"Two hundred ninety-four": Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking

We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writing and speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological (photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatized representations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions (e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices (e.g. posting a YouTube video of oneself climbing the 294 steps to the top of the Tower). Through this kind of empirically-based examination of tourists’ discursive and embodied performances – their ways of talking about and behaving in spaces – we witness how people never simply visit places but are always actively shaping and making these places. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is, therefore, as much an emergent production of the tourist imagination as it is a pre-existing, lop-sided construction of stone.

Aristeas the Tourist

"Herodotus the Tourist" was the title given by James Redfield to his inquiry into Herodotus's ethnological system (Classical Philology, 80.2, 1985: 97-118). Redfield's insights, together with François Hartog's monograph The mirror of Herodotus (University of California Press, 1988), definitively modified our interpretation of Herodotus's Histories. In the present paper, I analyse the so-called Letter of Aristeas from a narratological perspective, suggesting that the anonymous author of the Letter deliberately constructed his main character ("Aristeas") as a Herodotus-like figure, who visits Judea and Jerusalem as yet another "tourist". In so-doing, the author's pseudo-ethnographic text produces a specific Jewish self-definition and identity in the Hellenistic period, mirroring both Greek representations of the Jews as a people of philosophers, and a Jewish interpretation of the ideal bios philosophikos, best typified through the Jewish compliance with the Mosaic legislation.