Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp.

601–622, 2004
# 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures 0160-7383/$30.00
doi:10.1016/j.annals.2004.01.005

PLACE AND IDENTITY IN

TOURISTS’ ACCOUNTS
Scott McCabe
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Elizabeth H. Stokoe
Loughborough University, UK

Abstract: Although interdisciplinary scholarly attention has focused on the theoretical

links between identity and place, there exist few empirical studies that explore the processes
through which these constructs are embedded in language practice. This paper analyzes,
using the ethnomethodological approach Membership Categorization Analysis, formula-
tions of place and identity in tourists accounts of their activities in a UK National Park.
Analysis focuses on the way interviewees construct a particular ‘‘spatio-moral’’ order of pla-
ces and types of tourists, through formulations of activities in tourism sites, descriptions of
scenes and terrain, and stories about other users’ normative and transgressive uses of space.
Overall, identity claims are practical achievements that are embedded in talk about places.
Keywords: tourist interaction, place-identity, morality, category-membership. # 2004 Else-
vier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Résumé: Lieu et identité dans les comptes-rendus touristiques. Bien que l’attention éru-
dite interdisciplinaire ait été centrée sur les liens théoriques entre identité et lieu, il existe
peu d’études empiriques qui examinent les processus à travers desquels ces constructions
sont enchâssées dans la pratique linguistique. Cet article analyse, en utilisant l’approche
ethnométhodologique de l’Analyse par Catégorisation d’Appartenance, des formulations de
lieu et d’identité dans les comptes-rendus des touristes de leurs activités dans un parc
national du Royaume-Uni. L’analyse se concentre sur la façon dont les interviewés con-
struisent un ordre « spatio-moral » particulier des endroits et des genres de touristes à tra-
vers des formulations des activités aux sites de tourisme, des descriptions de scènes et de
paysages et des histoires de l’utilisation normative ou transgressive de l’espace. En général,
les affirmations d’identité sont des réussites pratiques qui sont enchâssées dans des propos
au sujet des endroits. Mots-clés: interaction touristique, lieu-identité, moralité, catégorie-
appartenance. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
Place and space are fundamental constructs in tourism studies. The
spatial characteristics of destinations, as well as the contrasting fea-
tures of domestic spaces, are fundamental to understanding the

Scott McCabe is Senior Lecturer in the Center for Tourism and Cultural Change at
Sheffield Hallam University (Sheffield, United Kingdom. Email <s.mccabe@shu.ac.uk>).
Elizabeth Stokoe is Lecturer in Social Sciences department at Loughborough University.
The authors’ research interests include tourism and discourse, gender, identity, neighbor
relationships, spatial language, experiences, the consumption of places, consumer psy-
chology, and interaction and behavior.

601
602 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

dynamic character of destinations and the meanings attached to

places by tourists. The impact of globalization on contemporary
societies in the production and consumption of place has profound
implications for understanding identity and the social self in tourism
studies. While the theoretical and empirical elaboration of the
meanings of place in cultural discourses has been emphasized, scant
attention has been paid to the practical methods employed by tourists
in their formulation and construction of place and identity. Actually,
discourses of place and identity have become embedded within post-
modern cultures, but the means by which tourists draw upon such in
their descriptions of experiences has been largely overlooked or
taken for granted. Although it is uncontested that place is funda-
mental to cultural identity constructions through the creation of
distinctions between ‘‘insiders’’ and ‘‘outsiders’’ (Relph 1976), or
that such dichotomous relationships are shifting the function of
place in postmodern identity formations (Augé 1995), few studies
examine critically the praxis of identity construction through spatial
language.
The touristic experience of place has long been of potential inter-
est to social scientists since the tourist is away from home, out of the
mundane, and physically uprooted from the domestic environment,
as well as being motivated by the difference in physical character of
destination space, being amid another culture(s) and thrilling to the
unknown. Yet many philosophical questions may be raised in a dis-
cussion of these experiences and the role of identity in them. The
purpose of this paper is to explore the practical processes by which
tourists construct their identities through their descriptions of activi-
ties in places. In this study ‘‘day visitors’’ were interviewed as a sub-
category of tourist type but the respondents’ categories for their
behavior, such as ‘‘tourist’’, ‘‘walker’’, or ‘‘serious hiker’’, are the focus
of the study. The paper demonstrates the contested nature of the
construct ‘‘tourist’’ in the context of its use as a member identity cate-
gory as opposed to its largely uncontested acceptance as a conceptual
one. The deployment of categories of places together with those of
behavior creates powerful identity ascriptions for members. Assuming
a membership categorization analytic approach (Sacks 1972, 1979),
the paper demonstrates how talk about place becomes talk about identity.
This is linked to the second purpose of the paper, which is to demon-
strate how interview accounts can be treated as central resources in
understanding the construction of common sense knowledge about
categories of people, places, and things. Categories lock discourses
into place (Baker 2000); thus in describing and accounting for their
activities, people (members) assemble versions of the social world.
From this perspective, interviews are treated interactionally, as cate-
gory members’ account for their practices as belonging to such
groupings. Peoples’ artful use of these is central to the social and
moral achievement of identity and is a profound form of cultural com-
petence (Baker 1997).
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 603

