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Comment by 就是冷門 on September 26, 2021 at 11:23am

Epilogue

Because ‘tourism’ takes place in spatiotemporally distinct places and times, the tourist experience inherently and inevitably involves processes of representation that, together with transportation, serve to compensate for distances and discontinuities (symbolic as well as concrete). These processes supply what sociologist Erving Goffman termed ‘ritual access’ or ‘symbolic access’, which afford access to the desired spheres of tourism, concrete as well as symbolic (Goffman, 1981: 187). Through their dislocation from ordinary places, recollections of tourist moments and places have a particularly enduring and memorable effect in and on the biography of individuals, families, groups and communities (Noy, 2007a). This is true of representations of the trip to Eilat, which, in popular Israeli culture, is commonly viewed as a liminal and paradoxical place: ‘a virtual “abroad” in Israel’, as Azaryahu (2006: 121) puts it.

In and through this autoethnography I set out to explore and to critically expand on Cohen’s early notion of the ‘tourist experience’ (Cohen, 1979). Yet from a performative perspective, the paper asks of tourist representations of experiences not what they are but what are they for; not what they mean (subsequently conceptualizing intricate typologies thereof), but how are they (re) employed or (re)mobilized. It is here that the crucial moment of representation and performance arises. As mentioned earlier, the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ – a ‘piece’ or artefact of tourist discourse – was written with the aim of being presented as a present.

Through this act of writing, an instance of contextualized textualization, I cashed or materialized on the tourist memories we share, with the aim of reconnecting with my dear relative. The spaces and practices of tourism emerge as resources for shared experience, an experience that is accessible only vis-à-vis representation, usually in the form of memories. In this vein, tourism scholars are encouraged to adopt more constructivist rather than essentialist orientations, and thus consider conceptualizing tourists’ expressions of motivations, desires, experiences and reminiscences in performative frameworks.  （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 25, 2021 at 8:55pm

Reading the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ both commences and concludes with language concerns, and specifically with the notion of translation which is an embodied movement and (e)motion between different languages, senses and spaces. While the interpretation commences with addressing the language of the poem – ‘tourism English’, it ends with a discussion of the various transformations and translations that travel writing embodies and evokes: between memory (past) and re-enactment (present), event and narrative, personal, familial and public spheres, tourism and hominess, and more. Metonymically, the poem offers a tourist space in and of itself, a textual self-made souvenir into which readers enter and from which they exit. As indicated in the Introduction section, translation and travel (auto)ethnography are construed as media of communication in

and of themselves (Bhabha, 1994; Clifford, 1997). Indeed, these are transformative media, which afford the traveller/reader access to something alien (Clifford, 1997: 182). As texts, (auto)ethnographies are ‘translations and not descriptions’ (ibid: 183). From this perspective, ‘Quiet Eilat’ is not primarily a representation of a tourist experience, but part of the tourism (experiential) world.

The hiatuses mentioned above illustrate the complex, multi-varied nature of the tourist experience, a nature which, in the capacity we are (also, sometimes) laymen tourists, we often deny. In the capacity of conducting a ‘guerilla warfare against the repressive structures of everyday lives’ (Denzin, 1999: 572, and above), and in appreciating the fact that tourism is indeed part of everyday life, this paper also wished to shed light on the emotional downside of the tourist experience. Following the poem, the autoethnography too is hued with shades of aloneness and nostalgia, which it sets to explore. This is partly because Nathan’s chromic illness did not simply disappear as we crossed the thresholds dividing the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ – as capitalist commercial ads would have had it, and partly because we arrived in Eilat in the winter.

In ‘Quiet Eilat’, tourism spaces are not only recreational resources. Rather, they are both concrete and symbolic spaces – circumstances, perhaps – that offer vocabulary and syntax of a complex of experiences, memories, denials and emotions; ‘a combination of the material and the metaphorical’ (Crouch, 2002:208). They offer a language wherein experience – whether it is individual or familial – is reflected, reciprocated and reverberated by the surrounding. In this capacity the paper shows how disciplined tourists’ notions are of the ‘in’ places and times in which leisure can be consumed. This discipline does not allow the expression of alienated sentiments. （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

Comment by 就是冷門 on September 24, 2021 at 10:39pm

Finally, following recent advances in ethnography, and in feminism and postcolonial studies, reading ‘Quiet Eilat’ raises issues concerning the discourse of tourism studies, that is writing about tourists and tourism. Although the poem was written naïvely, the question as to what is naïveté and whether there is indeed such an objective, ‘naïve’ perspective rises poignantly. Consider the power matrix that underlies the triadic relations between (1) the people who are described in the poem ‘Quiet Eilat’ (who traveled to Sinai in the late 1970s and to Eilat in the early 1990s) – mainly Nathan and myself; (2) the person who wrote the poem (in 1994); and (3) the person who wrote the academic text – the autoethnography, about the poem (in 2006–2007). Power relations and inequalities between the researcher, the writer and those represented in the text (the ‘field’), are clearly at stake here, complicated by the particular arrangement of power relations within the family.

By way of epilogue I wish to return to the interconnection between professional life and disciplinary academic socialization, on the one hand, and personal life and familial relationships, on the other, an interconnection which is characteristic of autoethnographic inquiry (Ellis, 2007). In the professional sphere, writing an autoethnography amounts to an empowering and emancipating act, because it assumes a public state (i.e. publication). It positions the scholar within a particular field or sub-discipline, ties her or him to a particular social network etc. The autoethnographic text assumes, beseeches, and cultivates a particular type of (academic) readership, which can radically change the discursive and interpretative practices of academic writers and readers.

On the personal sphere, I have not been in touch with Nathan in the last few years. He has refused the invitations which I extended before and during a post-doctorate year spent in the US in 2001. Yet my invitations were admittedly sparse: coping with Nathan’s severe illness is difficult for me, and I had and still have other needs to satisfy – my own growing family and my academic career.

I was initially furious with my relative, blaming his refusal to receive therapy (and recurrent institutionalizations) for the continuous deterioration in his health and for causing a deep divide in our relationship. I guess this is what psychologists call the ‘denial phase’. Only quite recently, and as a consequence of writing this autoethnography, I came by way of self-reconciliation to view Nathan’s crude rejections as expressing perhaps an agentic decision to avoid contact with me in this period of his life, or to establish a different type of relationship, one which is yet to be conceived. （Chaim Noy，2007，The Poetics of Tourist Experience: An Autoethnography of a Family T...，Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. January 2007, P141-157)

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