Tourism and natural imaginary in Sicily: an ecolinguistic perspective

1 Introduction

Under the multiple pressures of modernity our relationship with nature has fundamentally altered, not only in the breaking of centennial agricultural connections, but arguably also in intimate, personal fields like art, mythology, religion, philosophy, therapy, leisure, and contemplation (Bergmann and Clingerman 2018; Duguid 2010). Where Keats and other Romantics opposed an idealized, bucolic ‘nature’ to a weary human world (Löwy and Sayre 2018; Williams 1975), today the solace that nature can provide has become a commodity for the tourism and leisure industries. The great mysteries of nature, as well as Romantic conceptions of a pantheistic natural world that surrounds and sustains human existence (Günter Heimbrock and Persch 2021) appear to contract almost to a vanishing point under the impact of mass tourism in its various forms (van Heezik and Brymer 2018).

This paper focuses on natural photos taken to promote tourism in Sicily. It asks what kind of imaginary of nature in modern Sicily is construed by such shots of the natural world, and how this might depend on the perspective of the taker, as well as the pragmatic dimension of intentionality that underlies the photographs. The paper recognizes that ‘nature’ in itself is a contested, fluctuating concept, one that serves multiple functions that shift with human social change (Millington 2013). As Smith (1999: 361, cited in Næss 2008: 69) says: “Almost inevitably, the conclusion of such studies is that there is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and that each such nature is constructed through a variety of sociocultural processes”.

As Thurlow and Jaworski (2011: 222) say, tourism is semiotic in nature, “simultaneously a mediatized and a mediated activity”. It is a cliché that the camera cannot lie, and hence must simply show ‘what is there’. Peirce, for example, thought that a photograph is “physically forced to correspond point by point to nature” (Peirce 1965: 143, cited in Winston 1998: 54). In anthropology, however, the inescapable subjectivity of photographic work is acknowledged (Crowe 2003; Henley 1998), and in photography too, as will be seen, selection is key (Clarke 1997).

The first part of the paper focuses on the imaginary itself, and contextualizes the notion within the more language-based approaches current in critical discourse studies. In the words of the International Ecolinguistics Association (IEA), one of the key aims of ecolinguistics is “to show how linguistics can be used to address key ecological issues, from climate change and biodiversity loss to environmental justice” (https://www.ecolinguistics-association.org/). This paper focuses on whether the natural imaginaries in tourism photography reflect current ecosophy, or whether they respond to a different internal logic.

2 Modern environmentalism and ecolinguistics

Ecolinguistics explores the relationship between language and the environment; how patterns of thought and expression highlight attitudes towards the natural and the non-human world (Fill 2001; Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001; Fill and Penz 2018; Stibbe 2012, 2014, 2015). It can thus be seen as a manifestation of the ecological awareness that has emerged in the late modern period, as part of a collective awakening to the devastating effects of industrial capitalism on the biosphere in the Anthropocene period (Ponton and Sokół 2022). At a popular level, this awareness has led to the introduction of many eco-friendly practices such as urban cycle ways, recyclable materials, and green energy. Activist groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil have emerged. However, just as ‘nature’ may be a heterogeneous, multi-faceted concept, there is no unitary understanding of ‘ecology’ (Ponton 2022), which may range from what (Naess 1973) terms ‘shallow’ to ‘deep’ ecology:

1. The Shallow Ecology movement: Fight against pollution and resource depletion. Central objective: the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.

2. The Deep Ecology movement: (1) Rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations. […] The ecological field-worker acquires a deep-seated respect, or even veneration, for ways and forms of life. He reaches an understanding from within, a kind of understanding that others reserve for fellow men and for a narrow section of ways and forms of life. (Naess 1973: 95–96, italics original)

The former type of ecology is pragmatic, and could potentially motivate all kinds of social actors, including politicians who may adopt green policies for superficial political reasons. The latter is more radical, and involves religious and philosophical convictions that re-position humanity among the other animals in a ‘biospherical net’ in which the latter are ‘respected’, or even ‘venerated’ (Bratton 2008; Gottlieb 2006), as is the case in some indigenous cultures (Robinson et al. 2021). It seems that, while the second group of ecologists would share the objectives of the first, since pollution is harmful to the whole animal kingdom including humans, there is no reason why this should be true of the first group. The key difference appears to consist in humans’ relations with what has been termed the ‘non-human’, especially with other sentient beings. Shallow ecology may re-produce habitual exploitative relations and practices, while deep ecology acknowledges animals as conscious beings that share many human characteristics, including personhood (Ross 2019), political organization (Meijer 2019), and complex vocal interaction (Suzuki 2016; Todt and Naguib 2000). Some have the capacity to name each other, play games and use tools (Thompson 2019). Again, there are echoes here with the way some traditional societies have regarded the non-human world (Bringhurst 2007; Stibbe 2015; Thompson 2019).