PLACE, IDENTITY, AND THE LANGUAGE OF TOURISTS

Through tourism activity, there is a symbolic as well as physical con-
sumption of place in terms of the relationship between people and
their possession of tourism experiences and places (Brown 1992).
These relations can be located within a wider philosophical treatment
of space, place, and human experience (Buttimer and Seamon 1980;
Lefebvre 1991; Seamon and Mugeraner 1985; Tuan 1977). However,
the relationship among place, identity, and experience is a contested
aspect of social theory. Within postmodern theory, place is examined
not as a static, a priori or objective phenomenon but as ongoingly and
dynamically constructed (Lefebvre 1991). The experiential and cul-
tural significance of places and the function of the environment in
identity construction have been examined across a range of dis-
ciplines (Buttel 1987; Cresswell 199; Crouch 1994; Desforges 2000;
Fridgen 1984; Tuan 1980; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell 1996). Such work
focuses on, for example, senses of belonging and people’s attachment
to places, contrasting and problematizing the ‘‘home’’ and the
‘‘foreign’’, the center and the periphery, or places and ‘‘non-places’’
(Augé 1995; Morley 2001).
Many argue that the postmodern condition is characterized by an
importance of the visual, detachment, extreme sensations, and fleet-
ing movements through space, separated from everyday life (Crouch
2000). These features have resulted in a new geography of leisure in
both cities and the countryside. For example, concepts of ‘‘nature’’
are increasingly significant in the new geography of leisure, although
Urry (1995) argues that it is often an adjusted, managed nature.
Crouch and Ravenscroft (1995) examine the ways in which space is
represented as the ‘‘countryside’’, and how it is constructed for lei-
sure. The space in this view is more than simple physical reality, and
comprises a duality of identities; it is both a product presented for
consumption, and a site where many different practices occur
(1995:289). Leisure happens in ‘‘real’’ places, and so the way in which
individuals come to know localities is contextualized through leisure
practices. Space is then a frame of reference for actions, since actions
and practices produce the social world and so constitute space. The
spatial and temporal dialectic creates leisure experience that is not
firmly rooted in fixed concepts of ‘‘time/activity’’ relationships, but in
episodic moments of ‘‘flow’’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). Some argue that
experience within destination spaces demonstrates an ‘‘inversion’’ of
identity. Gottlieb found that Americans invert their class-based every-
day (including work) roles on their holidays to become ‘‘peasants for
a day’’ or ‘‘Queen (King) for a day’’ (1982:173), depending on the
class of person and type of holiday they select. Lett (1983) drew upon
the Turnerian notion of liminality, together with the ludic aspects of
play, to explain how yachters invert their everyday roles on charter
holidays in the Caribbean. Their behavior becomes more playful, a
free activity without material interest. Selanniemi (2001) pro-
blematizes cultural constructions of place by Finnish tourists, arguing
that the specifics of the destination are less important than the
604 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

opportunities to escape home to a ‘‘liminoid south’’, a placeless time

where the comforts of home can be experienced unproblematically
alongside more hedonistic, liminal activities. These studies demon-
strate the relationship between places, experience, and identity. How-
ever, the language used by tourists to account for their experience
and practice in these spaces is a crucial omission in this literature.
Changing conceptualizations of consumption are also central to
any analysis of links between place and identity. Leisure plays a cen-
tral part in the buying of clothes, kinds of foods, pastime, and visits
away from home that make up the lifestylization of consumption. The
commercialization of places under a name or brand depends on the
re-imaging, or re-labeling of landscapes used in advertising and semi-
ological interpretations of place (MacCannell 1976). The design of
new buildings and the copying of ‘‘rural’’ types of landscape in new
developments at the edges of cities blurs the traditional distinction
between town and country, and, furthermore in the context of heri-
tage sites, creates an ‘‘unreal’’, pastiche, or false geography (Crouch
2000:270). The changing nature and character of places, together
with adapting modes of leisure consumption and commercialization
of locales, has shifted the ways in which meanings are attached to pla-
ces. Therefore, in relation to destinations, the needs and identities of
the interlopers and those of the locals then become of central impor-
tance yet less distinct or separable. Several commentators have argued
that leisure practice, including tourism and other place-based prac-
tices, are linked to such constructions as middle class identities (Munt
1994) or a ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘moral’’ self (Matless 1995). Identity is increas-
ingly constructed through the consumption of leisure goods, services,
and signs rather than through occupational categories (Urry 1994).
Additionally, people not only identify themselves as particular types of
category members (sky diver rather than computer operator) but also
categorize destinations as particular types of places (resort or wilder-
ness).
Such categorizations are not just simple, objective or factual
descriptions: they construct places as ‘‘the geographical world we
know’’. A close examination of some of the practices that ordinary
people use in accounting for their consumption of and engagement
with places becomes a legitimate interest for tourism researchers.
However, there are few empirical translations that examine how the
embeddedness of place and identity is constructed in tourists’ talk.
There are two reasons for this neglect. One, while tourism is currently
enjoying renewed interdisciplinary attention, including the ‘‘shift to
discourse’’ that has been seen across the social sciences, the discursive
practices involved in ‘‘doing being a tourist’’ in situ is problematic for
researchers. Therefore focus has been placed on written texts or the
voices of people who live in destinations, rather than the interactions
and accounts of tourists themselves. Two, while many studies examine
experiences (Cohen 1974, 1979; Dann 1999; MacCannell 1976;
Masberg and Silverman 1996; Squire 1994; Urry 1990), few focus on
the interactional significance of touristic language (notable exceptions
include Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Karch and Dann
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 605

1996; Katriel 1994). Desforges concludes that, across tourism litera-

ture, there is ‘‘a general lack of empirical engagement with tourists
‘in the flesh’’’ (2000:934).
Beyond tourism studies, there is a body of work that explores the
function of spatial language and ‘‘place formulations’’ (Schegloff
1972) in the construction of located identities. In particular,
Schegloff provides a framework through which such formulations can
be studied, which is adapted for the analysis in this study. More
recently, discursive psychologists have focused on the way belonging
and/or not belonging to places is accomplished in talk; how descrip-
tions of place are action-oriented, and how people’s talk about it
becomes talk about category membership, for themselves and others
(Barnes 2000; Dixon 2001; Dixon and Durrheim 2000; Stokoe and
Wallwork 2003; Taylor and Wetherell 1999). Pockets of work within
anthropology, environmental psychology, tourism and geography have
also begun to study, for example, the constitution of the environment
in discourse (Bird 2002; Bonaiuto and Bonnes 2000; Burningham and
Cooper 1999; De Chaine 2001; Harré, Brockmeier and Mühlhäusler
1999; McCabe 2001; Mels 2002). This paper aims to address some of
these issues and to explicate the place-identity interface using a fine-
grained analytic approach that allows examination of action-descrip-
tion detail and place-identity links in talk. In this way, the paper aims
to reveal the sense-making procedures displayed in talk when describ-
ing and accounting for members’ own and other people’s activities in
tourist spaces and the construction of place as an ongoing achieve-
ment of interaction.

