Tourism and Visual Culture

Tourism is an essentially visual experience: we leave our homes so as to travel to see places, thus adding to our personal knowledge about, and experience of, the world. The study of tourism as a complex social phenomenon, beyond simply business, is increasing in importance, and by providing an examination of perceptions of culture and society in tourism destinations through the tourist's eyes, this book discusses how destinations were, and are, created and perceived through the 'lens' of the tourist's gaze.

Part 1: Gazing Through the Orientalist Lens.; 1. The Changing Tourist Gaze in India's Hill Stations: Vignettes from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present; 2. Glancing at Gaze with a Wink at Tourism; 3. Goods of Desire: Visual and Other Aspects of Western Exoticism in Postcolonial Hong Kong; 4. Seeing is Believing? Visualism, Authenticity, and Tourism; 5. A 'Vice among Tourists'? Trans-National Narratives of the Irish Landscape, 1885-1914; 6. Making the Desert through Different Eyes; 7. Gazing at the Gallant Gurkha: Glimpsing Nepalese Society; 8. Hip-Hop Tourism and Technologies of Gazes; Part 2: Gazing Through the Constructivist Lens; 9. Gazes on Levanto: How Local Identity Becomes a Tourism Asset; 10. Using Visual Methods: Hadrian's Wall; 11. Tourist Gaze or Tourist Immersion: The Backpacker Experience; 12. Mauritanian Guest Book: Shaping Culture While Displaying it.; 13. Come and Visit! We Have Just What You Expect! Image, Construction and Representations in Tourism Promotion; 14. Transforming Taste(s) Into Sights: Gazing and Grazing with Television's Culinary Tourists; 15. Seeing the Sites: Tourism as Perceptual Experience; 16. Mobilising the Tourist Gaze: Virtual Panoramas and the Iconographic Construction of Liverpool's Waterfront; 17. Tracking the (Tourists') Gaze - Methodologies for Visualising Identity Formation in Real and Virtual Space; 18. Receiving and Shaping the Tourist Appraising Gaze: the Experience and Curriculum of Reception Work in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry.