Landscapes, tourism, and the multiple geographical scales of gazing

Abstract

Gaze still is a prevalent human sense in the experience of landscapes, although it is multisensory. Landscapes coexist in the dialogical confrontation between subject/object, distance/proximity, gaze/Earth. Here we pursue an interplay between contributions from Humanist-Cultural Geography and Tourist Studies, based on Edgar Morin’s Complexity. That said, this theoretical essay has as its core goal to address the discussion revolving around the geographical scale in the study, perception, narrative and/or in the representation of landscapes, within the framework of the geographies of gazing and of the current regimes of visibility (GOMES, 2013). To attain that, we used qualitative bibliographic research, with an exploratory character. We seek to geographize the gaze, through its revisiting, reframing, and compatibilizing of key ideas, which are articulate and re-systematized in a conceptual network. We sustain that the gaze is a part of the body, and as such, it becomes an ocular practice, in which the psychophysiology of vision converges with the socio-cultural conditioning and aesthetic canons. Landscapes are also practiced and performed. In the field of Tourism know-how, and its resulting mobility, new paradigms of looking at landscapes seem to be necessary, which would incorporate motion, temporality, fluidity. These attributes do not differ from what is meant by landscape classically, but question and point to new ways of seeing, and also, of being landscape. Geographical scales prove to be decisive in the understanding of the multiple facets, presentations and landscape experiences, whether by tourists/visitors, or not. This concept sets the landscape in motion, and adds new layers of meaning, as well as new possibilities for inter-scale reading. Finally, we raise questions on limitations of looking at landscapes, and their different scale dimensions, from the body of the subjects who experience them, until reaching cosmographies.