Geneva School of Social Sciences Geneva School of Social Sciences

The project

Summary of the project

The project focuses on the first tourist round-the-world tours (1869-1914) and questions the new regime of geography that they reflect and help to establish. These were journeys made by people who claimed to be travelling around the world essentially for pleasure, and who identified themselves as tourists rather than (exclusively) as explorers, journalists, diplomats and so on. The project questions the issues, logic and significance - particularly geographical - of this new tourist practice and its institutionalisation.

It is based on two hypotheses.
The first is that round-the-world tours represent a major shift in the Western tourist industry and geographical imagination, with the globe being seen for the first time as an attraction and a place that can literally be circumnavigated. The second is to explain the importance and pervasiveness of the round-the-world motif and its dissemination in popular culture beyond the circle of tourists well off enough to travel the globe, through the role of more or less immersive simulation devices that enable almost everyone to take a virtual tour of the world.
The main research question, then, is to examine critically the process of objectification of the world by these actual (real) and virtual world tours, as an important stage in globalisation and modernity. The World is now something that can be made: in the sense that tourists say they have visited such and such a country, but also in the sense of performance. This spatio-temporal performance manifests a new way of practising and inhabiting the planet as such: a new regime of geography. By establishing the World as a relevant scale for the imagination and even the practices of each individual, round-the-world tours have a performative component: they bring space (the planet as the World of human beings), time (that of modernity) and the subject of this practice (the globetrotter, who wants to be a citizen of the World) into being. But circumnavigating the globe remains a practice largely reserved for Westerners and conditioned by the extension of their technological, economic and political domination on a global scale: for them, the aim of circumnavigating the globe is to experience and celebrate this domination.

AREAS OF RESEARCH

  • The first area of research concerns archives relating to previous round-the-world voyages. At the heart of the project is the journey of Emilio Balli from Ticino (1878), which is exemplary and documented by untapped private archives that are exceptionally rich and complete. Interested in Switzerland's place in round-the-world travel, both as a sending and receiving country, we have identified nine Swiss globetrotters who travelled around the world during this period, documented by largely unpublished sources. The analysis of their careers makes sense as part of a global micro-history.
     
  • The second section focuses on published books that describe or present round-the-world tours. We have identified 260 accounts of circumnavigations carried out between 1869 and 1914, published mainly in English and French, but also, for seven of them, in Japanese. A database will be created from these travelogues. From a comparative literature perspective, the analysis will enable us to identify common structures and motifs, but also lines of rupture attesting to an evolution over time and undoubtedly differences according to gender, class and nationality. This corpus is supplemented by publications from actors in the tourism industry: eleven guides and advertising brochures relating to World Tours have been identified, and the archives of two tour operators have been explored.
     
  • From a visual studies perspective, the third axis studies devices consisting of series of images produced by a photographer or filmmaker during a round-the-world tours (real or fictional), sometimes within a group of tourists, and presented in such a way as to allow the public to virtually repeat this round-the-world trip. We have chosen two of these, because of their intrinsic interest and the sources that are most accessible: two series of stereoscopic Around the World photographs by the Underwood company (1905 and 1913) and nine cinematographic productions that involve and/or depict a round-the-world trip (between 1906 and 1914). We will examine in detail and within an intermedial framework how the motif of the round-the-world voyage spreads and becomes part of popular culture, enabling everyone to take a virtual trip around the world.
     
  • In the context of a global history, and in order to avoid a Eurocentric approach, particular attention will be paid to the place of Japan in these round-the-world tours, using cross-historical methods to analyse the practices and reception of Western globetrotters in Japan and those of the rare Japanese globetrotters (who travelled on the occasion of 3 package round-the-world tours organised in 1908-1910) in the West.