2.

0
The newness of the second version of The Tourist Gaze published in 2002 was
the new chapter Globalizing the gaze. It must be seen in relation to Urrys
edited book Touring Cultures (with Chris Rojek; Rojek and Urry, 1997) and
especially his new interest in mobilities and globalization [see Sociology
Beyond Societies (Urry, 2000) and Global Complexity (Urry, 2003)]. In the latter
Urry formulates a sociological manifesto for our globalized age of mobile people,
objects, image, information, and much more. In that new chapter Urry writes that
the world has become much more mobile and globalized, and this to an extent
that he speaks of global tourism. He argues: there are . . . countless ways in
which huge numbers of people and places get caught up within the swirling
vortex of global tourism. There are not two separate entities, the global and
tourism bearing some external connections with each other (Urry, 2002: 144).
Since the first edition, the Internet and cell phones have become widespread and
afforded what Urry terms virtual travel and communicative travel.
There are many more screens now allowing virtual gazing. And there is more
corporeal travel due to cheap flights, more airports, and more destinations. So
Urry sums up the situation by saying that the amount of traffic . . . has
magnified over this last decade, there is no evidence that virtual and imaginative
travel is replacing corporeal travel, but there are complex intersections between
these different modes of travel that are increasingly de-differentiated from one
another (Urry, 2002: 141). The roaring nineties, we may say, was the decade
of unprecedented levels of global mobility. The tourist gaze traveled abroad
when especially package tours and budget airlines made air travel cheap and
easy. In Europe, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and London became weekend
playgrounds to what we might call the Easyjet generation. Overall, travel time
and cost have reduced within the past decade, so frictions of distance and the
cost of travel only partly matter in relation to physical travel; so many places are
within reach quickly and cheaply (see Larsen et al., 2006). And, as a
consequence, many people have become habituated to mobile leisure lifestyles
and a touristic cosmopolitan outlook that presupposes travel by cars and planes.
Far more places are now part of global tourism. This includes very distant places
and places thought to have little tourist appeal, such as places of war, disasters,
and famine. This is a part of reflexive process whereby places and nations enter
a new neoliberal global order where places compete with each other to attract
business people and tourists (and cheap labor). Urry further notes that gazers

increasingly emanate from many very different countries. In particular, the new
Asian middle classes visit places of the West. The tourist gaze is no longer
exclusively a Western one. The tourist gaze is everywhere and socially much
more widespread. Then Urry responds to criticisms raised against the tourist
gaze. This includes Veijola and Jokinens (1994) assertion that the tourist gaze
neglects the multisensuous tourist body and that there is a male basis to it (see
also Pritchard and Morgan, 2000). Urry acknowledges this by highlighting that
the gazing involves corporeal movement and mobile bodies that encounter
places multisensuously, often through movement (see Urry, 1999, on the
multiple senses involved in tourism; Larsen, 2001, on the mobile travel glance).
He discusses gazing in relation to embodiment, and movement: the body
senses as it moves. It is endowed with kinaesthetics, the sixth sense that informs
one what the body is doing in space through the sensations of movement
registered in its joints, muscles, tendons and so on (Urry, 2002: 152).
The sense of touch is crucial here. The walkers feet on the mountain path and
the climbers hands on a rock face are explored in Bodies of Nature (Macnaghten
and Urry, 2000). Urry (2007) also introduces the notions of corporeal proximity
and compulsion to proximity to highlight that tourists travel long distances and
pay much money to experience places corporeally. Virtual travel is a poor
substitute for the sensuous richness of corporeal travel: To be there oneself is
what is crucial in most tourism. . . . Co-presence then involves seeing or touching
or hearing or smelling or tasting a particular place (Urry, 2002: 154). For Urry,
much travel results from a powerful compulsion to proximity that makes it
obligatory, appropriate or desirable (Urry, 2003: 164165)
Theoretical and Methodological Reflections: Conclusion The tourist gaze is on
the move.. I have argued that it is not telling the same tale today as it did in
1990. The 1.0 version explored the social and cultural the discursive ordering
of the tourist gaze. The 2.0 version turned to its global ordering. The 3.0 version
is concerned with respectively the embodied and resource ordering of the tourist
gaze. So Urrys take on and interest in tourist gaze has shifted over the years. It
has been gazed upon through changing theoretical lenses (e.g. visual theory,
postmodernism, and the mobilities paradigm) and new empirical realities
(e.g. media saturation, globalization, peak of oil, and climate change). We have
seen how Urry questions the sustainability and very existence of a widespread
and globalized tourist gaze. He suggests that future research with regard to the
tourist gaze must explore ways in which it can be localized and de-exoticized as

well as more virtual. There is a need to tame the global tourist gaze. In the
meantime I would also stress the need for researching how the rising number of
non-Western tourists gaze as there has been almost total focus on Western
tourists. There have already been some studies on how Asian tourists gaze and
they all suggest that the tourist gaze as described in this article is somewhat
ethnocentric and does not capture the specificity of Asian ways of seeing (Lee,
2001; Shono et al., 2006).

