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Public places, private journeys : ethnography, entertainment,and the tourist gaze

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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.

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Product Details
Rutgers University Press
081353187X / 9780813531878
Paperback / softback
306.48
31/08/2003
United States
English
x, 313 p. : ill.
24 cm
postgraduate /research & professional /undergraduate Learn More