Rodanthi Tzanelli

The recent Paris attacks have left the 'civilised world' exposed to accusations of dehumanising policies. One of our best achievements, technology, is at the centre of this exposure - and we are all 'in its' grip, whether we choose to admit it or not. Here is why.

This chapter focuses on the Northern Irish political-cultural context of cinematic tourism to consider how the televised adaptation of R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones informs territorialised claims over tourist flows in the province’s filmed locations. Defined by folk legends and gifted with natural riches, these Northern Irish sites are implicated both in World Heritage complexities and the ethno-national sensibilities of Ireland’s history. The study examines how the TV series’ filmed sites are being ‘reconfigured’ (interpreted) as Irish cultural capital in websites regulated by transnational, Northern Irish and Irish e-tourist providers. Drawing on combinations of these filmed Northern Irish places’ heritage matrix (their legends, fantastic-literary and real-natural imagery) and the series’ multi-sensory content, e-tourist sites contribute to synergies between capitalism and nationalism. It is argued that Northern Ireland’s Games of Thrones mobilities market tourism’s quotidian events while also reiterating the nation’s sacred time and essentialised existence.

The paper explores the socio-cultural dynamics of Greek demonstrations in 2011, suggesting that their function exceeds that of social movements as we know them. A form of what I term “simulacral thanatotourism,” including marches and demonstrations to Greek cities in protest for austerity measures, actualised in this context a form of mourning about the end of Greece’s place in European polity. This mourning, which places Greece at the centre of a withering European democratic cosmos, inspires in today’s dystopian Greek Raum two conflicting forms of social action: one is geared towards consumption of the country’s political history in terms similar to those we examine as “tourism.” This symbolic consumption of history re-writes the European past from a Greek standpoint while simultaneously promoting relevant entrepreneurial initiatives—in particular, the global circulation of imagery linked to riots and protests, and thus the movement of the abject aspects of Greek culture in global...

The chapter explores recent transmutations of belly dancing into a digital narrative that fuses the discourse of ‘travelling cultures’ with that of embodied, mobile technologies that define ethnographic work: video recording, participant observation and experiential associations with the studied subjects. Despite its numerous ethnic archaeologies, scholars recognise belly dancing’s late nineteenth‐century roots in the crafts of the market, the festival and the expos. Its performance by women and effeminised men symbolically connected it to ‘unholy’ sexualised mobilities and the white male gaze, but in late modern Western markets the style acquired a female consumer basis. Its origins in lowbrow ‘Oriental’ commercial cultures became pivotal in its insertion in the global markets of the Internet, where it continues to be advertised as an embodied, feminine and Oriental craft – markers of sinful reproduction and abject sexualities. Today, the ubiquitous narratives of gender and sexuali...

The term ressentiment originates in Friedrich Nietzsche's (Leipzig, 1969/1887) historical analysis of morals and describes a constraining sociocultural condition that brews a feeling directed against powerful agents. Nietzsche's French terminology reflects the context in which he developed his theory (nineteenthcentury European concerns about civilization decline, and the nationalization of Franco–German political conflict). The German and French models of habitus rationalization served as an ideal type in Elias's Civilising ...

What does 'globalization'mean for those who allegedly stand at the 'receiving end'of its messages? Do they truly stand at its receiving end only–or, are they partaking in it in covert ways? This paper proffers some theoretical reflections on the nature of new cultural industries and the interplay of local, national and global resistances that they induce. It singles out a specific case in which the contingent generation of interdependencies between Hollywood film-making and the 'tourist industries' that emerge from Hollywood screening ...

The article explores the conditions that fostered an unlikely convergence between James Cameron’s
Avatar (2009) media industry, his and his colleagues’ travel and activist pursuits in Brazil, and Chinese
tourist planning. Focusing on one of the film’s simulated landscape markers, Cameron’s collaborative
composition of an audiovisual “Pandorapedia” and his documentary on his Amazonian
travels, it debates how cinematic tourism assists in reconfigurations of utopian visions as tourist
markers. The particular utopian icon that connected such disparate projects as those of movie making
and its digital popular extensions to the generation of tourism in Chinese world heritage sites was that
of the fictional “Hallelujah” or “Floating” Pandora Mountains. Highlighting meeting points between
semiotechnological assemblages (world “languages,” music, and visual technologies) and human
artwork (acting, audiovisual creativity, and activism) it outlines how (a) postmodernist combinations
of art travel and tourist commodification relocate into postnational environments but (b) do not lose
their regional relevance and applicability.