The pressing question of the actual environmental character of tourism needs to be answered. Though it increasingly incorporates environmental statements in its advertising discourse, this practice has been critiqued as greenwashing (Bowen 2014; Hall 2015). The environmental impacts of tourism are increasingly contested, for example in the case of cruise tourism (Ponton and Asero 2018); phenomena like over-tourism and tourismphobia have drawn attention (Hugues et al. 2018; Milano et al. 2019). Moreover, tourism is an industry with a significant global presence: according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2019 it accounted for a quarter of all new jobs created globally, 10.3 % (333 million) of all jobs, and 10.3 % of global GDP (US$ 9.6 trillion). Given the ample power of images to influence human responses to phenomena (Freedberg 1989), pictorial representations of nature in such a conspicuous industry deserve attention.

3 Methodology

The paper analyses a corpus of 45 photographs, consisting of the webpages obtained by a google search for the prompt ‘Visit Sicily’ (see Appendix A). For comparative purposes, and to see how far the results typify the genre of global tourism photography, two reference corpora were assembled. The first of these is a collection of images from the Trip Advisor site for Marina di Modica, a beach resort on the South-East coast of Sicily. The second consists of three webpages promoting tourism in other global contexts, those of Visit Malta, Visit Spain, and Visit South Africa. These corpora are used purely as additional resources, to check the insights obtained from the main analysis. For example, one finding was that there were few images featuring architectural heritage in the corpus; this was checked through the reference corpora to see if it might figure as a generic feature of tourism photography.

Images are “an essential component of the process of destination branding” (Ponton and Asero 2022: 184), a key feature of the tourism industry (Morgan et al. 2004; Roesch 2009). The images are viewed from a pragmatic perspective (Bara 2011; Kecskes 2016; Wilson and Sperber 1990), assuming that in tourism photography the image has a clear purpose which all the elements combine to advance; namely to attract tourists, to sell destinations and associated tourism products (Kefala 2021). In selecting features of a destination to include in publicity material, the companies collectively affect the way it will be seen by prospective visitors, and by exercising such an influence, the images play a role in the creation of an imaginary of a destination. By focusing on these images, we learn something about the cognitive processes of both producers of these images and their consumers.

To view the images systematically, it was decided to check them for the presence or absence of categories listed as tourism ‘attractions’ in tourism research literature (Francesconi 2012; Pan et al. 2007). That of Kušen (2002) appears to be one of the most complete available:

Geological features/Climate/Water/Flora/Fauna/Protected natural heritage/Protected cultural heritage/The culture of life and work/Famous persons and historical events/Special events/happenings/Cultural and religious institutions/Natural spas/sanatoriums/Sport and recreation facilities/Tourism paths, trails and roads. (Kušen 2002: 61)

Each image was examined and the presence of these features recorded. From the point of view of tourism providers, these are all factors which experience has shown to be successful in contributing to tourist flows towards the destination; it therefore seems a reasonable hypothesis to expect them to feature in photographs of the places. The study also devotes some attention to a consideration of what has not been photographed, highlighting selectivity and proposing significant absences as a category worth investigating. Multimodal research tends to focus on the content features of images, in other words on what viewers see, rather than on what they are not shown. van Leeuwen (1996: 39) describes a phenomenon he calls ‘exclusion’, ‘suppression’, or ‘backgrounding’, where discursive selection allows writers to downplay certain categories of social actors or exclude them altogether. In analyzing photography, which has pretensions to show simply ‘what is there’, this perspective cannot be ignored. It will be seen that there are significant absences in the corpus; there are very few human figures, and none from the non-human world, where this term refers to animals, insects, birds, etc.^[1] In Stibbe’s terms, these absences figure as ‘erasure’ (Stibbe 2012, 2015), a significant semiotic feature contributing to discriminatory representation.

The heuristic of the ‘imaginary’ (Strauss 2006), current in social sciences such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, a notion that reflects the “ocularcentrism of modernity” (Garlick 2002: 294), is mainly used to analyze the data obtained. Alongside analytical linguistic tools in the tradition of multimodal research (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021) it adds two dimensions: firstly, it offers a means of theorizing findings as part of a broader picture relating to the way nature is seen within a specific society. Secondly, it draws on nuanced understandings at an individual, psychological level, to account for the choices of image creators in tourism discourse.

