Abstract
‘Odd choice of holiday reading’, someone remarked as I added this book to my pile of things-yet-to-be-packed. ‘Why don’t you take something lighter, maybe a Scandi-noir thriller or something off this year’s best-seller list?’ They had a point, I pondered later as the things-in-piles moved to a new state, and became things-packed. So the book was untaken, left behind, but definitely thought-with over the (Christmas) holidays. While it did feel like an odd choice of holiday reading in one sense, in another way, it makes perfect holiday reading; not least for rethinking how to do the being-with of holidaying.
Its oddness is part of the book’s appeal, but also makes it hard-going in places. Its embrace of messiness and unruliness makes it sound like it was fun to write, based around a shared camping trip and guided by a Dogme 95-style set of rules. These are, first, inviting along ‘theoretical houseguests’ that include a familiar roster from the bookshelves of critical hospitality and tourism studies – Agamben, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger and, of course, Derrida and Levinas. This inviting is handled in different ways, sometimes through traditional citation practices and sometimes, as in Emily Höckert’s chapter, by imagining a fictional fieldtrip in the company of her guests. Relatedly, the second rule concerns the form and style of academic writing, so the chapters variously experiment with fragmentary ‘moments’ (GermannMolz’s camping trips), imagined dialogues (Olli Pyyhtinen and an unnamed critical sociologist), travelogues and experiences both real and imagined. Third, the book’s authors were self-guided by ‘care for the reader’s affective experience throughout our narrative’ (p. 10). Hmm, this one is interesting. Among the affects I experienced were confusion, excitement, boredom, a desire for tidiness, tiredness, aliveness, relief. It is that kind of book: while we readers are encouraged to ‘play along’ and ‘play with’ the writers’ approach, it is at times a bit disorienting or unmooring, and not always in a good way. Like I said, it looks like it was fun to write. Anyway, rule 4 is to rethink tourism studies as an active agent in changing the world. This rule ebbs and flows across the book, sometimes addressed head-on, at other times somewhat implicit, even covert. Finally, the fifth rule governing the book is to ‘reflect the way [the authors] “messed around” with each other’s ways of thinking during our shared camping and writing experience’ (p. 10). Again, sometimes this takes place through the conventional name-checking and cross-referencing; at other times, we readers are left to divine just what went on in that cabin in the woods – and we know from too many horror films what can happen (while they look to Lars von Trier as a houseguest, they steer clear of Antichrist).
So, the chapters: Jennie GermannMolz carries on camping, including at a gourmet foodie foraging event; Olli Pyyhtinen considers Serres’ work on the parasite, and offers a reading of one of the most inexplicably picked-over films in tourism studies, The Beach; Soile Veijola thinks about silence, via a reindeer herd performance art experience (herd but not heard?) and then into the role of silence in host-guesting (she made me remember a favourite line from long-running British Soap Coronation Street, where an elderly character yearns for companionship in terms of ‘someone to share the silence with’); Emily Höckert takes Derrida, Levinas and Spivak on a fictional fieldtrip to Nicaragua; and Alexander Grit goes museuming. In the latter musing on host-guesting, Grit conjures the term ‘hospity’ to think about unplanned moments where we might momentarily become either host or guest. As he writes, hospitality spaces are full of potential for this kind of serendipitous interaction and new lines of flight.
The book ends with more collective thinking, and revisits the chapter outlines (it’s interesting to read this alongside those offered in the introduction, to see how they have been reframed either by writing or reading, or both). Here, at the end, they also ask some rhetorical questions, re-examining their journey. I can add my own: does the book make a useful tourist guide? Or is it overburdened with excess baggage? Are the words spoken in a strange language? In the end, it reminds me of a favourite joke:
How was your camping holiday?
In tents.