Epistemologies
and their practices:
A
performance approach to ethnography in tourism
Chaim
Noy
Introduction:
Performing knowledge
This
chapter attends to tourism epistemologies, which concerns ways of
knowing tourism and tourists and the types of knowledge that academic
research on tourism produces. The chapter is part of a growing
critical movement—a critical turn—within the field of
tourism studies, seeking to reflect upon and appreciate the processes
by which discourses and practices of tourism research serve to
construct academic knowledge . This critical movement explores common
discourses and practices in tourism studies, which shape the type(s)
of knowledge(s) in the field, offering critique of received
traditions, on the one hand, and fruitful “creative vistas”
(Ateljevic, personal communication) for future research, on the
other.
The
deconstructive move I offer is accomplished through a reflexive and
critical (re)examination of a particular research project I conducted
recently. The research is an ethnographic study of a national
commemoration site in Israel, which was conducted during the summer
of 2006 , and which supplies a case study of the production of
academic knowledge. As part of the research, I spent about a month
observing and interviewing tourists and other visitors at the
symbolic site’s memorial museum, focusing on the impressive
visitor book which is centrally positioned therein. Importantly, my
approach to the memorial museum and as a whole, and specifically to
the visitors’ commemorative entries in the visitor book was
performative. I viewed the symbolic spaces of the site and of the
visitor book as stages on which tourists may act meaningfully. The
paradigm of performance studies is generally concerned with how
meanings and identities are socially created, sustained and
challenged, and with the practices and discourses through which this
is accomplished. The performance paradigm is inspired by radical
social construction, suggesting that social reality (defined broadly)
should not be presumed as a given, but is rather continually
(re)created, shaped and negotiated by ongoing struggles between
hegemony (the powers that be) and various oppositions. Within tourism
studies, the performance approach is highly creative and critical,
radically suggesting that tourism as whole should construed
performatively; that tourism is arguably defined as power-ridden and
embodied scenes on which some of the most central dramas of our days
unfold .
In
light of this, this deconstructive move concerns addressing my
ethnographic research in terms of performance. Performance
sensitivities and sensibilities are shifted from the tourists unto
the(ir) researcher, as my ethnography at the symbolic site is itself
rendered performatively. In other words, the tourism ethnography that
I conducted will be (re)viewed and theorized in a fashion that
resembles the ways I viewed and theorized visitors’
actions in situ, putting visitors’ visits and researcher’s
ethnography on similar footing. A performative rendering of
ethnographic practices is promoted, which is to say a
problematization of tourist ethnography, suggesting that research
practices in situ may be viewed not in terms of “academic
research” but in terms of “tourist visits.” By
doing so, the power and authority of the modern institutions of
tourism and specifically museums are critically acknowledged, and so
are the authority and the taken for granted social roles and
definitions of who are researchers. The traditional positivist
notions of neutrality and objectivity, and the view that holds the
researcher as an uninvolved observer occupying a position that is
external to the observed events and ideologies (a “fly on the
wall”) are undermined. Hence the reflexive (re)view of the
academic research sheds light on the different ideologies and
epistemologies that typically compete over frames of interpretation
in tourism.
In
what follows, I will make three stopovers, at what I call “research
scenes,” where academic knowledge in tourism studies is
socially constructed and processed. The first scene illustrates the
performative rendering of my ethnographic practices and ethnographic
presence at the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration Site, located
in Jerusalem, Israel. Yet a performance rendering of ethnographic
practices does exhaust the entire process of academic knowledge
production. Alternatively, ethnographic practices do not actually
terminate once the researcher leaves the site/field. Hence the
chapter will move to inquire into two additional scenes: practices of
decontextualization (to be refereed as “collecting practices”),
followed by practices of representation. In the capacity of exploring
the dialectics between the practices that serve to construct and
represent knowledge in the fields of tourism and academic research of
tourism, in these three scenes I will attend (albeit not
systematically) to three issues, namely embodiment, technology and
visuality.
