elite mobilities: the semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

VISUAL ESSAY

Elite mobilities: the semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

Crispin Thurlowa* and Adam Jaworskib

aSchool of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington;bCentre for Language & Communication, Cardiff University, UK

Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities andprivileges. In the rapid expansion of ‘luxury tourism’ we find a wing of this trulyglobal culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elitestatus, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series ofmultimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that exploresand critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict interactional orders of these‘new’ elite mobilities. Mimicking the fleeting encounters of super-elite travellersthemselves, we undertook a series of ethnographically grounded but patentlyfrugal sorties into five different spaces (or modes) of luxury travel. Drawing onour own fieldwork material and quoting the visual rhetoric of advertisers, wetrace the normative production of an ostensibly enclavic landscape that imagines(or re-imagines) limitless aspirations and unbounded pleasures for all consumer-citizens regardless of their power or wealth.

Keywords: elitism; luxury; tourism; class; symbolic capital; space/place

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Social Semiotics

Vol. 22, No. 4, September 2012, 487�516

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.721592

http://www.tandfonline.com

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.721592

http://www.tandfonline.com

Everything comes together in Thirdspace:

subjectivity and objectivity,

the abstract and the concrete,

the real and the imagined,

the knowable and the unimaginable,

the repetitive and the differential,

structure and agency,

mind and body,

consciousness and the unconscious,

the disciplined and the transdisciplinary,

everyday life and unending history.

. . .

Any attempt to capture

this all-encompassing space

in words and texts . . .

invokes an immediate sense of

impossibility,

a despair

that the sequentiality

of language and writing,

of the narrative form

and history-telling,

can never do more than

scratch the surface of

Thirdspace’s

extraordinary

simultaneities.

Edward Soja (1996, 56�7)

488 C. Thurlow and A. Jaworski

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Unless we know why people need luxuries and how they use them

we are nowhere near taking the problems of inequality seriously.

Mary Douglas (1988, 24)

The place from which power is exercised is often a hidden place.

When we try to pin it down, the center always seems to be

somewhere else. Yet we know that this phantom center, elusive

as it is, exerts a real, undeniable power over the entire

framework of our culture, and over the ways we think about it.

Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek (1995, 291)

Social Semiotics 489

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Social commentators and public policy experts are increasingly documenting a

number of noteworthy trends in some of the wealthiest countries of the ‘indus-

trialized West’; for example:

1. Social mobility in the USA is at its lowest for 30 years, lower than in other

industrial countries like Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany. In spite ofthis, 40% percent of Americans still believe they have more chance nowadays

of moving up from one class to another.

2. In the UK, the gap between rich and poor is at its highest level for 10 years;

divisions between social classes in certain areas mirror those of the

Victorian era. With poor and wealthy households more and more segregated

from the rest of society, the UK now has the highest inequality levels for

40 years.1

It is figures such as these which serve as the impetus for our Elite Mobilities project of

which this essay is a part (see also Jaworski and Thurlow 2009; Thurlow and

Jaworski 2006, 2010). While popular opinion consistently regards countries like the

USA and Britain as ‘classless societies’ (cf. Eisenhauer 2008), extensive empirical

analyses show how the current, dramatic reorganisation of socioeconomic structures

is being marked by the emergence of a growing class of super-elites (New York Times

2005; Time 2006). A compelling manifestation of this change is the expansion and

intensification of the luxury market (Frank 2008) � a market that seems little

daunted by the so-called global economic crisis (Hughes 2010; see also Wall Street

Journal 2009).Where previous research concerned with racial and gender inequality focused on

people of colour and on women as the ‘problem’, scholars now recognise the need to

examine the social construction and cultural organisation of the dominant social

categories, that is whiteness (e.g. Dyer 1997; Lipsitz 1998) and masculinity (e.g.

Connell 1995; Johnson and Meinhof 1997) in order to better understand racial and

gender inequality. Social research is far more effective if it also examines those who

stand to benefit most from the status quo � those who generate the inequality rather

than those at the receiving end of it. Investigating the widening class gap in Western,

post-industrial societies by focusing on only the underprivileged and poor therefore

seems neither appropriate nor sufficient; research must also scrutinise those with

privilege and wealth.

Communication is, of course, central in the generation of any form of privilege.

In his well-known treatises Distinction and Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre

Bourdieu (1984, 1991) makes a compelling case for the complicity of discourse,

economics and relations of power. Class distinctions and social inequalities hinge on �and arise through � enculturated symbolic economies as much as they do on material

or political ones. Furthermore, the ability to use and shape ‘symbolic goods,

especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence, constitutes one of the key

markers of ‘‘class’’ and also the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction’ (Bourdieu

1984, 66). Communication is thus always ideological in that it not only (1)

constitutes identities and relationships of power, and (2) reproduces dominant


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systems of belief (or ‘good taste’), but also because it (3) maintains structures of

inequality and privilege. In this essay, we show how all three of these discursive

processes are strategically realised in the semiotic organisation and promotion of so-

called luxury travel. Just as social status often dictates access to spatial mobilities, the

elite mobilities of tourism offer themselves as both indicators of and resources for

social status.

