The study of material culture is gathering momentum in tourism research. The following article illustrates the performance of the backpack in backpacking travel. On extended trips from home, backpackers depend on various objects and other material ‘things’ to guide and assist in their journeys. Amongst these ‘things’, the backpack is one of the most important. This material object is synonymous with backpacking travel. In the article, however, the authors depart from the level of symbolism and propose that this object is performative within backpacking. Through reflection on their own experiences of travel, the authors show that a large part of backpacker identity creation and embodied performance is tied to the performative effects of the backpacks that backpackers carry with them. In short, the article proposes that these material objects do important things. But what do they do? In what ways do these objects perform? These fundamental questions give rise to the authors’ call to follow innovative leads in contemporary discussions of materiality to account for the social performance of tourism ‘things’.
Appadurai A (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things. Commodities in cultural perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2.
Archer MS ( 2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3.
Barthes R. ( 1970) The Empire of Signs. Hill and Wang : New York.
4.
Baudrillard J. ( 1981) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin. St. Lois: Telos.
5.
Bauman Z. ( 1998) Culture as Praxis. London: Sage.
6.
Bhaskar R. ( 1998) General introduction. In: Archer M, Bhaskar R, Collier T and Norrie A (eds) Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London: Routledge, ix-xxiv.
7.
Bordieu P. ( 1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste . London: Routledge.
Bowker GC and Star SL ( 2000) Sorting Things out: Classification and Consequences . Mass, US: MIT Press.
10.
Bray A. and Colebrook C. ( 1998) The haunted flesh: Corporeal feminism and the politics of (dis) embodiment. Signs24(11): 35-67.
11.
Brown SD and Capdevila R. ( 1999) Perpetuum mobile: Substance, force and the sociology of translation. In: Law J and Hassard J (eds) Actor Network Theory and After . Blackwell: Oxford.
12.
Burr V. ( 2003) Social Constructionism, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
13.
Callon M. ( 1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In: Law J Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?London: Routledge, 196-223.
14.
Crouch D. and Desforges L. ( 2003) The sensuous in the tourist encounter. Tourist Studies3(1): 5-22.
15.
Culler J. ( 1976) Saussure. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins .
16.
Dann G. ( 1996) The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective . CAB International: Wallingford .
17.
Dann G. ( 2003) Noticing notices tourism to order. Annals of Tourism Research30(2): 465-484.
18.
Dant G. ( 1998) Playing with things objects and subjects in windsurfing . Journal of Material Culture3(1): 77-95.
19.
Dant G. ( 1999) Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles. Buckingham: Open University Press.
20.
Dant G. ( 2004) The driver-car. Theory, Culture & Society21(4/5): 61-79.
21.
Deleuze G. and Felix G. ( 1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. RobertHurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane.London : Athlone.
22.
Derrida J. ( 1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
23.
Edensor T. ( 2001) Performing tourism, staging tourism: (re)producing tourist space and practice. Tourist Studies1(1): 59-81.
24.
Giddens A. ( 1994) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge : Polity Press.
25.
Gogia N. ( 2006) Unpacking corporeal mobilities: The global voyages of labour and leisure. Environment and Planning A38: 359-375.
26.
Graves-Brown P. (ed.) (2000) Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London: Routedge.
27.
Grosz E. ( 1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
28.
Franklin A. ( 2003) Tourism: An Introduction. London : Sage.
29.
Franklin A. and Crang (2001) The Trouble with tourism and Travel Theory. Tourist Studies1: 5-22.
30.
Haldrup M. and Larsen J. ( 2006a) Material cultures of tourism. Leisure Studies25(3): 275-289.
31.
Haldrup M. and Larsen J. ( 2006b) Following flows: Geographies of tourism performances . Available at: http://www.ruc.dk/upload/application/pdf/150408fc/FOLLOWING%20FLOWS%20pdf.pdf.Accessed8/8/08
32.
Hannam S. and Atelyevic I. ( 2007) Backpacker. Tourism: Concepts and Profiles. London: Channel View.
33.
Harraway D. ( 1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in Feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies14(3): 575-599.
34.
Harraway D. ( 1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature . London: Free Association .
35.
Harraway D. ( 1992) The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In: Grossberg L, Nelson C and Treichler PA (eds) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 295-337.
36.
Harrawy, D.J. ( 1997) Modest-witness@second-millenium. FemaleMan@meets_OncoMouse- . Routledge: New York.
37.
Harré R. ( 2002) Material objects in social worlds. Theory, Culture & Society19(5/6): 271-277.
38.
Hegel GWF ( 1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller AV. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
39.
Hollinshead K. ( 2004) Ontological craft in tourism studies: The productive mapping of identity and image in tourism settings. In: Phillimore JA and Goodson LJ (eds) Qualitative Research in Tourism: Ontologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Method. London: Routledge, 83-101.
40.
Ingold T. ( 2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge .
41.
Johannesson GT ( 2005) Tourism translations: Actor-Network Theory and tourism research. Tourist Studies5: 133-150.
42.
Keane W. ( 2003) Semiotics and the social analysis of material things . Language & Communication23(3/4): 409-425.
43.
Knapik JJ, Reynolds KL and Harman E. ( 2004) Soldier load carriage: Historical, physiological, biomechanical, and medical aspects. Military Medicine169(1):45-56.
44.
Latour B. ( 1993) We Have Never Been Modern. London: Prentice Hall.
45.
Latour B. ( 1994) On technical mediation: Philosophy, sociology, genealogy . Common Knowledge3: 29-64.
46.
Latour B. ( 1996) On interobjectivity. Mind, Culture, and Activity3(4): 228-245.
47.
Latour B. ( 2005) Reassembling the Social, Oxford : Oxford University Press.
48.
Law J. ( 1992) Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice5(4): 379-393. Also available at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-notes-on-ant.pdf
49.
Law J and Hassard J (eds) (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.
50.
Marx K. ( 1867) Capital Volume One Commodities Part I: Commodities and Money. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4
51.
Miller D. ( 1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
52.
Miller D. ( 1998) A Theory of Shopping. Cornell , Ithaca.
53.
Miller D. ( 2005) Introduction. In: Küchler S and Miller D (eds) Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, 1-19.
54.
Mol A.-M (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice . Durham, NC: Duke University Press .
55.
Morgan N. and Pritchard A. ( 2005) On souvenirs and metonymy: Narratives of memory, metaphor and materiality. Tourist Studies5: 29.
56.
O’Reilly C. ( 2005) Tourist or traveller? Narrating backpacker identity . In Jaworski A and Pritchard A (eds) Discourse, Communication, and Tourism . Channel View: London , 150-169.
57.
Pearce JL ( 1990) The backpacker phenomenon: Preliminary answers to basic questions. James Cook University of Northern Queensland Press.
58.
Pels D., Hetherington K. and Vandenburghe F. ( 2002) The status of the object: Performances, mediations, and techniques. Theory Culture & Society19(5/6): 1-21.
59.
Phillimore JA and Goodson LJ (eds) (2004) Qualitative Research in Tourism: Ontologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Method. London: Routledge.
60.
Pickering A. ( 1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science . Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
61.
Schechner R. ( 2001) Performance Studies, An Introduction. London: Routledge.
62.
Searle J. ( 1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.
63.
Shaffer TS ( 2004) Performing backpacking: Constructing "authenticity" every step of the way. Text and Performance Quarterly24(2): 139-160.
64.
Star SL ( 1999) The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist43: 377-391.
65.
Thomas N. ( 1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
66.
Tribe J. ( 2004) Knowing about tourism: Epistemolgical issues. In: Phillimore JA and Goodson LJ (eds) Qualitative Research in Tourism: Ontologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Method. London: Routledge, 46-62.
67.
Tribe J. ( 2005) New tourism research. Tourism Recreation Research30(2): 5-8.
68.
Tucker H.(2009) Recognising emotion and its postcolonial potentialities: Discomfort and shame in a tourist encounter in Turkey. Tourism Geographies11(4): 444-461.
69.
Urry J. ( 1990) The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies . London: Sage.
70.
Van der Duim R. ( 2007) Tourismscapes: An actor-network perspective. Annals of Tourism Research34(4): 962-976.
71.
Veijola S. and Jokinen E. ( 1994) The body in tourism. Theory, Culture and Society11: 125-151.
72.
Warnier JP ( 2001) A praxeological approach to subjectivation in a material world. Journal of Material Culture6: 5-24.
73.
Webmoor T. and Wilmore CL ( 2005) What about one more turn after the social in archaeological reasoning? Taking things seriously. World Archaeology39(4): 563-578.