Accounts and Membership Categorization Analysis

This paper is part of ongoing work on the construction of place
and identity across a variety of discursive sites. The data come from 14
conversational interviews with day visitors to the National Peak Park
in Derbyshire, England. These came out of a wider study of experi-
ences of the Peak Park,whose original purpose was to explore peo-
ple’s experiences, motives, and perceptions of it as a tourism
destination. The Peak National Park is located in the center of the
United Kingdom. It was the first such park to be designated, in 1949,
by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (Seabrooke
and Miles 1993) as a response to exploding car ownership as urban
systems began to sprawl (Glyptis 1991). The Peak National Park is
surrounded by major population centers: Manchester to the north-
west, Sheffield to the northeast, Nottingham to the southeast and
Birmingham to the southwest, with half the population living within
80 km of its boundaries (Glyptis 1991). The National Park authorities
now estimate that 22 to 26 million trips are made to it each year, mak-
ing it the second-most visited National Park in the world after Mount
Fuji in Japan, and thus making the study of tourist experience to the
Park of particular interest.
Participants were recruited in a number of ways, including placing
leaflets under the windscreen wipers of cars in the park and requesting
606 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

that interested day participants contact the researcher. They were

interviewed during 1997 and 1998 in a variety of research contexts,
including in situ, whereby the researcher walked with participants
engaged in the process of ‘‘doing’’ being a tourist. The names of parti-
cipants, as well as any other identifying information, have been chan-
ged to preserve anonymity. The data were transcribed, and then
analyzed from an ethnomethodological perspective. Traditionally,
accounts of tourist experience have focused on the cultural signifi-
cance and meaning of those experiences in contemporary societies,
treating participants’ accounts as a resource for tapping some kind of
‘‘reality’’ beyond the data or as revealing something about their
interior states of mind and cognitions. However, an ethnomethodolo-
gical approach shifts the analytic focus to the intrinsic features of
members’ practices. Lynch and Peyrot argue that the ethnomethodol-
ogist treats meaning contextually, attempting to unpack relational
configurations that enable sense or meanings to be produced in situ.
Context is not

a fixed set of social, cultural, environmental, or cognitive ‘‘factors’’

impinging upon specific instances of conduct as though from outside.
Instead the term describes a ‘‘reflexively’’ constituted relationship
between singular actions and the relevant specifications of identity,
place, time, and meaning implicated by the intelligibility of those
actions (1992:114).

Studies in ethnomethodology emphasize not place–identity relations

as theoretical categories but ‘‘member categories’’. Accounts of
experience are analyzed for the locally managed, ongoing practices of
reality construction and maintenance as a discursive accomplishment
(Miller and Holstein 1993). In this study, this approach to data analy-
sis was used to examine the locatedness of identity and track its con-
struction in participants’ accounts (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1972).
Membership Categorization Analysis focuses on the local manage-
ment of speakers’ categorizations of themselves and others, treating
talk as ‘‘culture-in-action’’ (Hester and Eglin 1997). The approach
makes available to analysts the practical reasoning that members draw
upon as they display their situated identities in ongoing interaction
and ‘‘provides a method for analyzing. . .the local senses, uses and
accomplishment of orders pertaining to culture’’ (Housley and
Fitzgerald 2002:80). MCA is organized around the notion of the
Membership Categorization Device (MCD) which, according to Sacks
(1972), explains how categories may be hearably linked together by
native speakers of a culture. For example, he provides this now-classic
example taken from data in which a child says: ‘‘The baby cried. The
mommy picked it up’’. Sacks claimed that cultural links are made
between ‘‘mommy’’ and ‘‘baby’’, specifically that the mommy is the
mommy of the baby. He provided an explanatory apparatus that
allows this ‘‘fact’’ to occur—the MCD. In this case, the MCD of ‘‘fam-
ily’’ allows the categories mommy and baby to be collected together.
Categories (including ‘‘members’’) are thus linked to particular
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 607

actions (‘‘category-bound activities’’) or characteristics (‘‘natural pre-

dicates’’) such that there are conventional expectations about what
constitutes a mommy’s or baby’s normative behavior. The categoriza-
tion process is inextricably linked to identity construction
(Widdicombe 1998). This is because sets of inferential resources about
particular categories are available to members of a culture. Each of
these categories carries with it a set of category-bound activities, pre-
dicates, or ‘‘rights and obligations’’ that are expectable for a category
incumbent to perform or possess (Watson and Weinberg 1982). The
categorization process makes available a frame of reference within
which the actions and activities of a person can be interpreted.
In the analysis, an explication was sought of how day visitors, as
members of a culture, display their understandings of, and reasonings
about, their identities and activities in places. Attention was paid to
participants’ situated descriptions of themselves and others in order
to track the emergence of cultural knowledge about ‘‘being a visitor’’
and ‘‘tourism’’ places. As people tell their stories about themselves
and others, as members of particular categories of ‘‘tourist’’, ‘‘visitor,’’
or ‘‘walker’’, they are engaged in aligning and realigning the social
order (Goodwin 1997) and establishing some version of events as con-
stituting common knowledge about what defines appropriate beha-
viours for such category members. More specifically, the analysis
asked how place is made relevant to tourism activities and how people
make meaningful places. One interest focused on how social identity
categories were negotiated in their interactional use; that is how they
functioned as resources that speakers used in producing accounts and
descriptions, and how they authenticate and warrant them. It was also
considered how place-formulations and identity-categorizations
worked in the ongoing construction of the ‘‘social and moral order’’
in accounts of the activities. Descriptions of ‘‘located activities’’ make
inferentially available notions of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ visitors and are
thus infused with moral nuances. As Tuan argues, ‘‘the ‘quality’ of
place is more than just aesthetic or affectional, it also has a ‘moral’
dimension, which is to be expected if language is a component in the
construction and maintenance of reality, for language—ordinary lan-
guage—is never morally neutral’’ (1991:694, emphasis added; see also
Bergmann 1998; Drew 1998).

