Abstract

JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE, 2018 VOL. 16, NO. 1, 97–108 BOOK REVIEWS by Sally Ann Ness, New York, Berghahn Books, 2016, 174 pp., $95.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-78533-116-9 This book addresses the topic of visitor behavior in Yosemite National Park from a semiotic approach. Viewing behavior of park visitors as performance with a landscape is intriguing and overdue. Although tourism literature has a tradition of frameworks that investigate host–guest interactions, few have focused on bodily encounters of tourists with a destination landscape. By viewing this interaction as one of meaning-in-the-making as a dance-like per- formance, Ness’ book embarks on territory that is comparatively unexplored. The first chapter is devoted to her framework of landscape performance theory. Ness sees the park as a stage for the enactments of cultural performance (p. 4), and her focus sharpens on those that are the most minor, ‘often coincidental or unintended movements and gestures [of which she is] the most concerned’ (p. 4). She draws on theory from anthropologists and human geographers to develop her argument. Ness favors the work by sign theorist Charles Sanders Peirce due to his ‘pragmaticist semeiotic’ approach. She also recognizes several others as contributory to the compilation of