ABSTRACT
Tourism is often spoken of in terms of the economic effects it generates, the cultural and environmental impacts it may cause or the system of values it promotes. In this essay I want to suggest that all of these approaches lack a sense of tourism as practice. That is because, with one major exception, they lack an open-ended theory of social events. I want to try and sketch out what such an approach might look like by thinking about the practices of photography, taken from my own work on heritage attractions. The essay focuses on photography for two reasons. First, ideas about images and sight have become paradigmatic in talking about tourist experience. Second, accounts using these ideas seem to rapidly pacify tourists — that is they tend to experience, perceive, receive but not do. To rectify this tendency, this essay will suggest we need an open theory of practice. Currently tourist practices tend to be reduced to either bald accounts of structure and values, as though these stand apart from the activities, or to empirically measurable content. In the latter case, it may seem odd to say tourist studies tend to lack a sense of events. Indeed one could say that, in their often empiricist vein, they are totally limited to an event ontology — where all that is admitted as being real or significant are transactions, movements, arrivals, departures, entrance numbers, or overnight stays. However, in all these cases the ‘events’ are closed replicable actions. They become black boxes into which all the untidiness of life can be quietly stuffed away out of sight. All sense that events might be about change and transition seems lost.