Tourist Accounts
It was found that respondents’ accounts were often formulated as
stories containing a routine orientation to being a particular type of
tourist. Their descriptions of the National Park and their activities
within it accomplished place–identity work in three main ways. One,
they invoked biographical detail to construct themselves as legitimate
consumers of the park. Two, their recurrent use of temporal formula-
tions connected practical methods for achieving particular kinds of
tourist identities and places. Three, they described the activities of
others as breaches of the spatial and, by implication, moral order.
Thus, talk about place became talk about identity, membership and
608 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

morality, as respondents constructed ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ places and

defined the conditions of membership for those that occupied each
spatial category. Each of these themes needs to be discussed.

Biography and Territorial Membership of the National Park

The first significant feature of the analysis is the way biographical
detail is worked into respondents’ descriptions, used to account for
their behaviour as ‘‘serious’’ (motivated, justified) or ‘‘normal’’ (cred-
ible, warranted). The following extract comes from an interview with
a man (Jim) in his early 30s, who visits the park with a friend who is a
fell runner. Here, Jim is talking about their visits:

Did you find out about the Peak District because you have known about
it anyway or through the running?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the Peak District (.)
my parents introduced me to it at a young age. . .my father’s from Shef-
field (.) so northern Peak District and my mother is from Birmingham
(.) and I grew up in Derby. . .my childhood memories are of Tissington
Trail (.) the early part when it was just being sorted out (.) and the High
Peak trail (.) Black Rocks (.) Edale (.) Chatsworth Park (.) Stanton
Moor I remember the rocks on Stanton Moor.

Jim’s comments illustrate the way respondents worked up territorial

warrants for their activities through biographical detail, drawing on
familial categorizations: parents, father, and mother. Jim collects these
together and associates them with particular place formulations. What
is the rhetorical function of providing such detail about his parents’
birthplaces in this fragment? He names his father as being from Shef-
field and his mother as being from Birmingham and, although these
are large industrial cities outside the boundaries of the Peak Park, he
constructs them as categories in the membership categorization
device ‘‘northern Peak District’’. This is analyzable as a move to tie his
parents to the place and warrant their own and, by familial member-
ship, his knowledge of the park. He then lists a series of place names
that belong to the MCD: ‘‘Tissington Trail. . .Stanton Moor’’. This
detailed listing of place names positions Jim as a powerful ‘‘knower’’
of the device (Nilan 1995). As Schegloff notes, ‘‘it is by reference to
the adequate recognizability of detail, including place names, that
one is in this sense a member, and those who do not share such rec-
ognition are ‘strangers’’’(1972:93). Given that the park is not Jim’s
home, it might be expectable for him not to know the place so
vividly: ‘‘I remember the rocks on Stanton Moor’’. Rather, his account
is rich with detail as he builds his categorizations and himself as an
incumbent of the place formulations. This, in addition to the claim
that frames his description, ‘‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t
know about the Peak District’’, functions to shore up the appropriate-
ness of Jim’s visits to the park as a long-standing user who is continu-
ing a family tradition. Similar work can be seen in the next extract,
which comes from an interview with Don undertaken on a Ramblers
Association walk in the Peak Park.
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 609

I like the countryside because my mother and my father’s side of the

family were farming people off the Welsh Borders originally (.) but then
my grandfather came over to Nottinghamshire (.) and had his last farm
just outside Sutton-in-Ashfield (.) and in fact from my very teens (.) to
leaving school I used to go and help out on a farm where my uncle
worked and I liked that used to come back with arms prickled from
haymaking and straw (.) and things like that (.) you know and splatters of
shit when you’re mucking out stalls and that (.) but I always used to enjoy
it (.) so I think perhaps(.) I enjoy it because that’s where my roots lie.

As seen in the first extract, respondents can routinely collect together

different MCDs which, when considered in their sequential position,
make available a set of inferential resources with which to understand
them. Instead of shepherding categories into the MCD ‘‘northern
Peak District’’, Don builds a different device, ‘‘the countryside’’, which
he constructs alongside another, the ‘‘family’’. Such categories are not
to be treated as pre-existing or ‘‘decontextualized’’ but as ‘‘con-
versationally tied predicates and occasioned collection’’. Speakers build cate-
gories in situ depending on ‘‘the practicality of such connections and
the particular here and now activities oriented to in the talk’’
(Housley and Fitzgerald 2002:69, emphasis in original). The ‘‘here
and now activities’’ in Don’s account include his positioning as some-
one who is entitled to visit and act in particular places due to terri-
torial membership of that space. In addition to the juxtaposition of
the ‘‘countryside’’ and ‘‘family’’ MCDs, which are hearable as belong-
ing together, Don lists a number of predicates and activities which
can be tied to both the ‘‘countryside’’ device and the category ‘‘farm-
ing people’’: haymaking, things like that, mucking out stalls, splatters
of shit. Don positions himself as an incumbent of that category, thus
warranting and working up his claim that ‘‘his roots lie in the
countryside’’. Thus, talking about place does interesting kinds of
interactional work, including identity work. As Schegloff argues, ‘‘for-
mulating locations can be of help in understanding seemingly quite
unrelated conversational practices’’ (1972:81).
In addition to family-territory categorizations, a particular list of
category-bound activities was constructed routinely by participants in
their warranting of ‘‘belonging’’ to a place, exemplified in the extracts
below. The first part of the following extract comes from an interview
with Larry, a regular visitor to the Park. The next is taken from an
interview with Pam, a walker:

It’s the old family daytrip thing [. . .] we went to the coast for a week (.)
during the summer holidays (.) we’d go (.) religiously (.) like every sum-
mer holiday (.) we’d go out for a drive and a walk around (.) its some-
thing we’ve just always done

And in the following with Pam:

My parents always had a little car (.) and we always came out every Sun-
day (.) so er (.) I can remember lots of places that we picnicked on Sun-
days (.) they tried to come out in the peak every weekend if they could
610 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

(.) they weren’t walkers (.) you know just the traditional thing you did
then (.) you brought a picnic and the Sunday papers and parked some-
where and perhaps have a little walk.

