ABSTRACT
Introduction In Chapter 1 we noted the strange similarities between the parallel and convergent evolution of hegemonic paradigms in cultural accounts of Orientalism and tourism. At a closer look this ‘strangeness’ may not be so strange. Both privilege ideas of cultures as geographically rooted, visual and textual readings of culture and (re)produce a dichotomous view on the ‘everyday’ and the ‘exotic’. In Chapters 2-4 we developed in more detail how we might mobilize and materialize studies of tourism and, by doing this, uncover the everydayness that lies at the root of most tourist endeavours. In this chapter, we take this one step further by fleshing out how ‘the Orient’ is invoked in various tourist and non-tourist contexts and circulated in different material and embodied forms through performances of contemporary everyday lives. In doing this, tourist encounters with choreographed ‘Oriental’ tourist places in Turkey and Egypt are framed by experiences and expectations generated by the various materializations and mobilizations of ‘the Orient’ in the media, in the streets and on computer screens ‘at home’.
