ABSTRACT
In western culture travel has long been associated with the collection of knowledge, the discovery of Self, the Other, faraway places and exotic environments. In the eighteenth century, knowledge created by scientific expeditions to distant lands was dispersed to the citizens of Europe by travellers who accompanied the researchers (Pratt 1992). Since then, the practice of travel has been transformed by the operation of power; this has created and differentiated a number of modes of travel. Tourism and the massive industry behind it is just one major type of travel with a different relationship to power than other forms of human movement and mobility (Coles et al. 2004; Sheller and Urry 2004; Hall 2004). Tourism is notable for its capacity to operate as, and be the subject of, a technology of power, and in so doing it conspires with technologies of consumption towards development of national identity. A technology of power as described by Foucault (1990, 1991) is a sophisticated arrangement of procedures which influence the behaviour of individuals towards specific ends. Contemporary examples of such a technology include marketing and advertising, and the operation of tourist business (Cheong and Miller 2000; Rooney 1997). This chapter examines how power relations articulated through tourism and technologies of power help to create, refine and communicate the identity of a nation. It discusses the use made of Indigenous Australians and Afghan cameleers to construct spaces named ‘Outback’, in order to promote an image of nation-state. Foucault’s theorisations of power are envoked as an interpretative framework through which to address these phenomena.
