with others. As noted by guide Clara, in speaking about the interpretation of the Jacobite rising as conveyed in Outlander noted that ‘[the story of Outlander] is interesting because it communicates that overarching theme very effectively. It has really conveyed a general understanding of how all these things are related and that is quite remarkable. It's not all true history. It almost doesn’t matter, does it?’ Clara's remark speaks to the non-binary nature of story-weaving and how the fantastical and the ‘real’ are stitched together (Lee, 2012). While Outlander presents a dramatized version of the events of Culloden interwoven with the fantastical (e.g., time travel) it also blends together what Clara refers to as ‘true history’ which is then shared with others. This was made clear with Eileen and her family. Eileen's family are not Outlander fans, but her experience on the tour and hearing more details about the events of Culloden made her want to share the story of Culloden with them. As Eileen explained, ‘I visited Culloden again [after the tour] with my husband and daughter. It was a very atmospheric place and I wanted them to experience it too’.

Ultimately, tour guides weave stories that allow visitors to think of Scotland and events in a new context. As Richard reflected, ‘my clients are going back [home] with maybe a different perspective on Scotland that they didn’t think about before, and that's a good thing in my book’. This was also a motivation for Adam as well. As he noted, guiding and telling stories, ‘it's really about allowing people to experience things for themselves. Like clearing the way for them to go on to paths that they wouldn’t normally have gone on’.

Discussion: Homo narrans, story-weaving and tourism

In their exploration of ‘contents tourism’, Yamamura and Seaton note that visitors ‘are not simply passive tourists consuming pre-packaged experiences’ but are often prosumers, individuals who are both (pro)ducing and con(summing) experiences (2020: 225). We would extend this notion and instead propose that tourism is a collaborative process of story-weaving. From the analysis above, it is clear that stories and storytelling play an integral role in how visitors and tour guides engage in tourism. However, the question remains of how we understand the role of stories in the wider context of the tourism ecosystem. This is, as highlighted by Moscardo (2010, 2020), an overlooked area of investigation. In order to address this gap, we return to Fisher's (1978, 1985) narrative paradigm and his concept of humans as homo narrans to frame the above findings within the context of visitors and tour guides as storytelling animals. In doing so, we draw on key points of Fisher's thesis: first, humans are fundamentally storytellers (i.e., homo narrans); second, history and culture govern what we would consider compelling stories and they are interwoven with individual biographies; third, we value a compelling story in ways that are not always driven by logic; fourth, the world consists of a set of stories in which we selectively collect stories and in the process, make sense of or recreate in our everyday lives. The last point is key here, as it illuminates a process of story-weaving. By framing the experience of touring and tour guiding as an experience of sharing, receiving and weaving together stories, we argue that both the visitor and the guides, as storytelling animals, engage in a process of ‘story-weaving’ wherein each individual is drawing on different threads to weaver their own stories.

The act of story-weaving manifested in several ways. For guides, the process of weaving involved adopting key themes of the Outlander storyline and weaving these elements together with facets of Scottish histories. This was the case with tour guides Clara, Richard, Euan, Daniel and Adam when working with their clients. Euan noted that stories shared through popular culture (Outlander) speak to a person's ‘thirst for knowledge’ which allowed him to tell stories beyond the narrative of Outlander. Similarly to Euan, Clara's clients welcomed different stories interweaving with their love of Outlander, leading Clara to view Outlander as a vehicle to guide her clients towards other stories about Scotland. Clara and Euans's experiences speak to Fisher's observation that humans, as homo narrans, learn lessons and accumulate knowledge through stories.

Where Euan and Clara were met with engaged clients and were successful in weaving together stories, Richard, Adam, Daniel and Jeremey occasionally found themselves beholden to their clients’ desires to only be told the Outlander-related stories. Where Jeremey navigated this challenge by having two sets of ‘histories’ he would share with clients, weaving the stories together depending on their interests from the client, Richard, Daniel, and Adam would only weave together stories which related to Outlander. This was met with occasional frustration as the guide had to counter their personal interest in particular stories with their client's own interests. The tour guides’ personal interests echo Fisher's emphasis on the importance of individual experiences and the cultural background in shaping which stories are found compelling. His point helps understand how the tour guides choose the hi(stories) they interwove with Outlander. Their practices of story-weaving went beyond helping the visitor to become curious and learn about the Scottish histor(ies) through the stories conveyed in popular culture. This was seen with the tour guide at Culloden when she referred to the events of Culloden as genocide and with Richard who felt it important to move away from the romanticised version of Jacobitism and highlight some of the less palatable stories of Jacobites, such as their links to slavery. Understanding popular culture-inspired tourism as story-weaving highlights how these processes allow visitors and tour guides to experience and engage with stories which may be contradictory to previously held assumptions about people, places or events, as seen with Jacobitism and ties to slavery.

