Journeys in the Palimpsest: British women's travel to Greece,1840-1914

Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output

(In)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concept

A brief exploratory approach to (in)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concep

Collecting En Route: An Exploration of the Ethnographic Collection of Gertrude Emily Benham

Included at the back of the thesis is a publication on a review of an exhibition: 'Connecting with Gertrude' Journal of Museum Ethnography Vol 25 (2012)pp.183-188In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century the collecting of objects from colonized countries and their subsequent display in western museums was widespread throughout Western Europe. How and why these collections were made, the processes of collection, and by whom, has only recently begun to be addressed. This thesis is an exploration of the ethnographic collection of Gertrude Emily Benham (1867-1938) who made eight voyages independently around the world from 1904 until 1938, during which time she amassed a collection of approximately eight hundred objects, which she donated to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 1935. It considers how and why she formed her collection and how, as a an amateur and marginalised collector, she can be located within discourses on ethnographic collecting. The thesis is organised by geographical regions in order to address the different contact zones of colonialism as well as to contextualise Benham within the cultural milieu in which she collected and the global collection of objects that she collected. An interdisciplinary perspective was employed to create a dialogue between anthropology, geography, museology, postcolonial and feminist theory to address the complex issues of colonial collecting. Benham is located within a range of intersecting histories: colonialism, travel, collecting, and gender. This study is the first in-depth examination of Benham as a collector and adds to the knowledge and understanding of Benham and her collection in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. It contributes to the discourse on ethnographic collectors and collecting and in doing so it acknowledges the agency and contribution of marginal collectors to resituate them as a central and intrinsic component in the formation of the ethnographic museum. In addition, and central to this, is the agency and role of indigenous people in forming ethnographic collections. The thesis offers a foundation for further research into women ethnographic collectors and a more nuanced and inclusive account of ethnographic collecting

Aural Auras and Haunting Echoes: Places with complex biographies

The aim of the thesis is to explore the distinct identities of places with complex biographies. In particular, it investigates the processes through which sound can enact dialogues between places and people, thus exposing these identities. Place, and more specifically the history of place, is understood as a field that is involved in a process of continuous negotiation and performance. Throughout the thesis, it is contended that the identities of "charged places" can be experienced similarly to how we experience ambience or background noise. Through the ostensible silence that characterises the places under study – a silence not necessarily acoustic, but rather one that relates to the absence of what was or what should have been there – a noisy narrative may develop in our mental realm. Imagination and daydream is the ultimate condition for creating what Gaston Bachelard (1958) terms the "poetic image", which will enable us to "listen" to the place through its histories and to delve into its "aural aura". The specific topic of investigation is how a sound artist, following a place-specific trajectory, may foster a meaningful conversation between the audience and the place, thus exposing the place's biographical essences, and furthermore how they may "orchestrate" an aural aura in order to establish this communication. The four works presented in the portfolio constitute a practical approach through which a response is given to the above inquiries. Each of the four works addresses fields that involve socio-political, philosophical, cultural and aesthetic concerns relevant to the island of Cyprus, as well as more practical artistic matters, such as interactivity, collaboration and ephemerality. The thesis concludes that place-specific sound art with a guerrilla-art style, can be an effective way of expressing and communicating nuances and concepts that relate to the biography of places

Oman from exploration to tourism: the images of the country in early travellers’ tales, travelogues and travel brochures (1838-2001)

This thesis uses early travel accounts (1838-1959), travelogues (1996-2001) and travel brochures (2001) to investigate the image of Oman and its people in British travel texts. Although there have been a number of imagery studies within the field of tourism over the last two decades, they have been recently criticised by Gallarza et al. (2002) for their lack of theoretical orientation. This thesis is intended to be a modest step in addressing this criticism by re-appraising Said's well known work on Orientalism (1978) and works that foreshadowed it, by testing their political, theoretical and polemical propositions against detailed evidence to be found in case study evidence derived from close analysis of English texts on one country; Oman. The thesis investigates the extent to which these texts confirm/disconfirm Said's predominantly critical evaluation of Western (particularly British and French) representations of the east through the construct he calls 'Orientalism'. Through exploration of the imagery attached to Oman, this analysis is intended to contribute to the wider "Othering" debate in suggesting how people of a developing country are defined and gendered by people from developed ones. The thesis, which is based on three genres of travel texts, suggests a much more complex picture of the mechanisms of representations than Said (1978) suggests, showing, for example, that each textual category (travel book, travelogue, and brochure) had its own distinguishing variations in terms of ideological perspective, mode of address and substantive content. For example, political and imperial discourses were widely present in early travel accounts, while, by contrast, travelogue and travel brochure data were more constituted by discourses of consumerism and commerce, with residual I'olitical and imperial traces either silenced, muted or reconstituted as forms of nostalgia, or a depoliticised, sometimes, aestheticised, historic heritage. Moreover, although some early accounts contain negative denotations and connotations relating to Oman and its people that would support Said's broadly critical deconstruction of "Orientalism" as an ideological mechanism of control and appropriation, all three media representations, historical travel texts included, were far from presenting a uniform, or even predominant construction of Oman and its people that would support Said's critique. In two contextual chapters, this thesis appraIses historical encounters between Omanis and Westerns with focus on the British and Omani relationship, and offers an overview ofthe development of tourism in Oman. On the methodological front, the study is unusual as an investigation that combines inductive with deductive approaches, quantitative content analysis with qualitative semiotic analysis. Content analysis was used to examine the images of Oman reproduced in the three media. The quantitative findings were analysed qualitatively by using semiotic analysis to explore and interpret the meanings behind the quantitative results

Tourists' voices : a sociological analysis of tourists' experiences in Chalkidiki, Northern Greece

Much of the writing on tourism treats the tourist as an object of analysis rather than as a subject with feelings, experiences, memories and stories to tell. The tourist is often conceptualised as a unitary type, who, like an inmate in a closed institution, is confined to a tourist bubble. Operating with a one-dimensional view of the tourist and an oversimplification of the touristic experience are major failings of existing social studies. Ethnographic evidence from Chalkidiki suggests that the tourist is a polymorphous consumer, and that different types of tourists experience the same host community in different ways. Analysis of qualitative data obtained from eighty-six participants have been clustered into five types - the Cultural Heritage, the Raver, the Shirley Valentine, the Heliolatrous and the Lord Byron. Each of these clusters are characterised by the dominant themes identified by participants for their choice of holiday, the types of holiday activities they indulged in., and the views they expressed about the host community. This study challenges the interpretation found in the literature that the isolated tourist cannot achieve an 'authentic' experience of the visited host community. It provides evidence to show that repeat visitors to Chalkidiki can achieve an 'authentic' experience interacting with local people. In recognising the value of the concept of authenticity in articulating this modern experience, the study also offers an interpretation of authenticity which makes a distinction between 'other-directed' and 'freedom-directed' authenticity for understanding this phenomenon. This conceptualisation of authenticity informs the discussion of participants' experiences in Chalkidiki. One of the key findings is that tourists enact and consume different stories of Chalkidiki and that their experiences must be seen in the context of these stories

Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636-1863

Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, the author adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections, and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, this book shows that both travel and travel-writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than reductive Eurocentric histories often suggest