ABSTRACT
As others have noted, the multiple forms of tourism do not constitute a bounded sphere of activity (Franklin 2003). Tourism is a modality of social life, not apart from it, and yet by confining tourism to a specific academic ghetto, analysis has been starved of ideas from the wider social sciences. In tourism studies the focus is often on the place-making qualities of the production of places as tourist venues and their continuous reproduction through tourist practices, while notions of the timings and temporalities of tourism have been neglected. However, brief consideration reveals that tourism is replete with temporal structures, phases, and paces at a range of scales. Since explorations of time are as innumerable as those investigating space, in this chapter I confine my focus to the particular temporal element of rhythm to explore how, in tourism as an aspect of social life, humans are “rhythm-makers as much as place-makers” (Mels 2004: 3). I follow Barbara Adam’s assertion that we need to investigate particular formations of “tempo, timing, duration, sequence and rhythm as the mutually implicating structures of time” (1998: 202), and utilize the concept of rhythmanalysis, a field of investigation initiated by Henri Lefebvre (2004), to explore how the rhythms of tourist places, mobilities, bodies and mundane routines provide an important constituent of the experience and organization of tourist time.
