Embodying the Map: Tourism Practices in Berlin

Abstract

Maps are often considered by tourism scholars as superimposed representations that reduce visitors to passive executors of pre-designed routes. Combining new post-representational perspectives in map studies with a concept of tourism as a corporeal, vividly lived and active experience, this article highlights the tensions between representation/power and practice/resistance within tourism cartography. The case study of the German capital is used to illustrate the concept that tourists can experience a ‘flirtatious’, intentional and enriching encounter with their destinations ‘dwelling in’, rather than passively enacting or subverting cartographic representations. Through an autoethnographical account and a cinematic-cartographical reading, the author explores the role of actual and virtual embodiment in the experiencing of map spaces, suggesting that Berlin’s ‘cartographic anxiety’ need not be understood as a form of tourism’s power of seduction.