Here, both Larry and Pam describe a particular activity device, the
‘‘family trip’’, and its predicates and category-bound activities. The
activities include drive around, walk, and bringing a picnic. This
activity was something that happened always, religiously, every sum-
mer holiday, every Sunday, every weekend. Both participants empha-
size the routinized nature of the ‘‘family trip’’ which functions to
establish the interconnectedness of place and family identity. More-
over, it is argued that such interaction work functions to maintain
‘‘existing social/cultural categories, in part by constantly defining and
affirming the conditions for assigned membership’’ (Nilan 1995:71).
Pam describes her family trip as ‘‘the traditional thing’’, to which the
category ‘‘walkers’’ does not belong. Although both Larry and Pam
include ‘‘walking’’ as part of the ‘‘family trip’’ device, the identity cate-
gory walker means something different and specific, as something
that people do in desolate spaces, not on the usual beaten track. As
Schegloff notes, ‘‘persons can be shown to be inadequate members of
the class, and thereby inadequate candidates for the activity’’
(1972:94). Here, ‘‘the traditional thing’’ excludes (serious or proper)
‘‘walkers’’. Speakers can trade heavily on the ‘‘known-in-common’’
attributes of particular categories (Wowk 1984). The category
‘‘walker’’ is in the same class as other ‘‘serious’’ users of place such as
‘‘hiker’’ and ‘‘cyclist’’, albeit participants locate these categories at dif-
ferent positions on a hierarchy of users. However, leisure activities
and identity appear to be intertwined, and practices such as ‘‘walking’’
or ‘‘hiking’’ constitute ‘‘proper consumption of the English country-
side’’ (Matless 1995). As Schegloff notes, persons may ‘‘offer current
or former proximity, or territorially based category membership, as
evidence, warrant, or account for their recognitions’’ (1972:92–3). In
the analysis of these data, speakers work to close the distance between
their home space and tourism activities, constructing the park as fam-
ilial territory. Members actively link together, rather than treat as sep-
arate, touristic with domestic/familial experiences and places.

Temporality and Place Formulations

The second finding was that place and time are linked in respon-
dents’ accounts, through temporal and moral formulations. Their
descriptions of the National Park and the places they describe are
what Bakhtin calls ‘‘chronotopes’’, special places where ‘‘time and
space intersect and fuse’’ (1981:7). For instance, members told stories
about their family histories, locating their familiarity with particular
places through their visits across long-standing periods of time. The
following comes from an interview with a couple, Emma and Sam:

That’s something else that we try and do as well I set off early because
the traffic up through the A6 through Matlock up towards Bakewell (.)
even at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning (.) you get in queues of
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 611

traffic (.) it’s like mental (.) so we get up really early and get there
before the traffic and before the people.

The category ‘‘Sunday’’ featured heavily in the accounts of activities,

although it was constructed in a variety of ways. While it is unsurpris-
ing that Sunday was the day most frequently mentioned, the weekend
being when most people have some free time, it is interesting to note
how temporal formulations or structures link place, identity, and
experience. In this extract, Emma formulates two alternative types of
‘‘Sunday’’: the ‘‘mental’’ category, which is tied to ‘‘queues of traffic’’,
and the temporal category they occupy, which is carefully occupied by
‘‘setting off early’’, ‘‘really early’’ so they ‘‘get there before the traffic
and before the people’’. Here, the destination is desirable only as
long as it is unoccupied by other people; it is inextricably tied to a
sense of time. Emma’s ‘‘mental’’ categorization of ‘‘Sunday’’ occurred
elsewhere in the data (for example, ‘‘I wouldn’t go on a Sunday. We
try not to go on the weekend because it’s just going to be too busy’’).
In the following extract, Barbara, a recently widowed woman,
describes how she came to visit the Peak Park:

This particular Sunday (4.0) I need to get out of the house (.) I have
never liked Sundays (.) as a child I always hated Sundays (.) you know
you were forced to go to Sunday School or something (.) I hated it (.)
so I have always had the urge to go out on a Sunday (.) even though the
place may be milling with people (.) but somewhere like that (.) it’s not
crowds (.) there’s not bus loads of people and they are likely to be the
sort of people who like the things I like (.) you know the open air and
the (.) what’s the word (.) far-reaching views.

A further illustration of the flexibility of the category ‘‘Sunday’’ can

be seen in the above excerpt. The reproduction of the conventional
family routine on Sundays works up both a warrantable and credible
reason for going to the Peak Park and also a moral order. Doing the
‘‘right’’ (that is, morally acceptable) thing on a Sunday is (or was at
that unspecified time) to go to Sunday school, or presumably church.
Sunday, the day of rest in the Christian world (and hence also per-
haps boredom for the child), and the childlike hatred of Sunday rou-
tine, provide a temporal framework for accounting for a particular
activity, ‘‘go(ing) out’’. In working up her reason for going out on a
Sunday as an escape from both the ‘‘forced’’ activities associated with
childhood and the home, Barbara constructs an escape from the
moral obligations of religious rectitude. The construction of home as a
‘‘limiting’’ place of confinement, serves to justify a concomitant ‘‘need’’
for ‘‘escape’’ to places where ‘‘freedom’’ from obligation to a moral
order is seamlessly interleaved through temporally bounded place-
categorization and identity-categorization. Here the type of place-user
is less important than the knowledge that other people transgress the
moral order in similar ways. However, this is unusual as in most of the
data, participants work hard to categorize places with types of usage, as
in the following extract returning to the interview with Pam:
612 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

What is it about hills and rocks do you think?

I don’t know it’s that combination of (.) wild places as well (.) I think if
you can go and climb up somewhere and sit and look out over other hills
and valleys and usually only being able to hear the traffic in the distance
(.) I mean when you’re at the top of Shining Cliff woods on a Sunday
you can see the A6 (.) but you can’t hear it (.) and you can see the traffic
in a solid snake going along and you’re quite removed from it.

