ABSTRACT
Tourism originated in Europe with the ruptures and rituals of modernity, as part of large-scale, transnational processes of class and state formation. This chapter argues that Europe as an everyday experience (as opposed to an abstract notion) was also born, at least in part, out of the experiences of millions of tourists, who share in the production and reproduction of transnational myths of beauty, pleasure, and/or edification. Experiences of recognition and distinction, the components of identity, emerge out of these practices of mobility. The goal of this chapter is to chart some of the ways ordinary people may see themselves as European as they travel their country, their continent, and the world. Here I adopt a performative, rather than discursive or representational, notion of identity (Butler 1990) and investigate “Europeanness” in its plural and contradictory dimensions not as a discourse propagated by institutional actors onto a receptive or recalcitrant population, but as an experience rooted in ritualistic practices and in subtle forms of adaptation and subversion. In other words, I understand Europeanness as not separable from the performances in which it is embedded. Conversely, I maintain that people become European to the extent that they engage in these performances. Tourism is an important performative act in which transnational identities have been instantiated.