Scholarly interest in visual culture too is driven partly by the increasing

prominence and power of the visual in contemporary life (Kress and van Leeuwen

2001). Extending some of the ideas of Mike Featherstone (1991), Scott Lash and

John Urry (1994) argue that post-industrial economies are heavily semiotic and

increasingly premised on symbolism, imagery and design intensity. This change,

which David Graddol (2002) refers to as the semioticisation of economic life, arises

primarily from a growing reliance on the promotion of services and lifestyles rather

than the manufacture of things (see also Fairclough 1999). And modern tourism is

a quintessential example of an industry that is highly semiotically embedded; a key

part of what is actually ‘produced’ and consumed is the semiotic context of the

service itself (cf. Du Gay and Pryke 2002; Negus 2002). This is precisely why

tourism is such an obvious social domain for visual communication research.

Through our ways of seeing and ‘doing’ the world we become both viewing subjects

and knowing subjects, with a sense of the world as both apprehendable and

knowable.

Patterns of mobility are, of course, a hallmark of globalisation whether in the

form of enforced migration but also elite travel-by-choice (Appadurai 1996; Bauman

1998; Hannerz 1996). Nor is tourism ever merely an economic activity. Writers in

fields such as anthropology, geography and sociology have increasingly considered

the key social/cultural practices by which tourism is realised (e.g. Bruner 2001; Crang

1999; Urry 2002). In all this writing, mobility clearly plays a key role in establishing

ideologies of difference and relations of inequality. In fact, social theorists such as

Scott Lash and John Urry (1994; see also Bauman 1998) argue that tourism never

merely reflects socioeconomic relations within and between countries, but is

instrumental in organising these relations. And luxury tourism, as a rapidly

increasing mode of contemporary travel-by-choice, is surely as complicit in re-

organising the economic and semiotic landscapes anew.

Nowadays, it is also a received wisdom in the social sciences that space is as

much a social construction as it is a physical phenomenon (e.g. Harvey 1996;

Lefebvre 1991 � see also Jaworski and Thurlow 2010). Just as communication is

mediated by space, therefore, space is itself communicatively constituted. For

example, the meanings of a place are established by the way the place is represented

(e.g. written and talked about) and by the nature of social (inter)actions that take

place within it. For Henri Lefebvre (1991), space is best thought of as being realised

in three dimensions: conceived space (mental or represented images), perceived

space (its material or physical dimension) and lived space which emerges through

the intersection/interaction of/between both conceived and perceived space. Places

are, therefore, always in the process of becoming, of being spatialised, in the

interplay between people’s ideas or images about the place and its on-the-ground,


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material properties. In this essay, we engage with the semiotic landscape of luxury

tourism to reflect critically on the predominantly visual and corporeal (or

embodied) aspects of its production and consumption. After Denis Cosgrove

(1985, 46; see also Berger 1972), we define landscape as a way of seeing the worldand as a visual ideology. For us, this means attending to the discursive construction

of space which determines the observer’s ‘point of view’, the scope of what is

‘revealed’ (cf. Cosgrove 1985), and the investment of its objects with symbolic

meaning.

Structured by the glossy rhetoric of advertisers and by our own fieldwork

material (images and written word), our essay traces the imaginative geographies

(Larsen 2005, 417) of four exemplary modes of luxury travel which we dub: global

elite (Emirates airlines and the Burj al Arab hotel,2 Dubai), retro elite (theSimplon Orient Express, Venice to London), egalitarian elite (the Bellagio hotel,3

Las Vegas) and imperial elite (Phinda Private Game Reserve, South Africa). Each

of these elite (or super-elite) mobilities promotes itself as the height of

contemporary luxury and each represents a (re)mythologisation of distinction,

desirability and status. What emerges from our analysis are seven organising

principles in this ‘new world of luxury’ (see advertising image on p. 3):

communication barriers, vacuous spaces, visible-invisible labour, recognition,

performing plenty, (dis)order and neocolonial fantasies. Together, these principlesdelineate the interactional orders of super-elite mobility and illustrate how luxury

and privilege are currently being imagined and re-imagined for all consumer�citizens regardless of their power or wealth.


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The bourgeois subject continuously defines and re-defines itself throughwhat it marks as ‘low’ � as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet the

very act of exclusion is constitutive of its identity.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986, 191)

Freedom to move, a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, quicklybecomes the main stratifying factor of our times. . . .A particular cause for

worry is the progressive breakdown in communication between the increasinglyglobal and extraterritorial elites and the ever more ‘localized’ rest.

