ABSTRACT

To conclude this book, the final chapter offers a short excursion into the comparatively new territories in human geography that relate to consumption, identity and the body, and – in particular – explores some of the intersections between tourism and these wider themes. Interest in processes of consumption and their influence has developed strongly in geography over the last twenty years or so, partly through the raised levels of awareness of culturally informed understandings of geographical patterns that have arisen from the so-called ‘cultural turn’, but also as a reflection of a wider realisation that in the contemporary world, ‘an understanding of the processes of consumption is central to debates about the relationship between society and space’ (Jackson and Thrift, 1995: 204). If, as it is generally asserted, we have progressed (or are progressing) from a modernist-industrial to a postindustrial/postmodern basis to life – with an associated shift from production to consumption as an organisational logic of economic and social space – the influence of consumption cannot be ignored. Jayne (2006: 1) captures this significance concisely when he writes that ‘consumption is understood to be a means and a motor of economic and social change, an active constituent in the construction of space and place, and as playing a vital role in constituting our identities and lifestyles’.