The act of story weaving is not limited to tour guides. Visitors, as homo narrans, also participate in story-weaving Fisher notes that powerful and compelling stories do not have to be based on logic in order for a person to find value in that story. This was illustrated with Outlander and Outlander-related tourism and the visit to Culloden. Outlander is a time-traveling historical fantasy drama yet the story compelled the reader/viewer to visit Culloden. This was noted by visitors Sabrina and Margo who were motivated to visit Scotland after discovering Outlander. For individuals such as Ruth, Louisa and Eileen, this fictionalised version of the Jacobite risings as told through Outlander and made physical during their trip to Culloden allowed them to weave together different stories (Lee, 2012). For Ruth, this story-weaving resulted in the unplucking of one story and the restitching of another as she reconciled the story of Culloden she heard in her educational upbringing (a justified violence) set against her own experience of visiting Culloden after being exposed to Outlander (an unjustified violence). Louisa and Eileen also faced a similar experience during their trip. Where Lousia wove together her own experience as a visitor with her newly acquired knowledge relayed on the tour with what she knew of Outlander, Eileen took these stories away with her and decided to share this experience with her husband and child by returning for an additional visit.

As noted by Fisher, humans, as storytellers, live in a world which consists of a collection of stories from which people construct and re-create their lives. In some cases, story-weaving went beyond weaving the imaginary and a particular place together (e.g., Jamie Fraser fighting in Culloden and Culloden Battlefield as a real place). It also wove in personal biographies. This was the case for visitors Jeanne, Kate and Rhonda. Their experiences of Culloden were framed by both their interest in Outlander but also by their personal stories. Each of these women had some familial attachment to Culloden, whether it was a distant relative participating in the battle or as a guiding inspiration to visit Scotland.

Since we have used Outlander and Outlander tourism to Scotland to unpack the dynamic nature of stories and examine how visitors and tour guides participate in a process of ‘story-weaving’ as a way of engaging with and in tourism, we must consider how story-weaving changes as the popularity of a particular story wanes. When this question was raised with guides, many noted that they could easily shift their Outlander tours to focus on different stories either ones based on historical figures and periods or weave new stories based on what becomes popular. Richard gave the example of ‘pivot[ing] quite easily to different things, like Jacobite tours or Robert the Bruce’. Here we can conclude that story-weaving will continue to be a vital part of engaging with and in tourism even after a narrative has lost in popular interest. New stories can be woven in and old ones unthreaded. Story-weaving is not just a way of platforming business but a collaborative process in which both the tour guide and visitor draw from their own experiences and world views to create their own experiences of engaging with and in tourism.

Conclusion

Through examining Outlander tourism, this article proposed to understand popular culture-inspired tourism as a process of story-weaving. We drew on Couchie and Miguel's (2018) notion of story-weaving and used Fisher's (1985) concept of humans as storytelling animals, or homo narrans, to apply it to a tourism context. We showed that story-weaving illuminates the intersections of stories transmitted through popular culture with personal biographies, tourism and media culture. In doing so, this article answered Moscardo's (2020) call for more nuanced studies of the role of stories in tourism, going beyond place-based narratives, marketing stories and fan experiences to shift into focus the dynamic nature of weaving stories that encompasses all of these processes. In looking to future research, humans, as homo narrans, carry, create and use stories in ways that are constantly being renegotiated. This is an important strand of research in tourism and future research should seek to expand this area. Future research can include more in-depth exploration into the role of non-fiction media and other forms of popular culture beyond television and film in inspiring tourism and, how humans, as homo narrans, experience and engage with other forms of popular culture tourism. Furthermore, while the authors have concentrated on the notion of the visitor in drawing on a case study of Outlander fans visiting Scotland as the focus of this article, it is important to note that the alternative view applied here can be more widely adopted when considering the role of stories in tourism. Future research can consider other stories, places and media to explore these intersections.