Tourismscapes

Tourismscapes

5 Tourismscapes

5.6 Tourismscapes

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Third, tourismscapes involve an array of networked objects, machines and technologies that extend tourismscapes in time-space. These include the networks of transportation of people by air, sea, rail and roads, as well as wires, cables, microwave channels and networks that carry phone or fax messages, pictures and images, money transfers and computer information. Obviously, the nineteenth-century development of the railway and the twentieth-century development of auto mobility and the jet-plane have been momentous for the development of tourism²⁵ (see Table 5.2).

Also important for increasing volumes of travel in the last two decades are computer reservation systems (CRSs), mostly developed by airlines, and global distribution systems (GDSs), which take the inventories of CRSs and distribute them via travel agents and other distribution outlets, such as the Internet (Vanhove, 2003). In the late 1990s, the four leading GDSs (Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus and Worldspan) yearly accounted for almost a billion flight segments booked through around 400,000 terminals around the world (ibid.: 138). However, bank cards connected to ATM networks, mobile phones, Internet cafés and global credit cards facilitating global travel, depend just as much on microwave channels and networks.

Material resources and technologies are much more than simply the outcrops of human intention and action. They structure, define and configure interaction (ibid.: 329). Tourists may be closely linked with the beaches of Manuel Antonio or Texel, the seven creations of César Manrique on Lanzarote or the cultural manyattas in Kenya. But take away the planes (or the Texel ferry), travel books and brochures, maps, timetables, the Internet, passports or international accepted ways of payments, and ‘time-space decompresses immediately’ (Verschoor, 1997a: 42).

The actors in tourismscapes define one another in the intermediaries they put into circulation (see Verschoor, 1997a: 35). Intermediaries connect actors into a network and define the respective positions of the actors within the networks. Through intermediaries, actors communicate with one another, and that is the way actors translate their intentions into other actors (Stalder, 1997).

Generally speaking, in tourismscapes the intermediaries are services (guidance, transport, advice, food and beverage, hospitality) and, in return, money. However, in principle the list of intermediaries is endless. An intermediary is anything passing between actors that defines the relationships between them (Callon in: Verschoor, 1997a: 35).

For example, ‘inscribed’ materials – like passports, visas and other travel documents – play an important role in creating and sustaining actor-networks in tourism. Imagine oneself at the Kenyan-Tanzanian border without a passport and visa, and suddenly one starts to realize the role of tools like travel documents. Parker (2002; see also O’Bryne, 2001) therefore petitions analysing the principles of travel documents,²⁶ how they are processed and how they are allocated.

According to Parker, in the specific field of passports, visas and electronic travel advisories, there is a plethora of official texts detailing the procedures and operation of travel documentation.

Studying these procedures and texts could reveal how travel documents are used to order the potential chaos of global movements (ibid.: 19).

Or take the example of vouchers. What these documents put into writing is a contract that binds three types of actors: tourism firms, its employees and its customers. And when it goes from hand to hand, a voucher is transformed first into a promise, then into an overnight stay (or meal, or rental car) and finally into cash (Callon, 2002: 196 and 27; see also Appelman, 2004:

163).

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Even more illustrative is the example of money. Obviously it provides a unit of account without which no calculation would be possible. However, as Callon (1998a: 21) explains, the essential is elsewhere. Money is required above all to delimit the circle of actions between which equivalence can be formulated. It makes commensurable that which was not so before. It provides the standard, the common language that enables us to reduce heterogeneity, to construct equivalence and to create a translation between, for example, tourism service providers and tourists. In tourism it can take the format of a voucher, a travellers’ cheque, the US dollar and, increasingly the euro or a credit card, but all these are passed among the actors to assure a certain degree of convergence among them. This convergence allows the heterogeneous network to act in a coherent way, that is, to translate one actor’s objectives through a number of different actors to achieve a goal (Stalder, 1997). Money is therefore an example of an intermediary, and intermediaries are the ‘language’ of the network.

Conceptualizing tourism in terms of tourismscapes thus implies an attempt to go beyond human/

non-human and global/local dualisms. Starting from the angle of a small-scale entrepreneur in Costa Rica, the coordinator of one of the modules of the Cultural Tourism Programme in Tanzania or the Texel Tourism Board, pursuing actor-networks will disclose the way tourismscapes are performed. Entities (people, organizations, resources, spaces) in tourismscapes achieve their form as a consequence of the relations in which they are located. But they are also performed in, by and through those relations, and if these relations do not hold fast by themselves, then they have to be performed (see Law, 2001 and 2002).