The aim of the research is twofold: firstly, to identify the elements that characterize Sicilian tourism photography, and secondly to see what the patterns reveal about the tourism imaginary, specifically that of Sicily. A later section (Section 6) discusses how far this may coincide with a more general ‘ecological imaginary’. Other research questions regard the pragmatic factors that might account for choices of what to represent, and finally the more speculative question of how far the imaginary of modern tourism in places like Sicily conforms with eco-friendly principles.

4 The imaginary

4.1 Imaginary and image

Salazar (2012: 864) summarizes what are perhaps the main strands in the concept of imaginary, as relating to “a culture’s ethos or a society’s shared, unifying core conceptions (Castoriadis 1987), a fantasy or illusion created in response to a psychological need (Lacan and Sheridan 2004) and a cultural model or widely shared implicit cognitive schema (Anderson 2016; Taylor 2004)”. The breadth of these fields of reference illustrates the pervasiveness of the imaginary for social science research, as well as hinting at the diverse applications of this fertile concept. Salazar also provides his own version, which leans towards the more familiar terrain, for linguists, of cognitive studies,^[2] conceptualizing imaginaries as “socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices” (Salazar 2012: 864). This study follows this definition, finding usefulness in its socio-cognitive connotations.

Roland Barthes’ well-known example of a black soldier saluting the French flag, in Mythologies (Barthes 2006: 115), is intended as an account of the Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified, in the context of his theories of modern myth (see Figure 1). As he says:

I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (Barthes 2006: 115)

Figure 1:

Barthes’ soldier.

The applicability of this approach to the notion of imaginary, as described above, is clear. Where Barthes uses the verb ‘signifies’, we can read ‘means’, and understand Barthes’ mythical dimension of meaning, developed in the work as a whole, as the terrain of the imaginary. The additional, connotational meanings Barthes refers to are all generated in viewers’ minds thanks to their shared knowledge of the context of French social history. Without this knowledge, the picture is just an image of a young man saluting.

The same could be said for other images which have a certain currency in mediascapes – for example, the UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) “Breaking Point” poster (see Figure 2) which claimed, textually that “the EU has failed us all”, beside an image of an endless, snaking line of migrants, many with Islamic features. The poster’s effectiveness as propaganda depends on the activation of multiple cognitive cues, built up in viewers’ minds by media over decades, that relate to uncontrollable immigration, ‘hordes’, ‘floods’, ‘invasion’, and the like (Baker et al. 2008; Mantello and Ponton 2018). The poster could be thought of as representing a far-right, populist ‘imaginary of immigration’, concentrating latent emotional reactions around a unique political proposition. It is worth noting that the effectiveness of the poster is arguably not limited to voters who share a particular ideology. While the latter may be convinced to vote with UKIP, other viewers will only understand the image if they are aware, to some degree, of certain propositions current across the speech community: “uncontrolled immigration to Britain is a bad thing”, “the EU is soft on migrants”, “Islamic migrants are potential terrorists”, etc. Thus, even passive understanding of an imaginary confirms that these ideas are dialogically active (White 2003) within a certain social group.

Figure 2:

The UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.

Not all imaginaries have such an overt political message. Consider Andy Warhol’s celebrated work, “Coca-Cola 3” (see Figure 3), in 1962. Like the Brexit poster, this work depends on the contribution of unseen factors operating in viewers’ minds. Thanks to these, it constitutes itself as an imaginary of modern consumerism, a popular product that claims the right to usurp the place of traditional models of fine art – landscapes, portraits, historical or religious scenes, etc. (Hennessey 2022). Its subversion of aesthetic canons is in keeping with the spirit of the modern period where art, like soft drinks, can be mass produced, distributed in adverts from which there is no escape.

Figure 3:

Andy Warhol’s “Coca-Cola 3”.

4.3 Ecological imaginaries

Since, as was discussed above (Section 3) ecologies are variegated, there can be no single ‘ecological imaginary’. Figure 4 shows images suggestive of a ‘deep ecological imaginary’, in the sense used by Salazar, which takes for granted that social meanings, axiological positions, and deontic propositions may be activated among viewers of certain images.

