ABSTRACT
Introduction In Chapter 1 we noted the need to make issues of materiality more central to discussions of tourism performances, which is the aim of the present chapter. Despite the fact that tourists constantly interact corporeally with umbrellas, walking boots, sunglasses, sunbeds, benches, walking paths, beaches, souvenirs, maps, suitcases, cars, cameras and many other things, and physical places, tourist studies have failed to understand the significance of materiality and objects in modern tourism, the ‘sensuous immediacy’ of material culture to tourists and performances of tourism. Like much theory and research influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, tourist (and leisure) studies has melted ‘everything that was solid into air’, or, even better, signs (Jackson, 2000; Philo, 2000). By emphasizing cognitive and human processes such as thinking, imagining, interpreting and representing, it has dematerialized bodies, things and places as culturally inscribed signs or imagescapes, to sign-value. Such a perspective has been blind to the fact that non-human things, such as objects and technologies, enable human agency and are crucial in making leisure and tourism geographies happen-able and performable. It has wrongly portrayed the world of leisure and tourism as a purely human accomplishment.
