Guides through Cultural Work: A Methodological Framework for the Study of Cultural Intermediaries

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Wynn
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Work ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Cultural Worker ◽  
Epistemological Framework

Through their work, walking tour guides make the abstract histories and cultural flows of cities present and tangible for their followers – merging physical spaces, mental maps of information, and experiences through a kind of spatial storytelling. This social actor’s position in regard to consumption and production thus lends itself to conceptualization as a pivotal cultural worker. To better understand this condition, this article has two interrelated goals: first, to raise the importance of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural intermediary’ and the practice of spatial narratives as concerns for the study of culture, and, second, to refit Wendy Griswold’s (1987a) 1987 framework for a sociology of culture in order to better suit social actors located within a ‘circuit of culture’. Through the study of walking guides, this article places Bourdieu’s provocative concept in dialogue with a clear epistemological framework.

scholarly journals On a Walking Tour to No Man’s Land: Brokering and Shifting Narratives of Violence in Trench Town, Jamaica

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-60
Author(s):  
Alana Osbourne
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Musical Heritage

Tourists who visit Trench Town are drawn in by the neighborhood’s rich musical heritage. They want to see the birthplace of reggae and witness the circumstances depicted in many famous Jamaican songs. Knowingly venturing into marginalized territory, into the “ghetto,” travelers expect to encounter spectacular forms of violence. Yet what the walking tour of Trench Town reveals is an experience of another kind, an excursion that exposes poverty as structural violence, and that points to the historical and political struggles that are constitutive of the area’s social fabric. In this article, drawing on an ethnographic vignette of a walking tour that starts in Bob Marley’s rehearsal grounds and ends by an empty plot locally known as “No Man’s Land,” I focus on the entanglements of violence and tourism and present the discrepancy that exists between touristic desires and the reality of the tourism commodity. This analysis reveals how residents of Trench Town simultaneously choose to address and disregard different (un)spectacular forms of violence during the tourism encounter and I argue that in so doing, local tour guides productively leverage violence to denounce and grapple with structural and historical brutalities.

scholarly journals Insecure positions, heteronomous autonomy and tourism-cultural capital: A Bourdieusian reading of tour guides on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-442
Author(s):  
Ross Garner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Tour Guide ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Cardiff Bay ◽  
Tour Guiding

This article contributes towards debates concerning media tourism and tour guiding by using Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments regarding field and capital to analyse performed tour guide identities on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour in Cardiff Bay. The article pursues three core arguments: first, a Bourdieusian framework provides an enhanced understanding of the insecure positions that tour guides occupy in what is referred to throughout as the tourism field; second, the divergent pulls between heteronomous and autonomous poles which position tour guides are magnified in officially-located media tours because of the presence of branding and theming discourses; third, drawing upon empirical data from the Doctor Who tour, the symbolic capital of official guides involves demonstrations of what is named tourism-cultural capital, but such displays do not result in an increase in individualised status as any accrued capital transfers to the institutional level.

Risk, Culture, and Cognition

2019 ◽  
pp. 448-466
Author(s):  
Daina Cheyenne Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Risk Perception ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Culture And Cognition ◽  
Risk Culture

For many researchers, risk is objective, fixed, and measurable. Social scientists, however, have long worked under the belief that risk is a social construction and is culturally determined. This chapter follows Wilkinson’s use of the term “risk” and the goal of the chapter is to review and map out the ways social actors perceive and make sense of hazards and conditions of threatening uncertainty. Such a contribution is generally seen to lie in the area of risk perception, risk communication, and risk responsibility. This chapter explores key contributions in the study of risk in these three areas through the lens of a sociology of culture and cognition. The chapter ends with some observations on risk and cognition from ethnographic research on the long-term aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

scholarly journals Touring the Hidden City: Walking Tour Guides in Deindustrializing Genoa

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMANUELA GUANO
Keyword(s):  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour

Don’t Waste Any Time In Mourning

2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (8) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Cultural Worker

In the many accolades Pete Seeger received&hellip;after his death, there was often something missing&mdash;as absent in tributes from admirers who share his revolutionary politics as in those aiming to reclaim him for respectability. That absence is Seeger&rsquo;s role as an organizer, and, more broadly, the role of music (and other kinds of cultural work) as organizing, which his life exemplifies.&hellip; Seeger&rsquo;s work as an organizer may have been most obvious, its goals most blatant, in the field&hellip;. But his work, as a singer, as a song-collector, as a song-teacher, was not any less a labor of organizing in the concert hall. And that&rsquo;s not exceptional. That&hellip;is what makes someone a radical cultural worker. What&rsquo;s exemplary about Pete Seeger is how damn good at it he was. What we need to pay attention to and learn from is how he did this important work so well.<p class="mrlink">This article can also be found at the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_blank"><em>Monthly Review</em> website</a>, where most recent articles are published in full.</p><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

scholarly journals City Tour Guides: Urban Alchemists at Work

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Wynn
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
The City