Figure 4:

Ecological imaginaries.^[8]

Pragmatically, these images refer to latent environmental notions regarding the effects of human industrial activity on animals, that lodge in viewers’ memory because of their repetition in media. As in the transmission of memes (Wiggins 2019), they work implicitly to convey specific discourses, connecting representations of reality with the realm of deontic propositions. From the perspective of deep ecology, humans are not at the top of creation, or apart from it. The polar bear looks directly at the camera in what Kress and van Leeuwen (2021: 118) term a ‘demand’ picture, claiming the right to a ‘relationship’ with the viewer (see also Stibbe 2015: 156). The message is that we do have responsibilities towards animals, whose suffering matters, especially when we provoke it. As with the Brexit imaginary (Section 4.1), interpretation involves the mental act of disambiguation (Griffiths 2006), or rapid, mainly unconscious calculation of possible correspondences that produce satisfactory interpretations, with incalculable effects among viewers which may depend on factors like their ideological outlook.^[9]

5 Analysis

In tourism photography, it has been suggested (Section 3), the image has a clear pragmatic purpose which all the elements combine to advance; namely to attract tourists, to sell destinations and associated tourism products (Kefala 2021). It has also been suggested that, in selecting features of a destination to include in publicity material, the companies affect the way it will be seen by prospective visitors, and that by exercising such an influence, the images contribute to the creation of an imaginary of a destination. Since nature and natural objects play a significant role in many such images, we can also learn something about how nature is understood; in other words, about the natural imaginary in tourist discourse.

The predominant role played by natural features in the Sicilian images was the most noticeable result of the first stage of analysis outlined above (Section 3), as can be seen by observing which of Kušen’s list of potential attractors occur in the photos (Table 1).

The high value for such natural elements, as can be seen from a Google search of the corpus relating to tourism in other global contexts (Visit + Malta, Spain, South Africa), is not specific to Sicily but rather appears to be a generic feature of tourism images. To the layman, this appears curious, since one would expect that destinations might compete by promoting the specific features that make them unique, rather than emphasizing factors that they have in common with all the others. Sicily, for example, is rich in archaeological treasures, boasting many Greek buildings that arguably rival the Acropolis in Athens, but these hardly appear in the corpus at all.^[11]

There are a few methodological issues to report concerning these figures. It was not possible, regrettably, to note features that concern the technical qualities of the images such as camera angle, perspective, and most of all, the use of filters, all of which could provide relevant insights. Recording of geological and natural features is straightforward, but many of the categories present insoluble problems. It is problematic to identify ‘protected natural heritage’ or ‘tourism paths, trails, roads’, since a simple image does not necessarily reveal these aspects. ‘The culture of life and work’ is rather vague, and if it means shots of local industry, offices, workshops etc., then this category too would be empty. I have interpreted it broadly to cover shots of town streets with cafés and people going about their business. Shots of fishing boats (see Figure 5), though perhaps relevant to this category, were excluded. The boats in this and similar shots, from my perspective, do not convey an implicit message that relates to the commercial activity of the place; rather, they appear as decorative elements in an attractive tableau whose dominant theme is nature. This is underlined by the fact that there are no people visible in the picture – no fishermen mending nets or standing about discussing the weather.

Figure 5:

Fishing boats.^[12]

As indicated above (Section 3), absences are not pragmatically inert. Naturally, the absence of people is not relevant to Kušen’s list, which registers what is present in tourist destinations, rather than what is not. However, these absences are also found in both reference corpora, of Visit Sicily and TripAdvisor, and could thus perhaps be seen as another generic feature of tourism photography. There is something paradoxical in such human absences, since several items on Kušen’s list denote an interest in human beings and their activities – the culture of life and work, famous people, cultural and religious events, sport and leisure, etc. One might expect images to show crowds of tourists flocking to museums or participating in these events. By the same token, it is not clear why images of beaches should not foreground happy tourists visibly enjoying the pleasures of sun and sea.

Pragmatically then, the implicit message could be that these beautiful natural worlds are all there for you alone to enjoy – they are pictures of an individual paradise, with neither crowds of local people nor coachloads of noisy tourists to disturb your visit. This interpretation of absences can be seen at its most evident in the following image (see Figure 6) of a lone woman, in a pose that recurs across the Visit + sites, and could thus be seen as a cliché of the genre:

Figure 6:

Woman in Ragusa.^[13]

The figure is shown from the back, thus the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002) is directed at the scenery before her. It does not engage the viewer in any sense (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2021), rather the woman becomes a token for the viewer by a process of corporeal identification (Taggart 2007), which is assisted by the model’s youth and attractiveness. Not only are viewers invited to admire her, but they are also drawn in to share her meditative wonder at the beauty of the scene before her. Table 2 shows these comparative ‘absences’ in the Visit Sicily corpus.

