With more than 230 million international tourists a year, the Mediterranean region is the largest tourist destination in the world. This book outlines that its economic importance is matched by its significance as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. Through a series of ethnographic insights into some of the key sites of mass Mediterranean tourism, it focuses on package tourists' experiences of the serial, banal and depthless spaces that are mushrooming along the coast and the enchantments, dissolutions and dreams that saturate them. Moving away from the notion of authentic places corrupted by mass tourism, the book shows how new forms and spaces are made and remade by the mobilities and performances of locals, workers and tourists. Finally, the book looks at the complex materialities of mass tourism and the many networks that make it possible.

Thinking Space is ideal reading for those looking to learn about the 'spatial turn' in social & cultural theory. As theorists have begun using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the complex and differentiated world this book looks at a range of social theorists. Contributions from a range of geographical writers each take the work of one thinker, ranging from early this century to contemporary writers. They examine how they use spatial ideas, what role these ideas play in their thinking and what this means for how we think about theory and space. Among the writers discussed are: Georg Simmel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Helene Cixous, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon.

Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:
* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed
* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies
* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203169425

Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:
* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed
* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies
* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world.
This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.

Cultural Geography is the first book to introduce culture from a geographical perspective. It tracks the ideas, practices and objects that together form cultures - and how these cultures form identities for individuals and populations. Crang examines a range of scales as he considers the role of states, empires and nations, firms and corporations, shops and goods, books and films, in creating identities.
Cultural Geography looks at the way different processes come together in particular places and how those places develop meanings for people, whether at a global scale or the intimate scale of everyday life. Specifically designed for use on modular courses this text features clear writing, boxed case studies, chapter summaries, further reading guides and a glossary of key terms.

Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective. This text focuses on how cultures work in practice and looks at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex. Crang presents no single answer but explores a wealth of different cases and different approaches people have taken to various issues and ideas. Looking at how cultures are spread over, and make sense of, space, this book tracks the ideas, practices and objects that together form cultures - and how these cultures form identities for individuals and populations. Crang examines a range of scales as he considers the role of states, empires and nations, firms and corporations, shops and goods, books and films, in creating identities.
Cultural Geography looks at the way different processes come together in particular places and how those places develop meanings for people, whether at a global scale or the intimate scale of everyday life. Exploring the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness; how the world, space and places are interpreted and used by people; and how those places then help to perpetuate the culture, Crang develops the relationship of change and the possibility that current societies may develop a more pick and mix relationship to culture.

Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia.

Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia. Simon Coleman teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham. Mike Crang is Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Durham.

This innovative volume focuses on tourism through the twin lenses of cultural theory and cultural geography. Presenting a set of innovative case studies on tourist destinations around the world, the contributors explore the paradoxes of the tourist experience and the implications of these paradoxes for our broader understanding of the problems of modernity and identity. The book examines how tourism reveals the paradoxical ways that places are both mobile and rooted, real and fake, inhabited by those who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, and both subjectively experienced and objectively viewed. The concepts of travel and mobility long have been used to explain modern identity and social behavior, but this work pushes beyond the established literature by considering the ways that place and mobility are inherently related in unexpected, even contradictory ways. Travel, the international cast of authors contends, occurs 'in place' rather than 'between places.' Thus, instead of offering yet another interpretation of the ways modern societies are distinguished by their mobilities-in contrast to the supposed place-bound quality of traditional societies-the chapters here collectively argue for an understanding of modern identity as simultaneously grounded and mobile. This rich blend of empirical and theoretical analysis will be invaluable for cultural geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists of tourism.