illustrates his argument with examples from Kaep- In the contemporary world,the tourist gaze is pler's essay. all-consuming.It is a visual practice and a cultural Wolfgang Kemp examines the mnemonic devices disposition enacted as much in the suburban mall present in the images produced in the early and high as in the"natural wilderness"of the Rift Valley.The Middle Ages,comparing two depictions of the tourist gaze is also paradoxical.There are systematic Prodigal Son,one in stained glass and the other in ways of seeing that define the tourist's experience as the form of a tapestry.In an analogy to the mne- unique-that "mythologize"it in a particular fash- monic elements of poetry,such as meter and rhyme, ion-and yet the tourist gaze has become universal- he suggests that the figural geometry of these two ized as the way postmoderns construct and under- forms constitute an art of memory,producing im- stand the world.It is this all-consuming and ages that are good to remember. paradoxical phenomenon of postmodern tourism Gillian Feeley-Harnik examines ancestor com- that Urry problematizes historically,socially,and memoration among the Sakalava of western Mada- culturally in his book. gascar,among whom remembrance is enacted in In the first four chapters,Urry considers how the performance of service on royal tombs.The act tourism became a uniquely modern leisure-time of dismantling and rebuilding these tombs figures in activity and a focal element of cultural change in the regeneration of the royalty in the bodies of those what he calls the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. who remember them,while also renewing the archi- Modemn tourists seek activities outside the sphere of tectural embodiment of ancestral power. the regulated everyday work world in order to visit Arthur Miller examines two ways in which mem- exciting and exotic places for short periods of time ory may be preserved yet simultaneously withheld Once in these unique settings,they gaze and,guided in acts of resistance.He focuses on how the Zapotec by their looking,are transformed by the experiences transposed their calendrical system into Spanish in they have.The tourist industry was built on repro- order to circumvent its prohibition.He also postu- ducing "new"objects upon which to look.Such lates that indigenous representations of space-time tourist spectacles are constructed and sustained by as in glyphs that marked both place and date,were the fact that they are objectified,framed,and pur- elided in naive,one-dimensional maps produced at chased as reproducible "daydreams."Urry draws the behest of the Spanish. out the irony of all of this."S]ince 'reality'can never Richard Vinograd compares art and memory in provide the perfect pleasures encountered in day- European and Chinese painting. For example dreams,each purchase leads to disillusionment and whereas European pictorial art is commonly de- to longing for ever-new products.There is a dialectic signed as an object of witness,Chinese scroll paint- of novelty and insatiability at the heart of contempo- ing was intended as an extension of an occasion rary consumerism"(p.13). involving the viewer in the process of witnessing.He Take the rise and fall of the British seaside resort, also traces changes in Chinese literati painting-in- one of Urry's best examples of this irony at work.As cluding privatization and,later,personalization- British tourism became a dominant industry in the and evaluates the impact of these processes on their 1960s and 1970s,the seaside resort-which had the mnemonic value. infrastructure to take advantage of this boom in the Missing from this stimulating collection of essays tourist market-declined.Urry explains how the is a conclusion that addresses points of agreement "social tone"of working-class resorts once was set and difference among the authors,for example, by the cheap accommodation and the variety of fun whether the mnemonic properties of art are organ- to be had.But this tourist experience and the condi- ized in terms of a grammar (Kaeppler)or not tions that supported it did not last long.By the (Kuchler),as image-schemata (Johnson),or accord- second half of the 20th century,with the accelerated ing to the requirements of different artistic genres.It proliferation of leisure forms and tourist sites,con- is also interesting to note that three of the four sumers had become more critical about the wide "ethnographic"cases presented fall within the pur- range of experiences available to them-be they view of that oddball category of ethnographic"high spectacles of sex,fashion,ecology,or family fun. art,thus perpetuating rather than revising the idi- Even commercial services are judged as part of the osyncratic manner in which non-Western art is se tourist gaze,and they are carefully managed as lectively memorialized in Western canons. impressions to be consumed as part of a holiday Given its position at the intersection of the hu- experience. manities and the social sciences,Images of Memory Today,the seaside resort is advertised as a nostal- makes a strong case for readers from both fields to gia site,a place to visit as part of a quest for the consider the implications of art as the (re)presenta- authentic British past.The irony is that the process tion of memory. by which portraits of the past are created and framed is the same one that subverts its authenticity.As the seaside resort becomes a mythologized rendering of "authentic British history,the "reality"beyond the The Tourist Gaze:Leisure and Travel in Con- temporary Societies.JOHN URRY.Newbury spectacle for which the tourist so ardently searches turns out to be just another picture available for Park,CA,and London:Sage Publications, consumption,attractive because of its new and im- 1990.ix+176 pp.,photographs,bibliography, proved fidelity and intensity.Urry has a chapter on index. the making of Britain into a spectacle in the form of a heritage refashioning of its urban and rural land- KENNETH LITTLE scapes.Following through on the irony of the gaze, York University he demonstrates how it is that Britain has become 940 american ethnologist