Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict

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PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 876–878, 2006 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$32.00

Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict Edited by John K. Walton. Channel View 2005, viii + 244 pp (bibliography) £24.95 Pbk. ISBN 1 84541 031 9 Russell D. Jones Eastern Michigan University, USA Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict is the sixth volume in the Tourism and Cultural Change series. Editor John Walton perceived a need for a new volume on the history of tourism; the resulting collection is intended to represent the intersection of the fields of history and tourism studies. As he explains in the introduction, neither of these fields has had much interaction with the other. History, when it diverges from politics and diplomacy into economics, routinely privileges its traditional topics of manufacturing industries and ignores the service industries. In the other field, Walton reports that mainstream scholars have failed to utilize insights that historians of tourism have discovered, such as how tourism leads to identity formation. The students to which this text is directed are those participating in a tourism program; the aim is to open them to the contributions that history can make to their studies. While claiming to offer the reader an international perspective and an interdisciplinary approach, the essays are rather limited in their diversity. Nearly half of the essays deal with British tourism and only two of these with British tourism outside the British Isles. All of the essays but one have a European focus. The one essay that ostensibly is not about European tourism is more about how the British constructed the Asian ‘‘other’’. So, this is mostly a collection of essays discussing European (British) views about tourism. Regarding the interdisciplinary approach, this too has problems. Most of the authors are historians, with borrowings from other disciplines, but the analysis is rather orthodox. Furthermore, the authors who are not historians commit grave historical fallacies. This is most clearly evident in ‘‘Tourism in Augustan Society’’. Loykie Lomine, a sociologist, uses 20th century concepts derived from the era of mass tourism in industrialized economies to analyze ancient Roman travel. To claim that ancient Romans possessed a tourist gaze or practiced staged authenticity stretches historicism and leads the author to claim the modernity of the ancients. Last, there is little diversity in periodization. Five of the thirteen essays discuss representation and identity-formation during the 19th century and seven others limit their focus to the inter-war period. Many of the essays are organized around the theme of representation. John Mackenzie, in the opening essay, discusses the relationship between tourism

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and empire. Treating Victorian travel literature as creating an imagined community, one sees that the British Empire was built on the gun, the Bible, the merchant ship, and the tourist’s guidebook. The empire, through the latter, was represented as a world of British sites that their own tourists could visit that would, in turn, offer a ‘‘legitimizing reassurance’’ of their right to dominate (p. 25). John Beckerson and John Walton look at the representation of air in the promotional literature of British resorts. By peppering their promotional literature with rhetoric of health and restoration available through the air’s ozone and bracing qualities, the business interests of the resort areas recognized the value of ‘‘selling air’’. Yorimitsu Hashimoto’s contribution on the British representation of a Japanese ‘‘other’’ is a remarkable essay for its contextualization of changes in British attitudes through popular plays. It is a superb analysis on colonialism and the formation and maintenance of an imperial ideology, but its relationship to tourism is less clear as Hashimoto does not tie this analysis well to the touristic experience. Kristen Semmens’ essay on ‘‘Travel in Merry Germany’’ extends this theme on the meaning of tourism to the Nazi state which redefined tourist space as National Socialist space. Brochures and destinations, under Nazism, became re-inscribed with new political messages. Semmens shows how Nazi travel literature recast all of Germany into a setting for the history of the party. By writing this way, the party created a Nazi tourist culture and a highly politicized discourse that ‘‘demanded a new way of seeing specific German destinations’’ (p. 153). Jill Steward addresses these same ideas of representation, the creation of a travel culture, and empire in her essay on British travel literature. The essays on identity include two excellent essays on central Europe that focus on the interaction of tourism, identity, and the state. Shelley Baranowski shows how the Kraft durch Freude organization fulfilled the party promises of eliminating class hierarchies and creating a national community. She shows how the organization accomplished this by monopolizing tourism businesses, thereby lowering prices, making vacations affordable for all Germans. It was not without its price, however, as the ubiquitous secret police officer who accompanied tours attests. Kraft durch Freude’s programs sought also to create racial and national solidarity among those who participated in Nazi tourism. Further, tourism provided the glue to construct an Austrian national identity following World War I. Corinna Peniston-Bird’s essay explains how the state overcame provincialism through infrastructure investments and tourism promotion. Following John Urry’s ideas in Consuming Places (1995) about identity formation through literature, Peniston-Bird illustrates how the Austrians built and projected an identity around cuisine, art, and the Alps, or ‘‘Coffee, Klimt, and Climbing.’’ Walton looks at conflict on Mallorca between expatriate and tourist notions about the island paradise. The large expatriate community on Mallorca saw the island as their unspoiled country where they could find the simple life. But as the island became a destination, the expatriates struggled against an emerging representation of Mallorca as a hedonistic escape full of drinking and adventure. Helan Pussard does an excellent deconstruction of pleasure grounds (amusement parks) to show the ways in which social and geographical hierarchies are perpetuated and reinforced by day-trippers on these commercial grounds. She brings attention to domestic tourism and the day-trip, which are neglected areas of tourism studies. Overall, this is an excellent collection of historical essays on interwar tourism in Europe that focus on representation, identity formation, and social and cultural conflict. Russell Jones: Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA. Email

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REFERENCE Urry, J. 1995

Consuming Places. London: Sage.

Assigned 3 November 2005. Submitted 14 February 2006. Accepted 22 February 2006 doi:10.1016/j.annals.2006.03.007