The Tourist Gaze

John Urry
Sage, 2002
Chapter 8
Globalizing the Gaze
As a result of technological developments, people have now been brought closer
to each other than ever before. A kind of time-space compression has occurred
through the use of mobile phones, television and the Internet, creating an
omnivorous production and consumption of space through remote images and
sounds. Virtual travel is easier than ever before. Our imagination is easily
assister (or restrained?) by images wired from the other side of the planet
accompanied by unfamiliar voices and strange sounds. This virtual travel also
stimulates physical, corporeal, mobility. We want to see and experience things
directly. We want to see, though, smell taste the actual thing ourselves.
John Urry discusses this virtual/physical distinction, as well as the implications
of virtual/physical tourism in his book 'The Tourist Gaze. Chapter 8 in this
book, entitled 'Globalizing the Gaze, explores how tourism has become a
globalised phenomenon and how cultures become commercialised, created and
re-created in producing the convincing image of the 'Other.
There exists a dominant ideology of sight in contemporary Western culture.
Western ideals have developed through a culture of image, including film,
photography and other media. There is a sense of 'what you see is what you get,
although looks can, of course, be deceiving. The significance of vision, hence
also the gaze, has originated from the scientific method. A priori knowledge

(reasoning) has gradually become considered inferior to posteriori knowledge

(observation).
Constance Classen writes the following on the subject of sight in Western culture
in her 1998 book 'The Colour of Angels:
Modern Western culture is a culture of the eye. We are constantly bombarded,
seduced, and shaped by visual models and representations, from maps and
graphs to pictures and texts. This rule of sight carries with it a powerful aura of
rationality

and

objectivity,

even

though

many

of

its

contemporary

manifestations, such as advertising. seem designed to manipulate the emotions

more than to exercise reason. The photographic nature of much of twentiethcentury representation helps maintain this aura of objectivity by appearing to
provide the viewer with direct access to reality, rather than only mediating
reality. (p.1)
Being part of a culture often necessitates corporeal travel. In order to see sacred
sites, read sacred texts, gaze upon sacred objects or take part in sacred rituals
rather than looking at their representations in photographs or videos, bodies
have to physically move through space.
Corporeal travel, the physical movement of bodies in space, has become a core
component of modern life. Whether it is the daily commute to work or holidays in
South East Asia, we often assume mobility to be one of our rights. Urry identifies
a 'nomadic quality of contemporary social life, embodied for example in the
Sony Walkman - a device designed for listening to music whilst on the move. This
device was, of course, soon followed by advanced mobile phones, mp3 players,
laptops, iPads, Kindles etc. Most everyday facilities are today designed to be
carried around on the body. Expectations are to eventually carry them within our
bodies.
The

modern

corporeal

travel

has

produced

number

of

bi-products.

Architecturally significant are the so-called 'non-places; train stations, air ports,
ferry terminals and the like. These spaces are not seen as destinations, but
represent the 'pause before the tourist moves on. Of course, these locations are
more than non-places to certain people. For example, employees at these hubs
experience close relationships to them.
Further bi-products include the vast production of images, icons and the
mediatising and circulation of them. As Urry explains, tourist experiences are

primarily visual. Our gaze orders and regulates what is presented to us. It defines
and identifies the 'Other. Sight sacralisation, the way an object is turned into
a'sacred site of tourism occurs through a series of stages. Mechanical
reproduction of souvenirs and images is one of the most important. Repeatedly
seeing images of the Eiffel Tower makes the icon seem more important and it
turns into a destination.
Urry does acknowledge the importance of other senses in 'The Tourist Gaze, but
maintains that vision is the most important one. Visual consumption has become
an everyday commodity in the society of spectacle where we travel to and pay to
enter through the gates at sites of visual stimulus. The creation of the 'hyperreal is the physical manifestation of visions triumph over the remaining senses.
In these simulated places with exaggerated visible features, fake objects appear
more real than the original.
The interconnectedness between tourism and culture is strong in todays mobile
world. Not only tourists (or worshippers) travel, but so do objects, cultures and
images. Tourists travel to cultural sites to witness the 'Other culture and
reinforce their own identity. The culture of film can necessitate corporeal travel in
order to experience sites through the 'mediatised gaze. This gaze occurs at sites
where scenes or aspects of a mediated event can be relived, 'seen with ones
own eyes. Such sites include Hollywood, Disneyland and the Bradbury Building.
Urry also touches on the development of so called 'dark tourism (thanatourism),
the travelling to former war zones, concentration camps and areas hit by natural
disasters or nuclear fallout, or as the Institute of Dark Tourism Research (iDTR)
at the University of Central Lancashire puts it: 'Dark tourism is travel to sites of
death, disaster, or the seemingly macabre. Urry refers to a couple of books on
the topic, including 'Dark Tourism by John Lennon and Malcom Foley (London:
Continuum, 2000).
Dark tourism is an aspect of Urrys book that ties in closely with my thesis work.
Although gaining in popularity, it is not strictly a modern phenomenon. Professor
Tony Seaton cites a number of attractions including graves, prisons, and public
executions and, in particular, the battlefield of Waterloo to which tourists flocked
from 1816 onwards in his 1996 article 'Guided by the Dark: from thanatopsis to
thanatourism.

Why are we attracted to scenes of death and disaster? Is it way for us to come to
terms with our own end? Is it because we only truly appreciate beauty once it
has been destroyed? Is it a morbid kind of satisfaction, 'better them than me?
Does it all originate from jealousy? Or are we simply adrenaline junkies looking
for another high?
Urry indirectly offers one explanation of what disaster films (and dark tourism)
attempts to do. He explains how public perception of nature gradually changed
over an extended period of time. As a familiarity with nature developed through
expeditions and adventure trips, descriptions of nature changed from 'a wild,
frightening beast to 'alluring, picturesque scenery. Is this what disaster films try
to achieve? By allowing the audience to visit dark, frightening places (in the
comfort of our own home and the pause button within reach) can we familiarise
ourselves with these places and make them appear less frightening?
Maybe it is just another way of identifying the 'Other in order to reinforce our
own identity. We have not been hit by
virus/environmental disaster. Yet.
---

an alien invasion/hyper resistant