ABSTRACT
In the study of tourism, the emphasis has, until recently, been placed on an analysis of the movement of peoples to places, a movement variously conceptualised in terms of individual motives of escapism, the need for adventure, a desire to partake of the tourist gaze, or a socially ordered quest for authenticity. Tourism has thus been considered in terms of people travelling to places, or perhaps more specifically people travelling to places as cultures in a mapped space. This notion is made explicit in the recent advertising claim: ‘Sicily. Tourism is culture’. There is in this approach a presumption of not only a unity of place and culture, but also of the immobility of both in relation to a fixed, cartographically coordinated space, with the tourist as one of the wandering figures whose travels, paradoxically, fix places and cultures in this ordered space. This is an understanding of cultures as situated, through an ordering of space, in places; as sites to be travelled to, around and through; cultures as the object of detours; cultures as places to visit and come back from, perhaps with some memento, an object or image that symbolises those places, those cultures-the photograph, the postcard, the souvenir.
