Tracing Place,Locating Self: Embodiment and Remediation In/Of Tourist Spaces

Abstract

Tourists’ encounters with/in places, while powerfully represented and organized by visual imagery, are also experienced through material exchange, social interaction and physical movement. We offer a visual ethnography of the embodied, re/mediating inter/actions of tourists in a range of different sites. Our images are organized into five compositional themes or narratives: (1) self-locational rituals and spectacles; (2) tactile engagements with place; (3) digital remediation of embodied actions; (4) scaling the ‘Top of Europe’; (5) the fleeting inscription of permanence. It is through their ways of seeing the world that tourists become viewing subjects and through their bodies that they become doing subjects. In both cases, their viewing and their doing produce tourists as knowing subjects, with a sense of the world as attainable and conquerable.