In the Middle of Things

Hand-drawn Maps

In our tourism research project on Brežice, Slovenia we reached the stage of hand-drawing route maps on which to create a hexis for later literary travel writing by the end of March 2023. We were still in the first phase of the process, which in our tourism textbook for travel writers and place-branding we call 'Step 1. Deep-mapping', Table 5.7 page 96.  The processual approach, where we work via dialogue journaling, began to yield up two emerging findings. One, which I will expand fully here, is the unknown town syndrome, and the other is linked to Paul Rabinow's (2007) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. It is the point where Rabinow develops Paul Ricœur's idea that meaning is discovered in what follows an event.  

Even though I’ve been thinking about Brežice for a long time now, it is still unknown to me, and to the readers of this blog. How do the tourist office there tell English-speaking people from Britain or the US that their town of just 6,800 people is worth staying in? How can the tourist office explain why it is worth making a holiday there? For those unknown tourists the place is an unknown town. The DMO might well ask a potential visitor, from the UK, why do you want to visit a town in Slovenia? But tourists are not ready to be asked why they travel to a specific destination. Their preferences are as unknown as the offerings and attractions of this place on the left bank of the river Sava.

Outline of the literary hexis for connecting the travel writer's plateaus in the design of a route during a deep-mapping project. Charlie Mansfield   

Drawing the maps first brought this home to me. And I was surprised. At first, I did not know where people in the town thought that the river Sava was in relation to the town centre. I had begun to form a topological map in my mind that the only river ran in a straight line along the bottom of the map, that is on the very southern edge of the built-up area. In my imagination the river drew a line cutting off the town from anything south of the paved areas and attractions. I cannot say now how that map had formed in me. When I saw the hand-drawn maps of others who were based in the town, the river either was not shown at all, or it ran on the left of the page, the western edge of the town.  It is good to be surprised when you are in the middle of a research project, it means you are experiencing new ways of knowing that urban space.

Thank you to Hermina for sharing the Hand-drawn map for planning the travel writers' hexis around Brežice before fieldwork. 

 ‘"One never commences,” says Deleuze, “one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms” (1998: 123)’ cited in Pendakis (2019, 23).

References

Deleuze, G. (1998). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Mansfield, C. & Potočnik Topler, J. (2023). Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies. Abingdon: Routledge. Please click to view on Google Books or on Amazon Kindle

Pendakis, A. (2019). In Medias Res: Deleuze and the Politics of Middleness. Stasis, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2019-7-1-14-36