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

In this globally interconnected planet, we are increasingly able to access exotic locales without ever actually seeing these places first-hand. 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.