ABSTRACT. The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have received due attention in the social sciences, with scholars examining the ethics of remembering and forgetting and their political implications. This study focuses on episodes that took place in a Northern Greek town in 2000 and 2003, when an Albanian student was twice denied the right to hold the Greek flag during a commemorative national parade. It is argued that this line of action against the student, representative of Greek attitudes towards immigrants in Greece, asserted the locality's participation in the Greek ‘imagined community’. This was made possible through a process of ‘forgetting’ the locality's history and the analogies this presents with the experience of contemporary immigration. Questioning the ethical implications of this collective decision, the article links regional micro-politics to nationalist discourses that originate in the European project itself.

The suggestion that cinematic and literary production are prone to fashion is not new. One could argue, however, that the reality of the 21st century culture industry exceeds the expectations of readers and viewers, in so far as literary fiction has become an organic part of cinematic production. It is well known and commented on that the current trend in filmmaking involves the adaptation, if not recreation, of best-selling novels (Dudley, 1992: 421; McFarlane, 1996; Stam, 1992; Bordwell, 1988).

Independent, Thursday 29th April. There is nothing more entertaining than watching pre-election campaigns and the cock-fighting that accompanies them: every side rushes to make last-minute amends to its programme and assure its followers that they misunderstood what they heard in the news, read in newspapers or listened in a public speech.

Yesterday night I opened my hotmail account to find a message from an old Greek friend with whom I shared my first journey to Britain about twelve years ago. My friend, a permanent resident now in her hometown of Kozani, is sending me emails with varied content. This message, the content of which was directed to a global audience of heritage lovers, both moved and angered me: its supplication to heritage readers was with regards to the return of the Elgin marbles to the Greek state.

We are accustomed to think of movies as part of our leisure activities rather than terrains on which political battles are enacted. However, in a highly commercialised globe that has turned image and sound into pathways to political inclusion and global recognition, films have become politicized arenas. Take movies that successfully promote global pilgrimage [7](fan tourism and other types of tourism) to filmed locales, making filmed regions and nation-states internationally famous.

Political and economic analysts speak of an economic 'End Game [2]' for Greece. The country has now seen past this point, with disorganised riots and protests that put unemployed youth, pensioners, family breadwinners, union leaders, anarchists and principled ideologues in the same boiling pot. Sociological explananda of 'social movement' are highly unstable in this context that is dominated by economic, political and social uncertainty.

The paper comprises an aspect of a (British Academy) project on evolving understandings of heritage in the Northern urban centre of Thessaloniki, Greece.The paper reviews politically motivated definitions of ‘heritage’ based on erasures or commoditisation of history, suggesting that such modifications conform to a European meta-narrative that prioritises Christian cosmological themes of suffering and spirituality. The ways these histories clash or collude with the living and evolving cultures of the city is explored. The author enacts a form of death travel (“thanatotourism”) in some of Thessaloniki’s inner areas to examine the role conceptions of “heritage” (Jewish, Ottoman, Turkish and Asia Minor) have in the production of the city’s global tourist image. Priority is given to an analysis of the author’s methodological tools – as a native ethnographer, an “auteur” and a tourist. It is suggested that these critical methodologies do not exist totally outside the cultural frame she analyses as a Western professional. Given its historic associations with Orientalist geographies (as a Northern Balkan city that joined Greece in the early twentieth century only to be swamped by refugees from the crumbling Ottoman empire), Thessaloniki’s multiculturalist archive is the site of historical trauma. It is significant that its once thriving “communities of practice”, exemplified by crafts such as those of chair-making or complementary therapy (as in the production of herbal remedies and concoctions), do not partake in the city’s tourist image. This has often encouraged the development of introversion or competitions that feed into nationalist agendas and play in the hands of those systemic centres (regional, national and transnational) that shape the country’s official historical records. Clashes of voluntary and involuntary tourist mobility are placed under sociological scrutiny – as a complex offshoot of regional policies, national miscommunications and systemic impositions at European level.