In this fragment, it is noted how ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ places are

developed in a series of contrasts. On the one hand, Pam describes
the MCD ‘‘wild places’’, tying activities (climbing, sitting, and looking)
to the device. This is contrasted with the ‘‘A6’’, a main road through
Derbyshire, which is ‘‘solid’’ with ‘‘traffic’’. Both localities are linked to
the temporal formulation ‘‘Sunday’’, but are located at different posi-
tions in a moral hierarchy of place. The ‘‘wild places’’ require effort
to visit (you need to ‘‘go and climb up somewhere’’) but then being
at some distance from the ‘‘bad’’ place rewards you: ‘‘you’re quite
removed from it’’, the traffic is ‘‘in the distance’’. Thus ‘‘Sunday’’ can
be simultaneously quiet and busy, traffic-ridden and removed. Such
stories ‘‘serve culturally to construct a sense of place and, with that, a
sense of cultural identity that includes some people while excluding
others’’ (Bird 2002:520). In other words, speakers construct ‘‘good’’
places, and locate themselves within such places, while at the same
time constructing ‘‘bad’’ places and the conditions for assigned mem-
bership. Stories of place become those of morality and, crucially, of
time. Analysis reveals that places do not have fixed identities that exist
separately from the language practices that produce them. Tourists
can flexibly construct places as good and bad, depending on the con-
text in which the account is produced. A further example of this prac-
tice can be seen in the following extract from Emma:

People go to get fresh air and exercise (.) away from their normal every-
day lives (.) and you can have it all different range within a spectrum (.)
so you can have little Sunday afternoon pootlers (.) and there’s so many
(.) within these little towns (.) it is so obvious that they are so centred
around tourism and that is it (.) because there is like (.) gift shops (.)
and tea shops (.) and there doesn’t seem to be a lot else.

In this extract, a certain type of ‘‘bad’’ place is constructed, that which

is occupied by a certain type of tourist. Arguably, ‘‘pootlers’’ are not
serious users of places. Such categorizations are also recipient-
designed; thus, speakers can rely on what is conventionally known
about a category to perform subtle interactional work (Widdicombe
and Wooffitt 1995). Here, Emma constructs a moral frame within
which to interpret her description of ‘‘Sunday afternoon pootlers’’.
The use of the temporal category ‘‘Sunday afternoon’’ is important. It
further establishes the pootlers as trivial users of place: people who
‘‘drive’’ but do not ‘‘walk’’, ‘‘hike’’ or consume spaces properly and do
not ‘‘set off early’’ to visit for an appropriate duration of time. As
Widdicombe points out, ‘‘it is likely that on occasions the ascription
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 613

of a category membership may be used to make available unfavour-

able inferences about a person’’ (1998:53).
The next extract in this section provides for a further analysis of
‘‘Sunday’’, as Larry describes a small town, Matlock, in the Peak Dis-
trict:

It reminds me of the seaside too much (.) now to me that is over com-
mercialised (.) that front is just (.) you’ve got knick-knack shop (.) pub
(.) knick-knack shop (.) pub (.) pottery shop (.) amusement arcade (.)
amusement arcade (.) fish and chip shop (.) pub (.) and bikers (.) now
for me (.) they completely ruin the place (.) every Sunday you can’t
move for them and they’re sat in the pub in their leathers (.) and fair
enough (.) they all might be very nice people but the place looks like a
T.T rally.

In this extract, the speaker juxtaposes his description of Matlock with

the categorization device ‘‘the seaside’’. It is clear that this is to be
understood as a ‘‘bad’’ or morally inferior type of place; indeed, the
place is ‘‘ruined’’ by the categories that collectively comprise it: knick-
knack shops, pubs, pottery shops, amusement arcades, and fish and
chip shops. This long list of categories is simultaneously tied to the
device ‘‘seaside’’, ‘‘the front’’, and ‘‘Matlock’’, such that the recipient
can understand what ‘‘type’’ of destination is being described. Each of
the items in Larry’s list is inference-rich, constructing a particular
type of scenery and framework for understanding his account.
Although Larry is oriented to the possibility that his description is
biased (‘‘they all might be very nice people but’’), he ties members,
‘‘bikers’’, to the device, emphasizing numbers (‘‘you can’t move for
them’’) and their category-bound activities and predicates (‘‘sat in the
pub’’, wear ‘‘leathers’’, and ‘‘ruin’’ places that become like ‘‘a T.T.
rally’’). His account demonstrates clearly the way that place and ident-
ity are inextricably linked: places are characterized by the people who
occupy them, and people can be categorized by the places they
choose to occupy. Within member’s accounts, moral senses of place
emerge.

Transgressing the Spatial Order

The final finding focuses on the way respondents work to construct
themselves as particular types of ‘‘visitor’’ to the Peak Park, as ‘‘doing
being morally adequate’’ while talking about their trips. The interview
is a site of social action, in which ‘‘an awareness of the accounting work
of interview talk’’ is essential (Rapley 2001:307). It was noted in a
number of ways that participants ‘‘attend to the issue of their appear-
ance as moral persons’’ (Baruch 1981:275–6). This is in part because
descriptions are always to be understood as ‘‘doing moral work—as
providing a basis for evaluating the ‘‘rightness’’ or ‘‘wrongness’’ of
whatever is being reported’’ (Drew 1998:295). For example, the ‘‘tour-
ism’’ place, typically evaluated negatively, could be worked up as
‘‘good’’ if used at the right time and with legitimate reasons for being
there. In this section of analysis, both the moral identity work being
614 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

achieved in accounting practices and the way this is tied to talk about
spatial practice and place formulations are considered together. In
the following extract, Barbara describes the way she plans her trips:

I’ll make my own route and walk from village to village (.) but I have
got to learn how to read the map properly first (.) because I don’t want
to be traipsing over somebody’s land that hasn’t got a right of way over
(.) I do respect people’s rights of way.

Here, Barbara describes her practices as a particular type of ‘‘visitor’’.

