Spatial representations, heritage and territorial-synecdoche in contemporary tourism

Abstract

Contemporary society is characterized by intense mobility and the prevalence of visual culture, where representations are more important than experience. In that context, images are central to the tourist system, for they have the power to create expectations that motivate movements. This process is part of a cycle in which representations only take the value that society assigns to them and their meaning is constantly changing. There is a historical connection between tourism and such representations, from oral testimonies to digital photography and video. Be they captured or purchased, images are disseminated by visitors, thus perpetuating the cycle of production and diffusion of spatial representations. Such images ought to show how ‘special’ the visited location is. Because heritage items are usually unique, their images can be ideally suited to be representative of a territory and serve to entice tourists. Through numerous representations, a heritage artefact becomes a tourist attraction, and can become a territorial-synecdoche, formed by the strong association of an element (the referent) to an object (the territory). This can be such that referent becomes a substitute for the territory in the collective imagination. In tourism, an inductive territorial-synecdoche is easily accomplished through visual products, while a deductive synecdoche occurs through written texts. The danger is that such representations operate as a territorial-synecdoche by reducing the complexity of the tourist territory to a few icons, areas or experiences. Generally, in tourist destinations the infrastructure and services concentrate in certain areas, and those lying outside tourism’s influence remain ‘invisible’ for visitors and governments. Therefore, the use of heritage items to represent places, although seemingly innocuous, may lead to the construction of a territorial-synecdoche with tangible adverse effects on other territories. Spatial representations not only shape tourist itineraries but also configure their territories.