The paper examines Anatolítika glykà (Asia Minor sweets) and the craft of zacharoplastikí (sweet-making) in Thessaloniki, Greece’s main northern city. The continuum between sweet-makers and product explicates the development of zacharoplastikí – originally a colonial occupation, later a feminine craft of the domestic hearth – to a modern profession. Thessalonikiote sweet-making and glykà develop as a travel narrative by obscuring their Eastern associations. Zacharoplastikí’s professionalization was assisted by the employment of spectacular representational techniques. This is today communicated on the websites of its five biggest zacharoplasteío (patisserie) chains through a covert alignment of professional self-presentation with those Greek traditions that have acquired a public face and are (potentially) globally mobile. The author, a native Thessalonikiote, fuses digital hermeneutics with phaneroscopy to explore this phenomenon from within.

KEYWORDS: Artisanship, Civilizing process, Hermeneutics, Internet, Migration, Travel, Orientalism

The article examines how Prigipos, a cafe´ in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, communicates Greek cosmological themes through the way it ‘stages’ urban memories. The staging suggests an ‘Oriental’ tourist-like flaˆnerie that matches, and is directed towards the cafe´’s physical and symbolic surroundings (notably, the Turkish Consulate, the adjacent paternal house of Turkey’s first President, Kemal Atatu¨rk, but also the old part of the city, historically populated by Greek refugees from Anatolian
Turkey). My ethnographic eye is examined as constitutive of this flanerie, especially since I grew up in Thessaloniki. Through the employment of mixed research tools and methods, I explore how Prigipos’s spectacular self-presentation replaced old migrant
kafeneion culture with new aesthetic fusions to enable its global consumerist mobility. At the same time, the article argues that old ethno-national formulas are enmeshed in Prigipos’s design and narratives, endorsing a Thessalonikiote permutation of culture.

Keywords: cosmology, consumption, ethnographic travel, flaˆnerie, tourism, tourist gaze, methods,
Orientalism

The role Western philhellenism played in the production of modern Greek identity has been the object of extensive research. Scholars focused on the importance Hellenic culture acquired in European discourses of modernity and the maintenance of national and imperial self-images in the West. The present book re-conceptualises the historical emergence of such discursive frameworks as ‘gatekeepers’ hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. The specific context it explores is that of Anglo-Greek cultural exchange in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (1864-1881). It is argued that Greece’s ambiguous attitude toward British demands for Greek modernisation, and British frustration originating in modern Greek irredentism and internal disorder, define the frame of resistance. A consistent miscommunication between Greeks and Britons made co-operation impossible and assisted in the production of Greek counter-hegemony. The specific path of Greek modernisation, state, and nation-formation was developed in several key political/discursive conflicts around: (i) Crime and disorder, (ii) the rationalisation of historical past, and (iii) the nationalist project of the ‘Great Idea’.

The paper explores how the Da Vinci Code, a novel by Dan Brown, and its cinematic adaptation (2006) operate as a ‘node’ for European capitalist networks of corporeal and virtual travel. Reexamining the convergence, as well as the divergence of patterns and practices of early travel and contemporary tourism, the paper discusses the centrality of technologies of “gazing” upon other cultures and of collecting cultural signs to the global networks of contemporary (digitized or corporeal) travel. It is argued that the film and the novel assist in the interpellation of a new type of traveler, what is termed here a neo-pilgrim. The mobilization of neo-pilgrimage by global tourist networks also indicates a kind of staged cosmopolitanism that originates in conceptions of the cosmopolitan as the epistemological subject of Enlightenment political philosophy. Contrariwise, however, the cosmopolitanism of the Da Vinci Code democratizes the consumption of what used to be regarded as high culture, reserved exclusively for the old, aristocratic, elites of Europe. It will be argued that the novel and the film break away from established codes of authorship in cultural production while debating the emergence of a new service class of professional travelers whose fleeting visits to museums, galleries, luxury hotels and boulevards operate as both unacknowledged touring of commoditised European heritage and an aspect of personal self-betterment and self-education.

Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, Democratisation, Europe, Heritage, Mobility, Neo-pilgrim, Tourist
Gaze, Travel

The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have been the subject of a fierce debate in the human sciences - especially, but not exclusively, in the study of nationalism. This paper re-investigates the nature of national memory in the context of European nationalisms by drawing on contemporary national cases of remembering and forgetting. The explored instances are mobilized in the study of remembering/forgetting on a factual, rather than ideal level. Theoretically, it is argued that the Habermassian call for fostering ‘anamnestic solidarity’ with the past often fails in practice because of its normative undertones that disagree with Realpolitic demands. This is so because nationalist discourse, which serves to preserve the political interests of the national community, has to present itself to political forces that reside outside the community as a
closed, autopoetic system akin to that theorized by Niklas Luhmann. Although the Luhmannian thesis (which would gesture
towards the autonomisation of national memory) also fails to explain the nature of nationalist remembering/forgetting tout
court, it allows more space for an exploration of nationalist self-presentation than Habermas’ normative stance. The argument
in this study, which combines an appreciation of hermeneutics and autopoeia, is that the practice of (re)producing the
‘nation’s’ solitary amnesia enables nationalist discourse to respond to external political pressures. This presents the latter
as a dialogical/hermeneutic project despite its solipsistic ‘façade’.

Keywords: Collective Memory, Europe, Habermas, Hermeneutics, Luhmann, Nationalism

This book adopts an unorthodox approach to debates about ‘the end of tourism’. Through twenty-first century cinematic narratives of symbolically interconnected ‘risks’ it considers how art envisages the future of humanity’s well-being. Filmic scenarios articulate the futuristic survival of community as the triumph of the technological human over otherness, and provide a means to debate societal risks that weave identity politics into unequal mobilities. This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in mobilities theory, tourism and travel theory, film studies and aesthetics, globalisation studies, race, labour and migration.

Only virtuous humans are supposed to move in time to meet their happy destiny or karma. The tale of Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire is such a case of serendipitous mobility towards riches and love – a ‘journey’ in which good heroes and urban communities respecting solidarity are successfully modernised. Unsurprisingly, the cinematic enterprise was enmeshed in many controversies over India’s destiny in the world.  By interrogating Mumbai’s insertion into various financial, political and artistic scenes; inducing new tourism in its filmed slums; promoting charity projects in which celebrities and tourist businesses were involved; and provoking reactions from Non-Resident Indian literati, journalists, activists, politicians and slum localities, the film served as a global example of a ‘developing country’s’ uneven but unique modernisation.

This book examines such mobilities of ideas, art, tourism and activism as a unity in order to unveil the significance of Mumbai as a post-colonial city in discussions of modernity as a form of mobile adaptation to new world realities. This is achieved by various agents involved in controversies through multiple virtual and real journeys to India’s colonial history and present social complexity, with a view to actualise a post-colonial future, a ‘destiny’ as the country’s serendipitous destination. Addressed to interdisciplinary This book examines such mobilities of ideas, art, tourism and activism as a unity in order to unveil the significance of Mumbai as a post-colonial city in discussions of modernity as a form of mobile adaptation to new world realities. This is achieved by various agents involved in controversies through multiple virtual and real journeys to India’s colonial history and present social complexity, with a view to actualise a post-colonial future, a ‘destiny’ as the country’s serendipitous destination. Addressed to interdisciplinary audiences, the book will be a useful text for students and scholars of globalisation, mobility, tourism, media and social movement theory.

In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world’s political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside the increased media attention and publicity, came accusations of governmental ‘corruption’ and overspending.

In Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events, Tzanelli uses Brazil’s 2014 World Cup to explore how mega-events articulate socio-cultural problems. Critically examining the aesthetics and ethics of mobilities in the mega-event, this book explores these socio-cultural issues and controversies:

the background of staging mega-events, including the bidding process and the host’s expectations for returns;
ceremonial staging and communications between artistic representations and national symbolism;
the clear reaction mega-events almost always generate in national, regional and global activist circles, including accusations of overspending and human rights violations.
This interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of mobility, sociology of globalisation, cultural sociology, social and anthropological theory, as well as the sociology of sport, human and cultural geography, and leisure and tourism studies.

In recent decades ceremonies stood in Olympiads as both vehicles of cultural values and shows embracing the banal and the everyday. But how much do we understand them as forms of public art? This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover event to Rio for the 2016 Olympics as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. It is argued that embodied and projected performances of Britishness and Brazilianness embraced both artistic styles and the contemporary digital turn, refinement and banality. Combinations of art and technology reflected a vision of humanity in motion complying with the Olympic values of fairness, beauty and embodied well-being. The three ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel on stage, on big screens and in musical genres. This travel, at once mediated, embodied and experiential, created an ideal form of 'human': a tornadóros. A creative worker and a tourist, the tornadóros manipulates audio-visual narratives of culture and identity for global Olympic audiences. Spanning Sociology, Sports Studies, Culture and Media Studies, Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, this is a highly interdisciplinary and original perspective on the Olympics

What happens to traditional conceptions of heritage in the era of fluid media spaces? ‘Heritage’ usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into generic landscapes and ideas through digital reproductions or modifications, prompting renegotiations of belonging in new ways. Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, creating virtual spaces of debate for people with access to televised, cinematic and Internet ideas and networks.