It is argued that the activities she describes are bound to a category
within the device ‘‘moral types of visitor’’. Both ‘‘good’’ (hikers, walk-
ers) and ‘‘bad’’ (tourists, bikers) visitors are categories of this device,
and Barbara describes the activities of both. The activities and pre-
dicates of good visitors, ‘‘walkers’’, include planning a route, walking,
map reading, and respecting people’s rights of way. In contrast, ‘‘bad’’
visitors ‘‘traipse’’ over ‘‘somebody’s land that hasn’t got a right of way
over’’. Here, ‘‘traipsing’’ is an activity that breaches the moral order
of place and transgresses cultural norms about the appropriate way
to move ‘‘from village to village’’. The talk in this extract is thus
‘‘drenched with implicit moral judgments, claims and obligations’’
(Heritage and Lindström 1998:398). This is because the procedures
through which speakers list category-bound activities are central to
the praise or degradation of members. As Sacks notes, ‘‘the fact that
activities are category-bound also allows us to praise or complain
about ‘absent’ activities’’ (1992:585). Therefore, Barbara’s description
of walking without reading the map properly or respecting people’s
rights of way provides for two types of moral assessment: it enables
her to position people who do not fulfill their category-bound obliga-
tions as ‘‘bad’’ visitors and it works to place herself within the morally
superior ‘‘good’’ category.
The notion of transgressing and breaching a social sense of place is
explored by returning to the interview with Emma and Sam:

E You see I love Castleton (.) I think it is a really pretty little ‘‘I’d love
to live here’’ type place but it is always full of folk (.) mind you Bake-
well’s really nice as well but
S [that But all these places are the same (.) if you just cycle out for
about ten minutes you are away from all these people
E Yes because walkers tend to (.) unless they are serious hikers (.) tend
to swarm around those sorts of centers and only walk half an hour
or so round them (.) it’s like when you go up Winnat’s Pass (.) that’s
really desolate up there.

There are three main points to make about this exchange. First, it is
possible to track the complex way places and their category-tied activi-
ties and predicates are built across Emma and Sam’s account. The
formulation ‘‘Castleton’’ is simultaneously constructed via its pre-
dicates as a good place (‘‘really pretty’’, ‘‘I’d-love-to-live-here type
place’’) and via the ‘‘bad’’ activities that occur within it (‘‘always full of
folk’’). This neatly underlines the point that places can be con-
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 615

structed as good or bad although the types of activities that are tied
to them do not have to be congruently good and bad. As noted
earlier in the analysis, for a place to be an incumbent of the MCD
‘‘good or moral types of place’’, it must possess predicates such as
being desolate, empty and absent of people.
The second point focuses more sharply on the construction of
good places and their category-tied predicates. As seen across many
data fragments, and within the current extract, good places are those
empty of other people, as interviews with Sam, Larry and Emma
suggest:

That’s what I love about it so much (.) just that feeling that you are
totally free and you are not chained to anything (.) you can see for
miles and not see a single house or a road or anything.
It’s just nice (.) it’s nice to get away from all the same houses (.) and the
same buildings and the traffic [. . .] you can actually go up the top and
look down on the whole place (.) and then you can go into the village
and look up.
Is what makes it because by seeing around you so far around you (.) that
there is nobody or anything that is the attraction of it being so solitary
in the middle of such a nice place I suppose (.) well you know what I
mean (.) an unbuilt up place (.) with not many people.

Formulations of good places are littered with sensory terms (for

example, see, look, far, seeing and solitary) that are tied to locational
pro-terms (such as place, up, around, middle, as per Schegloff 1972).
This sensual dimension is fundamental to spatiality, such that con-
structions of visual in- or out-of-placeness can be invoked to warrant
the moral categorization of self and place (Dixon, Reicher and Foster
1997; Stokoe and Wallwork 2003). Moreover, being able to see other
people in such spaces constitutes a breach of the spatial order.
‘‘Good’’ places are ‘‘optical spatialities’’, places that are natural and
unmediated (Lefebvre 1991; Mels 2002).
Finally, the focus again returns to the identity work being achieved
in the above views. Emma and Sam build categorizations of good and
bad visitors to the park, each positioned within the device ‘‘moral
types of visitor’’. The bad category, including ‘‘walkers’’, is tied to
particular activities: they ‘‘swarm around those sorts of centers and
only walk half an hour or so round them’’. In contrast, the good visi-
tor, including the ‘‘serious biker’’, ‘‘cycles out for about ten minutes’’,
gets ‘‘away’’ from ‘‘all these people’’ and goes ‘‘up’’ to where it is
‘‘desolate’’. This kind of description was found elsewhere in the data
(‘‘visitors in coaches and cars tend to not go very far’’). The activity
‘‘swarm’’ carries with it a host of numerical and temporal inferences.
The activity is constructed as deviant, and thus complainable,
‘‘through a shared and consensual use of time’’ (Reese and Katovich
1989:159). This is because the activity ‘‘swarming’’ breaches normative
notions of tempo and rhythm: people should not ‘‘swarm’’ together
but walk at an appropriate pace away from other people. This kind of
description was found elsewhere in the data (e.g. Barbara in an ear-
616 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

lier extract, ‘‘the place may be milling with people’’ or Pam, ‘‘you walk
two miles up hill away from that car park and it’s a different world. . .
you look from Kinder Downfall on a summer’s day and it looks as
though there’s a swarm of something on it and its people but you can
get away’’). The temporal formulations ‘‘ten minutes’’ and ‘‘half an
hour’’ function as place formulations, as they both construct rhetori-
cal places that are alternatively far from, or comprised solely of, other
folk (Schegloff 1972:116).
For Emma and Sam, ‘‘good’’ visitors are ‘‘serious hikers’’ and
‘‘cyclists’’; ‘‘bad’’ ones include ‘‘walkers’’, thus demonstrating the flex-
ible way categories are deployed depending on the context of con-
struction. It is also possible to see the recipient-designed nature of
categorizations, which are produced in accordance with the pre-
sumed knowledge of the hearers. As Schegloff notes, ‘‘for some
names, recognition can be expected of the members of some mem-
bership categories. And not only recognition, but adequate recog-
nition’’ (1972: 92). If a person is a ‘‘serious hiker’’, then it is
expectable that they do certain things. Therefore, the way identity
and morality, spatiality and temporality are imbricated in Emma and
Sam’s jointly constructed account is evidenced through this approach
to analysis. Here, Pam is describing one of the towns within the Peak
Park:

Hartington’s always (.) always full of coach loads from Birmingham its a
bit like Gulliver’s Kingdom (.) it always seems to be full of coach loads
from Birmingham. . .but people seem quite happy just to turn up in a
bus in Hartington (.) get off the bus go and have a cream tea (.) go and
buy something in the shop and get back on the bus and that’s Harting-
ton ticked off.

