Tourist Gaze

Tourist gaze expresses the dynamics associated with construction of tourist experience, the complexity of the social organization of tourism, and the systematic nature of these processes. It allows us to articulate what separates tourist experience from everyday living and to illuminate ways in which production and consumption of tourist goods and services have wide implications for social relations. The social organization of these processes encompasses a number of elements, including carefully chosen images about places to see; narratives that speak about the uniqueness of their history, culture, and heritage; varieties of performative practices through which tourist experiences are embodied; and a network of professionals and institutions providing services to ensure that particular tourist experiences can be generated. These developments are closely related to the emergence of mass tourism, consumerism, and commodification of places and cultural practices. The gaze is an organizing principle that structures encounters among tourists and people and places visited at multiple levels; it helps to create experience that is felt as extraordinary and, in this way, memorable and also implicates people into an ongoing and systematic set of social relations through competition for tourist attention.

The tourist gaze suggests that tourist experience involves a particular way of seeing. Images and myths about what to see tend to be distinctive, striking, unusual, and extraordinary. Such visual and narrative depictions of tourist destinations are strategically promoted by the marketing industry to contrast with people's daily routine and work schedules at home. These imaginaries are captured through signs that signify a particular fantasy. A photo of a couple kissing on the streets of Paris is not meant to capture simply youthful behavior on a busy urban street but rather the idea of romantic Paris. Similarly, a photo of the Grand Canyon does not simply signify an unusual geological formation but rather the idea of unmatched natural beauty. Such gazes help create anticipation in travelers about what they will encounter during their trip, and these gazes fuel desire to experience these particular imaginaries. Varieties of gazes organize anticipations of a wide range of experiences, from romance and pleasure to health and education. Organization of such experiences also implies different kinds of socialities, from private and solitary to collective involving festivity and conviviality. The tourist gaze signifies something distinctive about tourist experiences that come to be endowed with importance and significance, and remembered by the tourist as unique.

In historical terms, the tourist gaze emerges from changes in the organization of travel, innovations in communications technology, developments of travel infrastructure, transformations of the economy, and the changing tastes of travelers. On their trips for pleasure and cultural purposes, the elites of Imperial Rome made use of a network of roads and various providers of hospitality. By the late Middle [Page 1467]Ages, a network of hospices and mass production of religious handbooks encouraged the spread of pilgrimage so that in the fifteenth century, historians already note the existence of regularly organized tours from Venice to the Holy Land. What is known as the Grand Tour flourished among the sons of the aristocracy a century later. They traveled to prepare themselves for political leadership at home by educating themselves about the languages and ways of life in faraway places. Starting with the sixteenth century, historians begin to note a gradual transformation from traveling for knowledge through opportunities for conversations to traveling for the purposes of seeing something with one's own eyes through eyewitness observation. The development of the idea of scientific knowledge—coupled with the growth of professional classes, availability of the rail system, proliferation of guidebooks, spread of packaged tours, and the invention of the camera—facilitated the emergence of scenic tourism and the practice of sightseeing. These become the basis for the emergence of the tourism industry, as discretionary income grows across the population and travel becomes available to ever larger numbers of people. Throughout the past century, the scale of tourism has continued to grow, entering what is known as the global economy.

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