This book examines a range of popular cinematic interventions that are reshaping national and global heritage, across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australasia. It examines collaborative or adversarial articulations of such enterprise (by artists, directors, producers but also local, national and transnational communities) that blend activism with commodification, presenting new cultural industries as fluid but significant agents in the production of new public spheres.

Heritage in the Digital Era will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, film studies, tourist studies, globalization theory, social theory, social movements, human/cultural geography, and cultural studies.

Cosmopolitan Memory in Europe’s ‘Backwaters’ reconsiders the definitional relationships of ‘national character’ and ‘national heritage’ in the context of Western industrial modernity. Taking as a case study the Greek islands of Skiathos and Skopelos which served as cinematic locations for the blockbuster Mamma Mia! (2008), the book explores how national identity - once shaped by political, cultural and religious practices - can now be reduced to little more than an ideal, created and sold globally by Western industries such as tourism and film.

Tzanelli argues how the film encouraged the development of regional competitions that further enhanced the emotive potential of a Greek nationalist discourse that projects the blame for regional favouritism onto Western agents and the nation-state itself. It also takes into consideration the historical background of this controversy, which finds roots in the religious heritage of the South-eastern Mediterranean region – in particular, the notions of Byzantine Christianity which the Greeks used to set against the Islamic traditions of their Ottoman colonisers to affirm their European civility.

Recent years have seen a radical transformation of conventional tourist marketing and experience. The use of exotic locations in Hollywood films has allowed global audiences to enjoy distant places. Simultaneously, Hollywood screening of potential 'tourist paradises' has generated new tourist industries around the world. This book takes a closer look at this new phenomenon of 'cinematic tourism', combining theory with case studies drawn from four continents: America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

The author explores audiences' perceptions of film and their covert relationship with tourist advertising campaigns, alongside the nature of newly-born tourist industries and the reaction of native populations and nation-states faced with the commodification of their histories, identities and environments.

he role Western philhellenism played in the production of modern Greek identity has been the object of extensive research. Scholars focused on the importance Hellenic culture acquired in European discourses of modernity and the maintenance of national and imperial self-images in the West. The present book re-conceptualises the historical emergence of such discursive frameworks as ¿gatekeepers¿ of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. The specific context it explores is that of Anglo-Greek cultural exchange in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (1864-1881). It is argued that Greece¿s ambiguous attitude toward British demands for Greek modernisation, and British frustration originating in modern Greek irredentism and internal disorder, define the frame of resistance. Constant miscommunication between Greeks and Britons made co-operation impossible and assisted in the production of Greek counter-hegemony. The specific path of Greek modernisation, state, and nation-formation was developed in several key political/discursive conflicts around: (i) Crime and disorder, (ii) the rationalisation of historical past, and (iii) the nationalist project of the ¿Great Idea¿.

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of nationalist movements and conflicts, both in Europe and beyond. The persistence of national identity as a central feature of cultural and political life invites us to reflect anew upon the dynamics through which nationhood is constituted. This book offers a provocative theorisation of nation formation, focusing on the key role played by dialogic relations of hegemony, resistance and reciprocity in the emergence of the modern nation. The workings of this dialogic relation between the emergent nation and its 'Others' is explored through the encounter between Greece and Britain in the latter part of the nineteenth century - one of the most notable instances of nation-formation played out within the heart of a 'modern' Europe, that traced its origins in an imagined Hellenic civilisation.

Recent years have seen a radical transformation of conventional tourist marketing and experience. The use of exotic locations in Hollywood films has allowed global audiences to enjoy distant places. Simultaneously, Hollywood screening of potential 'tourist paradises' has generated new tourist industries around the world. This book takes a closer look at this new phenomenon of 'cinematic tourism', combining theory with case studies drawn from four continents: America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.



The author explores audiences' perceptions of film and their covert relationship with tourist advertising campaigns, alongside the nature of newly-born tourist industries and the reaction of native populations and nation-states faced with the commodification of their histories, identities and environments.