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‘So much for snapshots’: The material relations of tourists as cultural dupes

‘So much for snapshots’: The material relations of tourists as cultural dupes Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions. Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Tourist Studies: An International Journal SAGE

‘So much for snapshots’: The material relations of tourists as cultural dupes

Picken, Felicity
Tourist Studies: An International Journal , Volume 14 (3): 15 – Dec 1, 2014
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References (73)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2014
ISSN
1468-7976
eISSN
1741-3206
DOI
10.1177/1468797614536317
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions. Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.

Journal

Tourist Studies: An International Journal – SAGE

Published: Dec 1, 2014

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