In other words, tourismscapes result from recursive processes (Law, 1994). Tourismscapes are not just a lot of tourists moving around in cars and planes, staying in hotels, apartments or tents, which were put in place beforehand. Instead, tourismscapes are emergent phenomena: in its processes, tourismscapes shape their own flows, organizations and things. Tourism and the organization of tourism are not different. So, although tourismscapes may appear to be pools of order, they should be treated as ordering accomplishments. There is no backdrop of social, economic or technical factors that shape tourismscapes, but rather the backdrop is itself built in the course of building tourismscapes (see also Halsema and Wester, 1994).

We should think of tourismscapes as effects that have for a moment concealed the process through which they were generated. We should think of them as more or less precarious recursive outcomes (ibid.: 15). In other words, entities of tourismscapes not only achieve their form as a consequence of the relations in which they are located, but they are also performed in, by and through those relations (Law, 1999: 4). Consequently, everything is uncertain and reversible, at least in principle. It is never given in the order of things. Thus, a lot of effort is needed to understand how durability in tourismscapes is achieved. How do things get performed and perform themselves into relations that are relatively stable and stay in place? How do they make distinctions between, big and small, centres and peripheries, global and local or human and non-human? Analysing tourismscapes is an important step towards finding an answer to these questions, and particularly in Chapter 6 I shall make an effort to do so.

5.6.1 Characteristics of tourismscapes

Tourismscapes bear a resemblance to the Internet.²⁷ The latter involves millions of networks, machines, organizations and people. Tourismscapes also mix people and things in infinite

Chapter 5 Tourismscapes

combinations and forms. The Internet is characterized by complexity and openness, and so too are tourismscapes (Urry, 2003: 42; see also Castells, 2001).

Tourismscapes are complex as they are not to be considered as structures, with a fixed centre, a vertical hierarchy or a formal or informal constitution (Urry, 1998: 4). Although some countries and regions (for example in Greece) historically depend on a relatively undifferentiated market controlled by a small number of tour operators, related tourismscapes still consists of a myriad of smaller and bigger organizations with different bargaining powers (Bianchi, 2002a: 282). In other regions (e.g. Manuel Antonio/Quepos and Texel), tour operators play a minor role in the distribution process (Duim et al., 2001).

Complexity is also mirrored by the fact that a relatively small country like the Netherlands (with 16 million inhabitants) has around 3000 retail travel agencies and 175 tour operators registered with the Dutch Association of Travel Agencies (Algemeen Nederlands Verbond van Reisondernemingen; ANVR). In the Netherlands, there are also 3000 hotels and pensions, 700,000 places to sleep at campsites and another 200,000 at holiday camps, and almost 40,000 restaurants and bars.²⁸ Similarly, Australia (with 20 million inhabitants) has 5000 retail travel agents, 600 inbound tour operators and over 45,000 individual tourism businesses (McKercher, 1999).

Tourismscapes also may create/recreate risks just as much as desires and opportunities, such as relatively cheap overseas travel, the ability to buy consumer goods and lifestyles from across the world, the possibility to participate in cultural events and the reinforcement of certain kinds of local identity. But they also produce risks, as in the case of AIDS and SARS, malaria, the tendency for the culture of different places to homogenize, and the like.

Tourismscapes may take uneven, emergent and unpredictable shapes. Actors (producers, consumers, things) align in tourismscapes, but they may ‘escape’ into even patchier configurations. Tourismscapes may also possess different properties of viscosity, being able to swiftly increase or decrease (as in the case of 9/11, the Bali bombings, the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, or SARS), or to shift according to certain temporalities, as the seasonality of tourism flows clearly shows. Moreover, tourismscapes may even plunge into chaos as a result of external natural disasters, global economic crises or terrorism, or because of rogues like pothunters in tourism (McKercher, 1999).

Finally, tourists and information enact tourismscapes in a non-linear and two-sided way.

Tourists and images travel from tourism-generating regions (which are also destination regions) to tourism-destination regions (which also generate flows) and back, leading to what has been called the ‘touristification of everyday life’ (see Lengkeek, 2002: 21). Paradoxically, this mobility has generated spaces of immobility (‘immutable immobiles’; Law and Mol, 2000), such as motels, airports, parking lots, international hotels, service stations, highways, bus and railway stations, and restaurants (Urry, 2003: 214-215).

