Between place and story: Gettysburg as tourism imaginary

This study seeks to advance our knowledge on the socially constructed character of tourism imaginaries. Ethnographic fieldwork at Gettysburg provides insight for theorizing the anchoring of tourism imaginaries on four experiential domains: narrative, moral valuation, emplaced enactment, and emotional connection. Accordingly, tourism imaginaries are defined as value-laden, emotion-conferring collective narrative constructions that are associated with and enacted in a particular place through tourism. Tourism imaginaries are seen as pliant certainties, that is, although they confer a powerful certainty as to what a tourism destination is, they are couched at the same time in pliant—even conflicting—narrative articulations. It is argued here that tourism imaginaries play an important role in the reinforcement of competing ideologies.