DESARROLLO DE LAS SESIONES DE LA 2º UNIDAD DIDÁCTICA

The performance of difference or asymmetry between nature and society is evident in tourism research not only through humanism but also in the specialisations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ tourism. Nature tourism is a continuum (Orams 1995) and the very natural form known as Eco-tourism often involves tourism actively performing the role of decontaminating nature from humans by performing a separation between them. Human-nature interactions are controlled with implements like boardwalks to suspend the human above the ecosystem floor, with hard science to inform the human of why this is important and visitor centres and guides to convey how to interact with nature, what to appreciate about it or how to be ‘mindful’.131 These ventures enforce the fact that we are intimately connected to nature yet are notable for ‘no touching’ or minimal touch and ultimately to create in the Eco-tourist no desire to touch.132 The Eco-tourist takes on board (him/herself) the indisputable fact that unmediated access to nature is dangerous for everyone and everything. The Eco-tourism solution is to make the ‘human interpretation of nature’ stand-in for ‘nature’ wherever possible, and to

130 _{See Hollinshead (1998 and 2004).}

131 _{See Cater and Lowerman (1994); Orams (1995); Wearing and Neil (2009) Black and Ham (2005) and}

Moscardo (1996) on ‘mindful’.

132 _{The invention of this new kind of subject ‘Eco-tourist’ is another example of becoming a tourist (after}

105 replace ultimately as many dangerous human-nature interactions as it can. It follows that if tourism can perform in such a way, when the human world (defined by its culture, language and interpretations) can stand in for nature (defined by the absence of these), their

separateness is less in dispute.

One of the widespread technologies used to do this is the visitor centre and yet this object immediately provides a challenge by showing that tourism does not perform this substitution of a natural world for a human one by drawing on only human things or natural things. Instead these performances are always “reciprocally coupled transformations of the social and material worlds” (Pickering 2000:308) and the following makes a brief illustration of this. The visitor centre in Strahan in Tasmania’s south-west is shown to be both hybrid and to perform asymmetry between nature and society at the same time.

Strahan is a 19th century convict outpost-come-fishing village-come-tourist town on the now advantageous fringe of a tourist attraction that is bigger than itself. The town has increasingly come to perform a gateway role to the World Heritage listed Tasmanian South West

Wilderness and this role is concentrated on the Strahan Visitor Centre. The visitor centre is not a natural object because it is a ‘built environment’ and this is celebrated as such with an architectural award. It is filled with information and pictures about various industries and lives that have happened there and there are statements about what is valuable and worthwhile in the wilderness today. While it refers to the wilderness, it is not itself the wilderness but something more besides. At the same time the visitor centre is not a

completely social thing either because it does exist materially, offers vista’s of MacQuarie Harbour and imports some elements of the wilderness ‘proper’ to include plant-life, bird sounds and the unique Huon Pine fragrance in its make-up. While it refers to society, it is not itself society but something more besides.

Visitor centres are not prone to be hybrid, but are prone to be social in the eyes of tourism research. They are investigated for their meaning, how this meaning is imparted and how well it is received or learned by visitors.133As places of meaning and information they exemplify ‘the life of interpretation’ (Foucault 1980b:210) whereas a hybrid is ‘something more besides’. Questions concern how the visitor centre as a heterogeneous entity acts and on the

133 _{See Moscardo and Pearce (1986) and Moscardo (1996) on the meanings and effective distribution of these}

106 surface there are three simple answers to this question. The Strahan visitor centre may be passed-by because it is not compulsory, in which case it does not act. It may act like a

gateway before or after a visit to the wilderness offering information, ‘skills’ (Franklin 2003) and ‘competencies’ (Edensor 2007) for better appreciating the wilderness experience.

Alternatively the visitor centre constitute ‘the wilderness experience’ and may act to replace the wilderness altogether serving less like a gateway and more like a substitution for the very ‘thing’ it is a gateway for.134

In this latter case tourism can be seen to bring humans and non-humans together to form substitutes, in this case a visitor centre for ‘nature’ but also as has been noted by other tourism scholars, as substitutes for ‘culture’.135 It is also the case that this substitution has contributed to an intellectual culture where tourism cannot shake its characteristic ‘fakeness’. However this sense of fakery is tied to a culture of thought that places a premium on a

“diabolical link between representation and recognition” so that dating from Plato, substitutes are always poorer copies (Serres in Latour 1990/1998: 78) and this tends towards a

‘fundamental’ practice in tourism research (after Latour 2004a: 460). Like the invisibility of immutable mobility (Chapter Three), this discounts too quickly the ingenuity and work that takes place through material relations to represent and sometimes substitute. Instead:

Tourism prefers the reconstructed object, and indeed, this preference for the simulacrum is the essence of postmodern tourism (Bruner 1989:438).

Substitutes do not have to be ‘unreal’ or poor copies but can also be assemblies of things that have the rather special ability to replace other things despite not offering ‘sameness’ (Law and Mol 1995: 283). They have a ‘unique adequacy’ (Latour 2000a:113) of their own. A visitor centre is not nature although it contains part of nature, and can substitute in part or in full for nature, even the wildest nature.136 In the case of substitution visitor centre becomes a substitution despite being a bad copy of ‘Tasmanian Wilderness’ and this is where tourism starts to fall foul of the ‘diabolical link’. Although in this case tourism, through the visitor centre has transported some elements of the wilderness proper, propagating ferns and

134 _{The Wilderness is not particularly user friendly on foot, the cruise is expensive and the weather is often}

inclement so the visitor centre is ‘the next best thing’ in these cases.

135 _{See for example Smith (2005); Bruner (1989) and Stronza (2001).}

136 _{This follows the same logic that a sliding door does not make a good copy of a doorman but it is still a good}

107 disseminating an albeit technologically induced Huon Pine fragrance, it has also gathered together a lot of very ‘un-Tasmanian-Wilderness’ things like a tea-towel in the gift shop that is reminiscent of Scotland and made in China. Substituting without copying the object ‘Tasmanian Wilderness’ it makes instead a translation or ‘other version’ of ‘Tasmanian Wilderness’ that may act as equivalent or partial equivalent without a pretence of ‘the

same’.137 The interesting question then becomes how one heterogeneous assembly substitutes another.

Setting up as tourism scholars have been used to, the visitor centre and other tourist objects in terms of how well they re-present means they will always fail the test of copy(ing)-right and always provide an inferior substitution for ‘the real thing’. This simultaneously dismisses tourists who allow the visitor centre to be a substitute for wilderness as poor copies of real people and then the ‘cultural dupe’ thesis is added in a ‘symmetric operation’ (Latour

2005:192) to inauthentic, tourist objects. If substitution is allowed more leeway, and is able to occur fully or partially without always re-presenting (badly or well), then tourism objects like visitor centres can be considered contributors to versions of reality, or ‘tourism orderings’ (Franklin 2004) some of which are so remarkable they have the competency to take the place of another, and others who competencies are still to be discovered. Without a bias towards authenticity ourselves, this kind of behaviour can only be interesting to tourism scholars.