Tourismscapes are also open. Actor-networks in tourism include interconnected nodes (Castells, 2000: 501). In tourismscapes, nodes are for example airports, destination regions, incoming tour operators, complexes of hotels and tourism facilities, and such like. Once tourismscapes have been established and actors are ordered and arranged in line with terms of enrolment, they still have to be continuously ‘performed’. In this process, other individuals, destination regions and companies

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will try to become connected to them, to become nodes within particular tourismscapes. For example, Manuel Antonio/Quepos in Costa Rica improved the road to Jáco in order to become better connected with the Central Valley, and has organized flights to Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José. Local entrepreneurs have plugged into the Internet to become connected with relevant tourismscapes. Community-based tourism projects in Costa Rica have developed an association (Cooprena) that is trying to be a node in the Costa Rican and global tourism networks (see Duim et al., 2001), just as TACTO was supposed to play a similar role in Tanzania (see Chapter 4). Principally, tourismscapes are open; they are able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the network, namely as long as they share the same communication codes and intermediaries (see also Castells, 2000: 501).

5.6.2 Boundaries of tourismscapes

This open character of tourismscapes leads to a question, namely: where do tourismscapes end and where does the ‘environment’ of tourismscapes begin? For example Woods (1997), analysing rural conflicts from an actor-network perspective, questions the demarcation of actor-networks and their environment. He argues that if particular entities (the state, financial institutions, magazines voicing public opinion, etc.) have an effect on the programme of particular actor-networks, they might as well have been included as actors in the network. As Woods (1997: 337) asks: where should we draw the limits, or do we accept the network as infinite?

The problem of defining which actors to include in the analysis is of course not restricted to actor-network theory, although its emphasis on the construction of network does make the issue significant. Furthermore, actor-network theory holds that each of the ‘actants’ is an actor-network in itself. This has considerable practical implications: where does the multiplication of networks end? (ibid.: 337)

For actor-network theorist like Callon and Latour, this question first and foremost should be addressed at an empirical level.²⁹ As actors and actor-networks are naturally embedded in open ranges of relationships, they cannot be artificially limited by the scope of any particular analysis (Cordella and Shaikh, 2004). As Latham (2002: 131) asserts, we cannot assume that we know how long an actor-network is, or at what scale it operates, until we have actually studied the relations through which it is made: ‘we must take the effort to follow the path of the network and see where it takes us.’ In this respect it is fruitful to see tourismscapes as ‘autopoetic’, entailing a process of self-making and self-producing in which the function of each component is to participate in the production or transformation of other components in the network (Stalder 1997; see also Urry, 2003: 28). Tourismscapes, then, include all the elements that are necessary to achieve and maintain their objectives. Environments are, then, all elements that influence the network but are not actively involved in maintaining it. In other words, the environment can only influence a network insofar as it is translated into the network by one or more components of the network.

The place where this translation takes place is the ‘logical’ or ‘functional’ border (Stalder, 1997).

Hence, any element that is able to influence an actor-network but is not inside the network belongs to the environment. The network itself maintains the separation and connection between the two at the border. As a consequence, struggles and negotiations to separate that which is defined as context from that which is defined as content are crucial for each actor involved in the performance of tourismscapes (see also Chapter 7). As Verschoor (1997a) explains, the final (though temporal) outcome of these struggles and negotiations may sometimes incorporate the

Chapter 5 Tourismscapes

institutional environment into the content of the activities. Innovation, product diversification, inter- or intra-division of labour, or – in the terms of actor-network theorists – the addition of new human and non-human beings to the collectif, the enrolment of people and things that initially challenged tourism development, a qualitative shift in the properties of the actors involved in the collectif: all of these are possible outcomes of these struggles and negotiations (ibid.: 231).

Since tourismscapes are interactively open, the environment can trigger these changes. The reason stems primarily from the fact that all actors participate in several, sometimes conflicting networks (see Stalder, 1997). In general, no actor is exclusively defined by one network. Indeed, every actor-network affects and is affected by the characteristics of the actors that have emerged from other networks to which they belong, because an actor can and usually does belong to more than one actor network at the same time (Cordella and Shaikh, 2004: 5). The case can be made even stronger: the reason why a particular actor is included in given or emerging tourismscapes is precisely because he/she/it brings along all the actors of other networks to which he/she/it belongs. In sum, networks develop because they are in inseparable interaction with other networks and self-production requires adaptation to an ever-changing environment (Stalder, 1997).