Pam’s description contains many of the features discussed thus far in

the analysis. She constructs a number of place and membership cate-
gories, all of which function to construct the moral order of place
and tourists. It is clear that Pam expects the recipient to understand
the implications of ‘‘coachloads from Birmingham’’ so that they can
apply their category knowledge as members of a shared culture
(Nilan 1994). ‘‘Coachloads’’, like ‘‘swarm’’ in the previous statements,
emphasizes the complainable matter of numbers: too many people in
a place ruin it and create a site of disorder (Barnes 2000). The cate-
gory ‘‘Birmingham’’ also carries with it a ‘‘relevant category environ-
ment’’, developing an interpretative frame within which to make
sense of Pam’s account (Lepper 2000).
It is in this fragment that the activities of tourists are perhaps most
clearly articulated. Here, Pam lists ‘‘turn up in a bus’’, ‘‘get off the
bus’’, ‘‘have a cream tea’’, ‘‘buy something in the shop’’, ‘‘get back on
the bus’’ and ‘‘tick off’’ the place being visited. This scripted list of
activities makes available the category ‘‘tourist’’, and Pam’s account is
heavy with implicit moral evaluations about the activities that com-
prise the category, the incumbents of it and the place that is char-
acterized by it. Hartington is categorized as a ‘‘transitional place’’
 MCCABE AND STOKOE 617

(Schegloff 1972), somewhere that people travel through on their way

to somewhere else, spending little time ‘‘milling’’ or ‘‘swarming’’ and
engaging in particular scripted activities. By contrast, good places con-
tain fewer people who stay longer and engage in appropriate activities
such as walking, hiking, cycling, or looking and seeing. In Schegloff’s
terms, places may be categorized as ‘‘course of action places’’, ‘‘places
that are identifiable only by virtue of what goes on there and are so
formulated’’ and, he argues, this is often how places are made
(1972:101). It is possible that the category ‘‘Hartington’’ and its asso-
ciated labels, predicates, and activities could be ‘‘revolutionized’’
(Wowk 1984). Sacks (1979) argued that social change arises when the
rules of association and what is routinely known about categories
shifts. Thus, places can be transformed in this way and so need not
forever be categorized as ‘‘tourism’’ places.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, an attempt has been made to enliven a strand of the-
orizing in tourism research that hints at, but fails to explore in fine
detail, the interactional processes of the articulation of identities and
how these are intricately linked to the formulation of places. When
describing touristic scenes and activities, speakers are doing all sorts
of other things. Here, the focus of these ‘‘other things’’ is on the
identity work imbricated in people’s talk about places via the con-
struction of the conditions for membership. Despite their accounts
being about visits to one of the most popular countryside areas in the
world, bristling with other people doing similar activities, participants’
self-categorizations worked to resist membership of the category
‘‘bad’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ ‘‘tourist’’. Rather, they claimed membership of
some other class of visitor activity or type. Their accounts were
designed to avoid or resist the implication that they visit certain places
because they are popular, because other people go there, or because
they are tourism places. Speakers emphasized the ‘‘naturalness’’ of
their engagement with places as something they have always done,
and the ‘‘ordinariness’’ of their trips to these places as something they
‘‘just’’ do. Therefore respondents worked to maintain individuality in
the face of actually ‘‘doing being a tourist’’ as they were interviewed.
These accounts simultaneously serve to position their activities as
normal, ordinary, and hence credible social activities, while also set-
ting themselves apart from the masses, as individuals, knowledgeable,
and thus warranted in their behavior. Dann (1999:162) argues that
the popular appeal of travel writing is in no small part due to the
spatiotemporal differences between the experiences of the authors
from those available to the ordinary person. Therefore such texts
appeal to the ‘‘anti-tourist in all of us’’. An exploration of the negative
connotations of being classified as a ‘‘tourist’’, a recurring theme in the
theoretical discourse (Butcher 2003; MacCannell 1992), is made poss-
ible through this ethnomethodological approach to tourist talk, along-
side analyses of how places are constructed and associated with a set of
behaviors, activities, or types of people. The term ‘‘tourist’’ is a cultu-
618 TOURISTS’ LANGUAGE PRACTICES

rally constructed category with associated negative category-bound

activities and predicates. It is proposed that such formulations work to
achieve a sense of moral orderliness in the categorization of places,
activities, and people. Thus, interviews such as these are rich in moral
associations and scripted formulations of category-bound activities in
time and space.
The categories deployed are conceived not as fixed but ‘‘occasioned
contextually’’ within the interview interaction, dependent upon the
practical and reflexive positioning or alignment of the speakers to the
situation. Previous research has attempted to interpret the meanings
behind individuals’ engagement in activities within tourism places,
treating interviews and surveys as unproblematic routes to infor-
mation about the ‘‘real world’’ or the participant’s subjectivity beyond
the interview. By contrast, the ethnomethodological approach demon-
strates the value of shifting the focus onto matters of how people talk
about place, people, and activities, and what is practically achieved by
the speaker in terms of interactional and rhetorical business. In this
way, the analyst can show, among the myriad of possible categoriza-
tions of tourism places, activities and behaviors, which categories are
chosen this time and for what purpose. An analysis of the formulations
and constructions of tourist talk opens up the possibility that not only
is tourism fundamental to the construction of modern social iden-
tities, but that tourism places play a significant function alongside the
domestic scene (and can be constructed as part of the same scene) in
contributing to such identity constructions.
To conclude, this paper argues for a centrality of place in social
scientific theorizing and its connections to the construction of ident-
ity: ‘‘who we are is intimately related to where we are, where we have
been, or where we are going’’ (Barnes 2000). Recent theoretical
developments, when combined with the application of an ethno-
methodological approach to analysis, can open up an avenue of tour-
ism research that focuses on the articulation of identity in the context
of talk about place. Analyzing data using Membership Categorization
Analysis produces empirical findings that contribute both to tourism
theory and to the practical understanding of the relationships
between place and identity that illuminate tourists as consumers of
places. In this way, the approach can make a significant contribution
to studies of touristic encounters. A
Acknowledgement—Helpful comments of Adam Jaworski on an earlier draft of this paper are
acknowledged.

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Submitted 27 January 2003. Resubmitted 16 June 2003. Resubmitted 7 October 2003.

Accepted 11 November 2003. Final version 15 December 2003. Refereed anonymously.
Coordinating Editor: Paul F. Wilkinson