“On the Beach”

This essay is different from my conference paper (“Money and Real Estate: The Limits of Cultural Studies”). That paper was about some problems that have arisen for me in studying the nexus of tourism and property speculation in Australia. Here, I look at broader debates which make it possible for such problems to arise. Whether my way of doing this also involves a shift from the “concrete” and the “social” to the “abstract” and “theoretical” (terms which I take to entail an often unrecognized degree of relativity as to their value for different academic cultures) is a problem that I shall address.