Scene
1: Dasein or Being—looked at—There
Heidegger’s
famous notion of Dasein comes to mind when I reflect performatively
on my ethnography at the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration
Museum. The notion of Dasein promotes an ontological realization of
my (ethnographic) presence at the site. Literally defined as “life”
or “being,” and commonly taken to mean being-in-the-world
or being there, the concept is helpful in acknowledging the
existential weight of occupying a space and a social role in a given
field. When applied to ethnography, the notion of Dasein suggests an
embodied and occupied presence. The expression’s twofold
designation points at the complexities involved in doing ethnographic
inquiry in symbolic spaces, where competing frames of interpretation
and similar practices concerning knowledge creation in academia and,
in the present case, in symbolic sites of national commemoration. The
term “being” touches on an existential notion of
presence; a Heideggerian being-in-the-world which underlies the mode
of performance. This type of being-in-(the world
of-)ethnographic-research concerns the meanings and implications of
being within physical and semiotic confines of various places.
Yet
the sense of being is not abstract. It has times and spaces as
possibilities of materialization . The notion of Dasein concerns
particular locals—a sited-ness—in which “being”
transpires. This is true for all beings-in-the-world, and it is
complicated in particular for ethnographic inquiry, which is by
definition a situated and embodied inquiry that is pursued in
distinct “fields” or “sites.” As a method of
research, ethnography concerns being—of observing,
recording, interviewing, participating, interacting, feeling,
etc.—there. In situated practices are defined and
understood by spatial references to places and locations, which
reveal the relations between the researcher and the field. “Here”
or “there” are common spatial (deictic) terms at use to
describe distances and relations between the field and the homeplace.
Interestingly,
the deictic terms “here” and “there” are also
profusely used by tourists who inscribe in the site’s
impressive visitor book . These deictic terms are used as indexicals
that accomplish the task of producing entries performatively, through
fusing the text with the place in which it is uttered. Accomplishing
a meaningful and effective statement of presence, i.e. a performance,
necessitates an anchoring of the text in the space/on the stage
whereat it is revealed as a meaningful social action . For visitors
at the symbolic site, the actual (corporeal, “authentic”)
presence in the site is of crucial importance, and it is vital for
the effectiveness of their performances. Visitors make this clear by
repeatedly indicating that their performances are produced in
situ, and that they are anchored to the “here” or the
“here-ness” of the site.
The
next paragraphs supply examples of the notion of the researcher’s
presence or being, and show the uniqueness of Dasein when viewed
under the ideologies, epistemologies and circumstances characteristic
of modern tourism. These examples are illustration of observable and
traceable presence of the ethno-grapher or touist-grapher in the
symbolic site.
First, the presence of my research installation, which included a
notebook, a tripod, a camera and a video recorder (and additional
technical equipment), drew some attention on behalf of the museum
visitors, who sometimes interpreted it as a display of sorts. This is
not very surprising, considering the fact that these devices were
located inside the museum and inside spaces of exhibition, and that
museum goers are typically curious with regards to objects and
devices which they understand to be part of the display. Since the
presence of a researcher in such spaces is not commonplace, it is not
routinely expected. (Re)viewing the video recordings reveals the
interest visitors exhibit with regards to the devices I used: they
approach and examine them, sometime looking directly into the lends,
and discussing their meaning with fellow visitors. This was the
visitors’ way of indicating that the research apparatus is part
of what they take to be the exhibit. In fact, the video recording
captured a number of instances where I had to actually approach
visitors and kindly ask them to avoid manipulating the tripod and the
cameras (I had forgot these uneasy instances and was reminded of them
when viewing the video recordings). While the motivations behind
these interactions were obvious, the point is that in the symbolic
and semiotic spaces of the museum, these interactions illustrated an
expression of authority on my behalf, marking myself off form other
visitors and situating myself above them in terms of the range of
situated actions that are available to me. In other words, this was a
way to say “this is not an exhibit.”
