MICRO TALLER PEDAGÓGICO N° 04 SITUACIÓN SIGNIFICATIVA

This chapter has reviewed how the tourism literature has theorised tourism practices, representations and subjectivation. This review has been organised as a sequence of diverse theoretical trajectories and critiques. In section 2.5, I outlined how emphasis on theories of performativity and the embodiment of the tourist experience shifted attention away from the work of representations. While the turns to performance and embodiment have rejected a focus on the visual in isolation from the other senses, visual representations of tourist destinations and tourists were and continue to be reproduced, mediatised and disseminated on a mass scale. Tourism representations therefore remain highly significant, but current theoretical trajectories in the field have left their theorisation still incomplete. Research that has theorised the representational work of the specific object of study of this thesis, the tourist brochure, has been discussed and theoretically contextualised in sections 2.8, 2.9 and 2.10. Focusing specifically on the ways in which brochures have theorised the representation of place and the representation of tourist subjects, a series of valuable contributions to the theoretical work of this project are assembled. Consideration of the work of the tourist brochure as representation of place in early studies was partial. These studies identified the work of the brochure as marker, but then ‘looked through’ the brochure to theorise the sites it represented. Significantly, however, an interaction of both performative and visual semiotic theory was central to the early analyses of tourist

places as attractions and tourism performances as pseudo-events. While visual theory and performative theory parted ways in subsequent developments, their early integration combined forces to produce powerful concepts with enduring influence.

That place representations are ideologically structured in brochures was advanced by Thurot and Thurot (1984). Their interest in theorising consumption patterns in relation to class relied heavily on the theoretical work of Veblen, Barthes and Baudrillard. Semiotic analysis of tourism advertising identified dominant discourses/ideologies and was used to augment the theoretical case. This thesis builds on the methodological and theoretical contribution of this early study to further investigate the argument that place representation and consumption is aligned with the representation of social status and mobility.

Uzzell’s (1984) suggestion that brochures represent places as sites for the undertaking of identities (rather than ‘locational qualities’) establishes another important way of theorising the work of brochures that this study builds on. Significantly, his suggestion highlights that it is the relationship between the represented subject and the place that carries the most powerful communicative force. The early discussions of tourism as ritual activity (Hummon, 1988; Graburn, 1977; MacCannell, 1976) offer useful precedents to theorising the ‘otherness’ of tourist places. Hummon highlights rhetoric in representations that position place as a utopian alternative to daily life. The argument for tourism as an escape or activity of self-renewal was asserted from a number of directions at this time and subsequently (see Rojek, 1993). Hummon’s study maintains that a desire to leave ‘home’, for the consumption of the ‘away’, is rhetorically embedded in tourist brochure publicity. The study offers departure points for further theorising the ways tourist brochures emphasise the separation between tourist places and everyday life that are developed in the analytical and interpretive work of this thesis.

The important relationship between realism and the visual representation of tourist places in brochures is problematized by Taylor 1998 (following Tagg, 1988). The focus of this discussion is on the mode of realism deployed by photography in tourist brochures. Realist representations, these authors argued, obscure their constructed qualities and facilitate the reading subject’s engagement with the representation as mirror of reality. Selwyn furthered this argument in 2010. This is an important contribution to theorising the representation of place in brochures, but elides their understanding as multimodal artefacts that are more than a set of photographs. This discussion, however, initiates the disaggregation

of the subject positions that are engaged in the production of meaning in brochures. A consideration of the work of realism begins to unpack the relationship between the subject reading the tourist brochure and the subject represented in the brochure.

Dann’s sociolinguistic studies (1993, 1996a, 1996b) that addressed the representation of people/tourist subjects in brochures developed a methodology that combined semiotic and content analysis to render the rhetorical construction of brochure texts explicit. Of the representation of subjects in tourist brochures, he concluded that “the images define what is beautiful, what should be experienced and with whom one should interact” (p. 79). Thus he established that the work of brochures is to cultivate a sense of identification or self- recognition by the reading subject. This offered further support for the wider pre-figuring work of the brochure discussed earlier and the theorising of representational realism. Dann’s 1996a work offered a detailed structure for a linguistic analysis of the media, techniques and register of the language of tourism. While not specifically concerned with the discursive operations at work, the textual focused methodologies developed in Dann’s studies

assembled a platform for empirically grounded discourse analytical methodologies to build on.

