Abstract 1 - Performing tourists

Performance
and Discourse in Tourism: The Narratives Visitor Books Tell.

Abstract
(1) for the 3^rd Critical Tourism Studies Conference in
Croatia

Chaim
Noy

In
this lecture I take a performance approach to how meaning is created
and sustained in and through tourists' actions and behaviors,
proposing a rather unusual stage of and for tourists' performances: a
visitor book. I argue that visitor books can serve not only as
bureaucratic documents where tourists register their visits at
various sites and add additional comments. Rather, in my research at
a national-military commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel, I show
how, under certain circumstances a visitor book essentially supplies
a symbolic space—itself metonymically correlated to the larger
symbolic spaces of the site itself and the city of (West)
Jerusalem—wherein tourists' meaning-making actions are both
produced and registered.

In
the lecture I first will specify a few of the contextual aspects that
serve to institutionally "frame" (Goffman) the visitor book
as a stage, and then I will discuss the semiotic consequences that
rise when viewing the visitor book thus. A performance view implies
that meanings do not lie primarily in the content of the tourists’
expressions, often referred to as 'tourist discourse' or 'tourists
language' but in their attributes as performances produced on
specific tourist stages with particular material features.

In
its performative orientation, this lecture brings together recent
theoretical advances in tourism research, offering a synergistic
combination of the multiple semiotic resources that are available to
tourists in general, and specifically to heritage tourists. These
semiotic resources include the embodied nature of tourists'
practices, the dialectics of mobilities and immobilities in tourism
and the materiality of tourists' (con)texts and stages. The lecture
builds on and expands recent works on this subject, where multimodal
approaches in tourists' research are employed (cf. Noy, 2007, 2008).

Noy, C. (2007). A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli
Backpackers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Noy, C. (2008). Pages as Stages: A Performance Approach to Visitor
Books. Annals of Tourism Research, 35(2), 509-528.