Second,
my embodied presence too drew visitors’ attention. This took
the shape of both direct and indirect references. On a number of
occasions I was addressed directly, such as when inquiries regarding
the museum were addressed to me (questions regarding the location of
museum halls and lavatories). On one occasion, a visitor (who was an
Ultra-Orthodox Jew in his thirties) approached me smilingly,
announcing that “the Messiah will come!” (Hamashi’ah
yavo).1
Indirect references to me were also made by visitors. These were
usually whispers and sneak glances (sometimes also chuckling), in a
way that revealed that my presence is a matter of/for discussion,
entertainment and perhaps some discomfort too. A memorable instance
occurred when I was attending to the equipment, and did not notice
that a few high school students approached the nearby hall. Since I
was absorbed in fixing the camera to the tripod, I did not realize
that they were able to observe me, when I suddenly heard the
surprised call from the first of these youths to have noticed me:
“Wow! I thought it’s a sculpture! Look!” (“Yuuh!
hashavti sheze pesel! Tir’u”). Since the video camera
was recording, the tape clearly discerns this cry. Indeed, why should
my figure, bent over the camera and tripod in an empty, darkly
lighten museum hall, not be taken to be a statue, which is to say why
should the researcher there not be taken in the context of a museum
to be a display of sorts? If in this context I am not viewed as a
visitor, what else might I be there? What else might my
actions there embody, and in whose (ideological) eyes is my
presence acknowledged and evaluated? What are the other
interpretative possibilities that are available for visitors who
encounter the ethnographer’s being in situ? In any case, the
video recorded the momentarily surprise—actually, a horrific
moment—when what seemed to the youth walking ahead of his
friends to be an inanimate commemorative sculpture suddenly started
moving. This moment of animation amounted in the eyes of the visitor
to nothing less than an act of resurrection. Note that this lies
squarely in the commemorative ideology of the site, which attempts to
“bring to life” the dead soldiers it commemorates.
Finally,
my embodied presence and movements were also captured, somewhat
paradoxically, by the technical devices which I used in order to
document visitors’ activities. As I look at the video tape my
own body is occasionally discerned, crossing the frame somewhat
ghostly (always looking away and not at the camera); at other times I
am recorded talking with my mobile phone or writing in my notebook
(see figure 1, below).
Here
I acknowledge the agentic role of the recording and documenting
devices which I used. I follow Latour’s line of thought as I
realize that in these circumstances, the video camera, which was
operating continuously, had its own role and performed its own
performance; once operating, it was not completely subordinated to
me. In other words, from the perspective of the camera’s lends,
my figure does not enjoy any particular (esteemed) status, and I am
caught in the frame just like any other museum visitor. The camera’s
framing, therefore, (re)positions and (re)presents me and inside the
museum, as I pass in front of it, rather than assuming the
photographer’s/tourist’s position behind it. The camera
is saying: “you too are observed.”
Figure
1: (Un)observed?: The researcher
Regardless
of whether these were face to face or technologically mediate
interactions, or whether they took the shape of direct or indirect
references, what these illustrations share is the delineation of the
ethnographer’s presence in situ. These interactions supply
documented instanced that make the presence of the ethnographer
visible and embodied, and hence traceable and documentable. A bit
like a chemical of which presence is revealed through interaction
with another chemical, both visitors’ and my equipment trance
my presence in situ. Moreover, all of these interactions not only
record my “being there,” but also propose various
interpretations and frames of understating. These are situated
interpretations that do not construct me as a “researcher,”
which is how I would have had it, but as an actor that occupies
various other meanings and social roles.
Scene
2: Collecting practices
Once
the ethnographer’s presence in situ is acknowledged, that is
once the diverse potential for physical and symbolic roles embodied
by the researcher in situ are recognized, the way is open for
examining another aspect which contributes to the ideology of
knowledge construction presently under investigation. This aspect
concerns collecting and documenting practices and materials, which
are pervasive in and pertinent for any type of empirical science .
