Materialities of tourism in the twenty-first century: A very brief introduction

Abstract

The ‘material turn’, seen across a number of disciplines in recent years, turns, in this issue, towards tourism studies. From its early appearances as ‘thing theory’, marked by Bill Brown’s special edition of Critical Inquiry in the Fall of 2001, it has had renewed impact in the social sciences, even though parts of anthropology would insist that they have always paid profound and detailed attention to ‘material cultures’. What changed, for instance, with the impact of Bruno Latour’s (2013) insistence on the agency of things and his inclusion of non-humans in a reconfigured governance model, is that objects achieve a surprising ‘vibrancy’ (Bennett, 2010). To coin a slogan, the newer materialist turn enjoins us not to see things as all being dead in the same way (merely material, all composed of atoms), but being potentially alive in their own unique ways. Objects and non-humans are not just there to serve us, or, for the gaze of the humanities, to provide rich textual or symbolic ‘readings’. ‘We’ are no longer looking out and interpreting the ‘world’ across an imaginary but powerful divide. There are complex pathways of humans and non-human entanglement that need to be traced along knowledge