Paper short abstract:

Paper long abstract:

In his recent "Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory," Bruno Latour remarks that the word "social" has come to mean "a type of material," used "in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'," which "rather than indicating what is assembled together, makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled."(1)

This paper offers an architectural perspective on the social definition of tourism by examining the reverse semantic operation: when architectural materials—wood and steel, but above all, concrete and sandstone—are injected with "social" assumptions that make the monuments they substantiate suitable for tourism.

Taking an ANT-inspired approach to architecture in the context of post-war development in Egypt, I see architectural monuments as "things" in the Latourian sense: hybrid assemblages whose social agency lies in their material construction. I concentrate on the monolithic temples at Abu Simbel: hewn in a sandstone cliff along the Nile around 3000 B.C., these colossal structures were carefully dismantled and displaced during the international campaign, launched by UNESCO in 1959, to "salvage" the Nubian monuments threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The paper proceeds through an analysis of the competing engineering schemes proposed by France, Italy, England and Egypt, for this salvage operation.

Even as they were cut into blocks, moved, then re-assembled into an artificial concrete hill, the temples at Abu Simbel retained their value as authentic monoliths, because a set of aesthetic codes ensured their continued material "integrity." The paper analyzes these codes, tracking their passage from specialized discourses (architecture, archaeology, conservation) into the language of tourism. Paramount among these tropes is the placement of the temples in the "universal heritage of mankind"—and the attendant assumption that the hospitality of this hypothetical "mankind" legitimizes tourism as a basic pattern of development.

The paper distinguishes three forms of mobility as constitutive of Nubia's regional identity: the imagined mobility of future tourists (able to navigate Pharaonic Egypt as a proto-internationalist heterotopia); the forced mobility of local populations (relocated to make way for the flooding of the Nile); and the engineered mobility of the monuments themselves (re-assembled in the Nubian desert, or sent to Western museums as "gifts in return.")

(1) Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).