Indeed, the very term ethnography includes a suffix that
conveys the importance and centrality of writing on processes of
constructing (social) knowledge and a social science discipline.
There
are numerous types of materials, data, and information that can be
gathered and collected through just as many methods of research. From
mass telephone surveys to in-depth interviews, and from structured
questionnaires to participant observation, in one way or another data
is gathered. ??(עוד קצת
על תפקיד איסוף
הידע במדעים
בככלל ובמדעי
החברה).
--Similar to many other forms of empirical research, ethnographies
too are concerned with collecting, storing and classifying data. Over
and above interviews with visitors, the research at the AHM was
dedicated to documenting visitors’ entries in the visitor book.
Furthermore, the data that is gathered must be of particular
worth, and not just anything can be gathered. Rather, the data must
be “authentic” on a number of grounds: for instance, it
must not be contrived (it is original), and the ways by which it was
accessed and collected must be revealed.
Within
the general context of tourism and specifically in the context of the
national commemorative museum, practices of collection and the
resultant collections are matters of central (ideological) concern.
“It is the museum, not the library,” Stewart correctly
argues, “which must serve as the central metaphor of the
collection.” This point was reiterated recently, in Macdonald’s
observations: “The idea of the museum has become fundamental
to collecting practices beyond the museum ... practices that
cannot only produce knowledge about objects but also configure
particular ways of knowing and perceiving.” The point of the
ensuing paragraph related to Macdonald’s mention of collecting
practices’ and role and how these practices are exercised
“beyond the museum.” In other words, the following
examples try to juxtapose evidences of research collecting practices
with of tourism and museums.
Typically
of ethnographers and others working with qualitative research methods
and data, what I “brought home from the field” eventually
amounted to a collection. Qualitative research is sometimes (dully)
concerned with what to do and how to analyze this vastly rich
material,2
yet presently the focus lies on acknowledging the fact that images
are transposed from the field unto the researcher’s workplace.
My research experience at the national memorial museum was no
different, perhaps beside the fact that compared to earlier research
projects, it contained not only a wealth of data, but data that was
gathered by various techniques and stored in various modalities.
These included field notes, audio recordings of ethnographic
interviews, digital documentation of various documents (including a
significant number of complete volumes of the site’s
commemorative visitor book), and video recordings.
Since
my research focused on the site’s voluminous visitor book and
visitors’ entries therein, a number of complete
volumes—including the one presented during the time I was there
and a number of volumes that I from the museum’s archive—were
digitally photocopied. What these documentation practices have
created to is a comprehensive collection of photo(copie)s of pages of
visitor book, that amounts to a second-order type of documentation of
the commemorative site’s corpus of visitor books. Figure 2
(below) shows the digital collection of pages of visitor books. The
collection, which includes high quality pictures of hundreds of
pages, is located on my computer’s hard disc. The image in
figure was created by screen capturing software. It illustrates a
page (a “window”) which includes twenty-four visitor book
pages. In the center of the figure, under the smaller images of the
book’ pages, information about the images is indicated, framing
them thus not as authentic commemorative scenes (which is how they
are framed in the museum), but as research data, to be organized and
analyzed.
Figure
2: Pages in the Window: Ethnographer’s collections
The
screen capturing operation allows to see not only the ethnographer’s
collection—high resolution pages of the authentic visitor book
at the Ammunition Hill museum—but also to notice the new
context into which the book’s pages have been transposed. While
the center of the screen (figure 2) is populated with the visitor
book pages, the top, right and left of the image reveal the
environment—the virtual workplace—where these images are
stored and available for analysis. For instance, on the bottom of the
screen, Microsoft Windows logo is recognizable (albeit the text is in
Hebrew), and so is Microsoft Windows Ruler, which shows that other
windows are open and other activities and programs are presently
underway (such as MS Outlook and Mozila Firefox browser, etc.).
