Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze / Edition 1

by Ellen Strain

Overview

In this globally interconnected planet, we are increasingly able to access exotic locales without ever actually seeing these places firsthand. Instead, what we perceive to be fresh cultural experiences are actually second-hand moments, filtered through mediums such as television, film, the internet, CD-Roms, and various other media.

Ellen Strain posits that the images in film and popular culture not only fill in the gaps of a person’s first-hand—or rather, lack of first-hand—experience with other cultural situations, but also predisposes the “tourist gaze” to view particular locales in a predetermined way. She theorizes the idea of a touristic way of understanding the world in general. How, she asks, are our cross-cultural perceptions of places and peoples created in the first place? Can a set of images—such as postcards—mediate our vision of distant geographies? Are there culturally constructed strategies set up to mediate our cross-cultural perceptions of the exotic? Strain includes the works of Jules Verne, E. M. Forster, and Michael Crichton, as well as film, CD-Rom travel games and virtual reality in her own authorial gaze.   

Public Places, Private Journeys is a unique postmodern exploration of how individuals see across cultural differences in an era of increasingly commercialized and globalized culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813531878
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	06/20/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ellen Strain is an educational technology consultant for Pearson Education and an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Filtering Eye of the Tourist

FOUNDATIONS
Defining the Tourist Gaze
Touristic Births: Placing the Tourist
Technological Identification: Stereography and the Panama Canal

THE CINEMATIC TOURIST GAZE
Moving Postcards: The Politics of Mobility and Stasis in Early Cinema
Jules Verne: Travel and Adaptation
Snapshots of Greece: Never on Sunday and the Politics of Touristic Narrative
Corporeal Geographies: E.M. Forster on Film
Global Mappings: Michael Crichton's Postmodern Travels

BEYOND FILM
Millennium: Tourist Stand-ins and Hyphenated Anthropologists
Narrativizing Cybertravel: CD-ROM Travel Games
Virtual Reality and the Challenges of Reembodied Tourism

Editorial Reviews

Strain (Sch. of Literature, Communication, & Culture, Georgia Inst. of Technology) explores how exotic environments have been used throughout the history of immersive entertainment technologies. These technologies, which include stereoscopic photographs, cinema, and virtual-reality systems, have served to expose us to an authentic experience of the foreign and, when we really travel, supply us with a biased outlook, or "tourist gaze." Strain's ability to make connections among wide-ranging areas of popular culture is evident in the chapter titles, e.g., "Jules Verne," "E.M. Forster on Film," "Michael Crichton's Postmodern Travels," and "Snapshots of Greece." But she makes no value judgment with regard to these technologies, and her thesis as a whole is not completely clear. This book is based on Strain's dissertation, with chapters having appeared in such journals as Visual Anthropology Review and Wide Angle, and the dense prose presumes a firm grounding in the history of cinema. For academic libraries with strong collections in media studies and anthropology.-Nancy Turner, Syracuse Univ. Lib., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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