Ateljevic and Doorne’s (2002) study specifically addressed New Zealand material to discuss the relationship between tourism subjectivity and the representation of place. However, like Thurot and Thurot’s early study and others that followed (see Scarles, 2004), its argument centred primarily on the ways in which ideologies are embedded in production processes rather than the representational outcomes. It is these representational outcomes that are the focus of this thesis. Sociolinguistic methods were the primary force in mobilising the discursive turn in tourism theory that specifically focused on representational outcomes. These approaches drew together a methodological toolkit that could disassemble discursive structures (exemplified by Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010). Discourse analysis further

problematized brochure representations by interrogating issues of politics and power in relation to representations of subjects, including their gender, class and race (see Morgan & Pritchard, 1999; Pritchard & Morgan, 2000a).

The representations of place and subject in extant studies have been theorised from a number of different directions. A range of methodologies and interpretive frameworks has been deployed. While these offer numerous useful insights into how the tourist brochure represents places and subjects, there are multiple threads running through this set of studies

that are yet to be connected. The major gap that this review of the literature identifies is that the theoretical interconnectedness of subject and place in brochure representations is yet to be developed. This thesis proposes that theorising subjectivation as a process whereby subject and place are co-constituted is one way that this gap might begin to be addressed. I argue that as placing devices, brochures inscribe subjects into places and places into subjects. This I theorise as a process of emplacement.

The methodological work of this thesis is to advance the theorising of place and subject in representations to find out more about processes of emplacement in relation to the specific case site to be studied. A number of methodological tools are utilised by the extant studies that when drawn together offer ways that this interconnectedness of place and subject can begin to be addressed. How these might be used in an interpretive case study to support the objective of the thesis will be discussed in the next chapter.

3. Chapter Three

Methodology: visual

publicity as evidence

3.1 Introduction

The primary aim of the thesis is to theorise how the discursive construction of tourism destination publicity, specifically that of the tourism brochure, has contributed to social formation at the case study site, New Zealand’s Tongariro National Park. The discussion of literature in Chapter 2 concluded that the interconnectedness of subject and place in brochure representations has yet to be adequately theorised. In response, the thesis proposes that theorising subjectivation as a process whereby subject and place are co- constituted is one way that this gap might begin to be addressed. To support the process of building a theory of emplacement in representations, the following chapter will discuss methodological issues and their relation to the objectives of the thesis. The specific objectives: to conduct an interpretive case study of archival brochures publicising the Tongariro National Park and the Chateau Hotel, and to interpret the brochures selected for the case study as placing devices, are discussed in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 of this chapter. The chapter begins by positioning the thesis within a social constructivist and interpretive methodological framework . In Section 3.2 the selection of interpretive case study method to address the primary research question will be discussed and supported. This discussion will address the specific status and concerns of the interpretive case study and position its difference in relation to the positivist tradition in which case study method originates. The status of the findings of interpretive methods will be discussed and issues of validity, reliability and researcher subjectivity will be addressed. These methodological discussions will be followed in Section 3.3 by a discussion of the material properties of the object of study, the brochure, and its status as both representation and material artefact. In Section 3.4 the procedures and steps undertaken to assemble and select brochure material for analysis will be outlined in detail. A description of the first phase of data collection

is followed by a discussion of the rationale for the selection of the specific case site, the Tongariro National Park and the Chateau Hotel. The extent of the archive of brochure material is discussed and sampling procedures are outlined. The discourse and semiotic methodologies used to answer the primary research question are discussed in Section 3.5. The primary research question is how have the rhetorical strategies of the publicity brochures co-constituted subjectivity and the archi-scape to emplace the subject at the Tongariro National Park in the time periods studied. How the evidence from the case study analysis and interpretation supports the third thesis objective- to build a theory of emplacement in representations is then outlined. The limitations of the study are canvassed in Section 3.7.