Scene
3: Representation: Dis/embodied
The
final scene that plays centrally in the construction of disciplined
scholarly knowledge is of course that of representation. While less
critical attention has been given to the two scenes that were
examined examine above, much has been written about seemingly
“scientific” modes of representation in the social
sciences.
While
the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration Site promotes an embodied
sense of commemoration, which seeks to arouse patriotic sentiments
and emotional involvement within the visitors, scientific
representation is marked by disembodiment which aims at sustaining
neutrality and objectivity. From a critical perspective, both stances
are ideological, and both have technologies and esthetics at their
core. However, in the western-modern culture, the body—and
therefore embodied notions—is viewed as occupying a lower
stance on the latter of intellectualism and cultural capital, while
abstract notion—embodied so effectively by the very notion of
intellectualism, are highly esteemed .
In
the available space, I will supply an illustration of the erasure of
the researcher’s embodied presence in situ. Like the
illustrations above, the example will refer primarily to visual
practices of “scientification” in tourism and not
textual ones. Figure 3 (below) presents a digital photo of an opening
taken from one of the visitor books at the Ammunition Hill Museum.
The image nicely captures the vividness of the visitor book pages,
and their visual-cum-textual nature . Also, the pages show how
visitors’ entries to the book are captured and stored in situ.
In other words, once visitors chose to write in the book, their
written entries endure after they leave, and they are publically
accessible for the consumption of following visitors. Hence visitors’
inscriptions become animated elements within the museums’
display. This occurs because the visitor book is not located near the
site’s exit, but rather in one of the site’s innermost
halls, near the Golden Wall of Commemoration (which supplied the
emotional peak of the visit). In this way, the function of the
visitor book is transformed: it is not positioned there merely to
record visitors’ details (such as date of visitor, etc.), or
even reflexive impression, as visitor books typically do. Instead,
the book supplies a stage for ritualistic commemorative performances.
The visitor book achieves its ideological goals as a stage for
commemoration due to the fact that it is a documenting device.
Which is why literally speaking, what figure 3 evinces are traces
of visitors’ visit.
Moving
from the memorial site’s ideological use of documentation to
the social scientific use of the same, it should be noted that in
order to produce an image of satisfactory quality, I had to remove
the visitor books which I was photocopying from the dimly lit
archive, where they are stored, to a more convenient and location
outside the building. The margins of the photo in figure 3 show/tell
the story of its production, a story of the scientific reproduction
of images: the image’s perimeter evinces the building’s
outer wall (typically made of “Jerusalem stone”), and at
the bottom the researcher’s sandals and his toes are
discernable as well. These are the researcher’s footsteps
(literally speaking), which are traces of the embodied practices of
reproducing images in situ—the heavy volumes had to be
positioned on a lower location (in this case a low stone wall), in
order to be able to take their picture vertically from above. These
images supply evidence of the embodied presence of the researcher
taking the picture (thus anchoring back to the ethnographer’s
performance), and of the specific background wherein the picture had
to be taken.
Figure
3: Embodied twofold: Ethnographer’s (and tourists’)
footsteps
Of
course, while for the sake of (social) “scientification”
embodied traces of the visitors must be well preserved, the embodied
traces of the researcher must be omitted. Figure 4 evinces a
manipulated version of the same digital photo presented in figure 3,
of the type of that appeared in publications on the Ammunition Hill
Museum . In this version, the material context of production and the
embodied presence of the researcher are erased, and what is left is a
purified and disembodied “scientificated” image, which
conceals the story of its production. This act of cleansing
represents a(nother) step away from the embodied Dasein—with
its (presence) traces of presence—towards decontextualized
representation of the type that is (still) all too common in the
social sciences.3
Figure
4: Embodied visitors/Disembodied ethnographer
Conclusions:
--the
three scenes that were described above are spaces of performances.
