The Tourist Narrative

Abstract

This paper concerns tourist narratives, a type of autobiographical narrative condensed by the temporal and spatial constraints of tourism experience, as a place-making tool. While much attention has been paid to the importance of metanarratives both in the construction of tourism sites and in the self-identity process, the role of personal narratives for bridging this divide has been underexplored. As episodes of personal narratives, tourist moments are both socially and semiotically constructed. These narratives are at the nexus of spatial and temporal experience as tourists use multisensory experience, material objects, and landscape cues to connect memories with contemporary events and metanarratives to personal history. Narratives, however, are a construction; as they are (re)interpreted and (re)told events change in terms of their significance. As tourism experiences are incorporated into one’s autobiographical narrative, the tourism space takes on new meanings and through this incorporation it becomes place. This process is examined via tourist narratives of Spring Mill Pioneer Village. Collected during survey work at the site, these narratives illuminate the deeper significance of place more than survey data alone could have revealed. By teaming these two data sets, the importance of the social, semiotic, and sensory to the tourist experience, as well as their creation of place, is brought to the fore.