Urban sociology, often and quite reasonably, emphasizes the effects of large–scale and corporate cultures of cities and yet, at the smaller scale, there is a diverse and complex set of practices that reinvigorate the urban landscape. By pairing ethnographic fieldnotes with interviews, this paper offers a limited rejoinder to these narratives, evincing the lived interactions of one set of characters that reenchants cities. for the purposes of this article, walking tour guides serve as examples of “urban alchemists,” and three of their practices are advanced for discussion: their use of myths and revelatory stories to uproot banal visions of the city; their aim to incorporate chance and serendipity into their interactions; and their attempts to transform their participants into “better” urban dwellers.

scholarly journals How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Henry
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Urban Tourism ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Cultural Cues

This study takes seriously the tourist’s desire to feel like a local and examines how walking tour guides work toward fulfilling that desire. The paper examines some of the techniques used by urban walking tour guides to convey local cultural cues. The tourist, armed with these cues, may feel able to fit into a new culture as a quasi-insider. Through qualitative methods, primarily participant observation, the researcher identifies three tactics that guides implement to make the tourist to feel like a local. These tactics are labeled agent alignment, urban alchemy, and material action. These tactics take place within a borderzone, the liminal time-space between insider and outsider status. A successful guide facilitates the border crossing, allowing the tourist to transition from tourist to perceived ‘real Chicagoan.’ However, the unsuccessful guide forces tourists to exit the borderzone unchanged, still as tourists. These findings highlight the uniqueness of walking tourism as a niche tourism and wade into the conceptual milieu of ‘localism’ and ‘the local.’ KEYWORDS: Walking Tourism; Urban Tourism; Tour Guides; Localization; Interculturalism; Urban Alchemy; Agent Alignment; Chicago

scholarly journals Desvendando as homonímias sígnicas da paisagem do Parque Nacional de Superagui: Subsídios metodológicos às ações de planejamento ambiental

GeoTextos ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Midori Kashiwagi
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Environmental Planning ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Conservation Areas ◽  
Environmental Conflicts ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Opening Up

Neste artigo objetivou-se apresentar subsídios metodológicos às ações de planejamento ambiental do Parque Nacional de Superagui por meio da identificação das homonímias sígnicas nas análises da paisagem. Os aportes teórico-metodológicos se fundamentaram na interface dos saberes da Geografia Humanista-Cultural, em sua vertente fenomenológica, com as teorias Semiótica e Linguística. A pesquisa utilizou como ferramental de investigação os mapas mentais, cuja metodologia de interpretação do significado dos signos das imagens mentais constituiu-se na essência fenomenológica das entrevistas associadas às teorias sígnicas de Charles Peirce e linguística de Stephen Ullmann. Com a identificação da homonímia sígnica da paisagem em áreas preservadas, buscou-se desvendar a raiz dos conflitos socioambientais, culturais e econômicos de um grupo social. Propõe-se com essa investigação um caminho para rediscutir e mediar as divergências de interesses entre os atores sociais, abrindo-se novas perspectivas de diagnóstico para as políticas de planejamento ambiental em áreas preservadas. Abstract THE UNVEILING OF LANDSCAPE HOMONYMS SIGNS IN THE NATIONAL PARK SUPERAGUI: METHODOLOGICAL SUBSIDIES TO THE ACTIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING This paper aimed to provide subsidies to the actions of methodological environmental planning Superagui National Park through the identification of homonym signS in the analysis of the landscape. The theoretical and methodological contributions were based on the interface of the knowledge of Humanistic-Cultural Geography, in its phenomenological origin, with Semiotics and Linguistics theories. The research used as a tool the mental maps, with a methodology for interpreting the meaning of the signs of mental images constituted in the essence of the phenomenological interviews associated with theories of signs of Charles Peirce and Stephen Ullmann linguistic. With the identification of homonym signs landscape in conservation areas sought to unravel the root of social and environmental conflicts, cultural and economic aspects of a social group. It is proposed that research with a way to re-discuss and mediate disagreements between the interests of social actors, opening up new prospects for diagnosis of environmental planning policies in conservation areas.

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