Together, they contribute to the construction of a hermeneutic
circle, moving between sites of being, practices of collecting, and
eventually practices of representation.
--The
semiotics of traces in tourism, and of being in places.
--through
the way it was organized and through its means of representation,
this article also stressed and echoes the visuals clues and traces
that are so abundantly available in tourism.
--Finally,
nate that with all its subversiveness, what I did in this chapter is
actually and highly recommended and approved by basic social science
textbooks, some of which are adamantly positivist. The claim that
social science in general pushes for new research, rather that
re-examining (and when possible re-conducting) older research and
experiments is shared by most observers of the fields.
--(from
the abstract) Altogether, the inquiry leads to insights into the
construction of academic knowledge with regards to tourists and
tourism (i.e. epistemology), and to enriching tourists’
ethnographies (i.e. methodology). The inquiry is located in the
junction of critical explorations of ethnography, on the one hand,
and museum studies, on the other, with the performance paradigm in
tourism as the connecting thread. The research develops earlier
conceptualizations regarding the construction of meaning and power
relations between researchers, tourists and tourism institutions
(Noy, 2007).
--Lastly,
I use the term ethnography throughout referring not only to the
traditional (anthropological) practice defined as “field work
proper,” nor even as to ““ (ציטוט
ממישהו בספר
הביקורתי הכותב
על כמה שכיחה
האתנוגראפיה).
Instead, and in line with performative sensibilities, I see any and
every type of research in the social sciences as ethnography.
Let me explain: insofar as documents of sorts are created and crafted
(“graphy”) during or in any other way in respect to
social interactions, what we have as a result is ethnography . In
other words, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder or
(Goffmanesque) framer or interpreter, and the fact that some
researchers “deliver questionnaires,” while others
“conduct telephone poles,” and yet others “do
fieldwork”—they are all accomplishing situated and
interactional social roles.
Furthermore,
if the above concerned a broadening of the concept of ethnography,
then the following presents a type of specification, which concerns
the charged field of tourism and its research. Contra the claim of
positivist science for ?? of methods, methods are actually
field-sensitive. Research methods are not some kind of ideology-proof
devices that can be put in use identically regardless of the context.
First, and this is quite know, research methods are bearers of
ideologies, or epistemologies (from Edensor??). Further, they are
also implicated by the fields and by the ideologies where they
operate. This statement is rather iconoclastic, because it pulls the
carpet from beneath one of the strongholds of positivist science. Yet
as Urry’s repeatedly argued, tourism pervades our lives, and
where exactly does tourism transpire is a tricky question. Surely,
such symbolic suits as the Taj Mahal or the French Riviera are
tourist spaces; yet contemporary tourism scenes are by no means
(de)limited by and to the physical areas where tourists travel. As
shown elsewhere, much can be learned about the field of tourism from
attending closely and critically to the methods themselves, and
interviews with tourists might become sites where the semiotics of
tourism are central .
Cited References
1
In contemporary Israeli society and culture, this statement should
not be taken literally but politically. It marks the politics of
Jewish messianism and often fundamentalism.
2
Qualitative textbooks typically dedicate sections to the ways that
qualitative data should be treated. One memorable treatises is
Kvale's “the 1,000-page question.”
3
In line with sensitivity to the technologies that are involved in
the production of academic knowledge and to their roles therein, and
with the risk of remarking a negligible point, notice the paperclip
on the right side of the image. Indeed, in all the images that I
have produced, paperclips are visible. These paperclips helped me
hold down the surface of the visitor book pages horizontally, which
is required if a quality image is to be achieved taken (because the
shape of the book, the pages’ center tends to round and rise
thus creating an uneven surface, which does not allow the camera a
good focus). In Latourian terms, these paperclips are “tiny
hands,” that allow the researcher to hold the camera while
they are holding the pages. These are low-tech devices that join
others in the (subtle) manipulation that occurs during processes of
collecting and gathering data.
1
