“Cracking the Canyon with the Awesome Foursome”: Representations of Adventure Tourism in New Zealand

The authors focus on the rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand and suggest that the growth of adventure-tourism attractions is related to important transformations in the sociocultural geographies of the places concerned. Three issues are addressed: first, the increasing importance of adventure-tourism facilities, practices, and subcultures, which have interconnected with the social spatialisation of places and landscapes; second, the ways in which adventure tourism transcends the metaphor of the tourist ‘gaze’, and suggests attention to the embodiment of tourist practice; and third, the implications for an understanding of nature—society relations inherent in representational texts used to advertise adventure tourism.