The Choreography of a Mobile World: Tourism Orderings

A few years ago I suggested that

we should begin to ·view modem tourism not as merely the welling up of deep-rooted structural elements of the human condition, something that in previous epochs surfaced as ritual or perhaps pilgrimage or camivalesque (indeed there are radical discontinuities between these and modern tourism) or based on basic binaries such as ordinary/extraordinary or home/away but as something that had to be made to happen, that belongs to a story of becoming; that has quite explicit and often surprising twists and turns and unintended consequences; that once formed and unleashed on the world it took on a life of its own as an ordering, a way of making the world different, a way of ordering the objects of the world in a new way -and not just human objects.

(Franklin 2004, italics in original)

This was deemed by many to be quite a radical departure but in many ways it was more routine, nothing much more than a shift in perspective along lines similar to Flink's (1988) work on automobility. As with actor-network theory (ANT), it was a relatively simple idea at heart.

The main difference was as I have shown, that tourism's constituent body of researchers from the social sciences held to an ontological position that tourism was primary a social phenomenon and that it was constituted through a range of (sometimes competing) claims about its human constitution and origins. Since these were frequently seen as derived from relatively simple social origins, the specter of global tourism, although very large indeed, hinged on nothing much more than the simple operation of some basic human habits and needs.