Figure 6 is the only one in the Visit Sicily corpus in which a human figure is foregrounded. In many, people are tiny, insignificant figures in a vast panorama. In others, they appear simply as props in landscapes, such as beaches or towns, which represent the images’ dominant dialogical charge, as in Figure 7. Here viewers see a picturesque street scene and, as in the previous image, their gaze follows that of the central female figure, engaged in ‘walking through’ this pleasant townscape. The cluster of people at front left are mainly shot from the back, avoiding engagement with the viewer and thus lowering their dialogical significance. They are simply a scenic element, another part of this place’s attractions.

Figure 7:

Street view.^[14]

Significantly, animals, birds, and other non-human social actors make no appearance at all in either corpus, nor do they generally appear on the Visit + sites. The exception is South Africa, where exotic animals represent a significant pull factor for tourism; even here, though, there are only few (6/45 = 13 %), with the overwhelming majority of images featuring natural scenery.

Comparison with the Trip Advisor reference corpus relating to Marina di Modica (Appendix B) reveals findings that correspond very closely to those for the Visit Sicily corpus (Tables 3 and 4). The correspondence of these patterns across the two corpora is suggestive of a generic regularity in tourism photography.

6 Discussion and conclusion

Since the overwhelming majority of images in the corpora analyzed refer to natural features such as sunshine, beaches, trees, and the sea, an impression could be conveyed that tourism itself – at least in Sicily, but this is equally applicable to the other contexts examined – is all about the natural world. This inference is the more persuasive since, as shown above, other supposed pull factors for tourism such as special events, cultural and religious institutions, natural spas, sports, and recreation facilities, simply do not appear in the images. Moreover, the representation of human beings in tourism images underlines this message, through their almost total elision of anything resembling tourist buses, crowds, queues at popular sites, busy restaurants, crowded pavements, and so on, to say nothing of airport scenes or other ‘traveling to the destination’ scenarios.

A typical scene promoting Sicily is that in Figure 8. As in many other shots, the main protagonist is the sea, which shimmers with (possibly filter-enhanced) light. It is a spotless image, and no human figures or even boats are allowed to disturb its purity. This is carefully staged, because the Mediterranean is well-known as an extremely busy waterway. The imaginary of Sicily that emerges is that of a ‘natural paradise’ with striking seas and skies; picturesque, though apparently uninhabited, villages that nestle by the seashore; occasional exotic plants and flowers, with plenty of green to set off the dominant, intense shades of blue. This imaginary echoes the Romantic imaginary of nature discussed above. The trope of intense sunlight and sea, encapsulated by Shelley’s phrase “the wave’s intenser day”, recurs throughout the two corpora, and the Visit + sites. It appears to offer the potential tourist an experience of ‘sublimity’, where this consists of an unadulterated immersion in pristine natural surroundings, undisturbed by troublesome mingling with one’s fellows.

Figure 8:

Scala dei Turchi.^[15]

Although the concentration on natural features might suggest that these images have something ‘ecological’ about them, a comparison of the Sicilian ‘tourism imaginary’ with the ecological imaginaries discussed above dispels this idea. The more-than-human world of animals, insects, fish, birds, etc., has been totally eliminated from these representations. Far from pragmatically suggesting that we have ecological responsibilities, the tourism imaginary perpetuates notions that in an ideal world – in an ‘island paradise’ such as Sicily – there would be no animals at all, no birds, no bugs. This is disturbing given the economic power of the tourism industry, and hence its potential to influence consumers’ hearts and minds, which are both immense.

As we have seen from the data from the Visit + webpages relating to other countries, the phenomena described are not specific to Sicily alone. Since the tourist industry has been operational for centuries, we can assume that these images represent the best possible business practices, i.e. they offer consumers exactly what they want, and thus maximize the commercial success of the enterprises. From a pragmatic perspective, the Sicilian tourism imaginary is explicable in terms of the chicken and egg relationship between supply and demand. It both reflects what consumers desire and transmits messages that condition their future expectations. As in the case of other imaginaries discussed above such as the visit to Doune Castle, the Sicilian tourism imaginary acts as a kind of cognitive filter that conditions the ways consumers will respond to the places they visit. For the non-human world, then, the imaginary confirms Coleridge’s words, and works to perpetuate the cognitive and emotive deficits he critiqued: “We have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand”.^[16]

Regrettably, the holiday-making presented in the Sicilian tourism imaginary, though it apparently proposes to immerse consumers in pristine natural environments, reflects the shared mindsets of producers and consumers alike, and actually conflicts with ecological principles. This finding should arouse concern, especially as it is not applicable to Sicilian tourism alone, but appears to be a feature of the industry as a whole. The presence, in tourism photography, of more ecologically sensitive imaginaries could significantly affect both our practices of holiday-making and attitudes towards nature in everyday life.