Zygmunt Bauman (1998, 2�3)


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Emirates Business Class Lounge, New York (10 April 2007). At this time of day, a vast

open space at JFK is reserved for the first-class-only eos passengers � all 48 of them.

That is 48 passengers (or rather ‘guests’) in a Boeing 757 like the one that lumbered

its way from Seattle to New York with over 200 passengers. And now here is a single

eos passenger complement dispersed across a space four times the size of an ordinary

family home. Throughout the lounge there are clusters of leather-bound chairs and

sofas grouped around coffee tables. With the exception of one or two hushedexchanges between a business man and perhaps his ‘trailing wife’, each cluster

appears to be occupied by just the one man. No-one is talking to anyone. No-one

needs to talk to anyone. It is a total production of discretion, isolation and civil

inattention.


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Beach at the Burj al Arab, Dubai (21 July 2007). It was not hard to find a sun bed

here on the beach � there were rows and rows of them for the six of us who had

determinedly been ferried down to the beach in the hotel golf carts. Here we are

introduced to the height of technologies designed to minimise unwanted interaction

and to maximise (our) inactivity: a red flag and a blue flag. Slot the red flag into its

special holder and you are left undisturbed; raise the blue flag and one of the four bar

staff will come to take your order for a mocktail or a meal. No need for us to get upand walk across the searingly hot � but thankfully carpeted � sand to the bar. On the

table next to us is also an Evian mineral water facial spray and a constantly

replenished ice-bucket with several bottles of water, the ice melting rapidly in the 418sunshine.


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Today more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space.

Henri Lefebvre (1991, 55)

There are also . . . places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding ofsociety � which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted

utopia in which the real sites . . . are simultaneously represented, contested, andinverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be

possible to indicate their location in reality.

Michel Foucault (1967, NP)


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Foyer in the Burj al Arab, Dubai (20 July 2007). When we see for the first and only

time a lone figure in the atrium-like foyer on the 18th floor, we are reminded of all the

empty chairs everywhere � in our suite, in the lobbies, in corridors. These chairs wait

on us, reassuringly and constantly, not unlike the butlers, servers, receptionists,

chauffeurs and cleaners. The ratio of staff to guests is, we are told, seven to one. Has

anyone, we wonder, calculated the ratio of chairs to guests? There always seem to beso many of them around with so few people willing to justify their existence. Or,

perhaps, their purpose is rather to perform choice (sit or stand or wander) and

excess? Chairs and sofas of all shapes and sizes occupy these unoccupied spaces,

promising interaction but creating instead the hushed silence of absent conversations.


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Lounge at Mountain Lodge, Phinda (9 December 2006). For two and a half days we

sauntered past this carefully groomed space; not once did we see anyone actually

sitting here. Phinda’s ‘private chalets’ mean that communal spaces are seldom

occupied. Spacious living rooms (dead rooms?) are everywhere we travelled.

Heterotopic spaces so far from home � and so far from homely. Generically

impressive spaces for passing through, but not for lingering or lounging in. Filledinstead with plush furniture and freshly plumped cushions, with orderly rows of

candles, regiments of single-stemmed vases, and ‘hand-carved’ basins of scarlet-

lacquered ostrich eggs. So much for time-space compression. The excessive,

expansive spaces of luxury have spaces to spare.


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Currently, the commodification of difference promotes paradigms ofconsumptions wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is

eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not onlydisplaces the Other but denies the significance of the Other’s history

through a process of decontextualization.

bell hooks (1992, 31)

It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, asvalues, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of

existence as objects of utility. . . . It is value that converts every product intoa social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get

behind the secret of our own social products.

Karl Marx (1976 [1867], 167)


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Beach changing room, Burj al Arab, Dubai (21 July 2007). Fresh flowers surround us

everywhere in the hotel, as they do in the changing room on the beach. Along with

the two bouquets of white lilies on either side of the wash basins, these rose petals are

balanced precariously on the edge of the toiletries tray. The abstract design of the

glass, gold-coloured tray contrasts sharply with the vivid red of the petals. Culturemeets nature. And all arranged by an unseen hand � though we suspect it belongs to

the uniformed attendant who follows us discretely, making sure to tidy up after us

and to remove any sign of our presence in the changing room when we leave. This

installation brings a sense of celebration to the prosaic act of washing our hands.


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Lobby of Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas (29 May 2007). At what point did someone

come up with the idea of embossing the ashtray sand with a Caesar’s logo? Where

was the embossing device manufactured, we wonder? Wandering through the

Bellagio and Caesar’s, we are struck by the endless but largely unacknowledged

(unnoticed even?) preparations for this world of pleasure and play. Seemingly

immaterial bodies (a la Hardt and Negri 2000) are materialised in the banal,Sisyphean acts of tightly rolled hand towels and toilet paper folded into points:

visible labour, invisible labourers. It is all ‘red carpet treatment’: a spectacle of labour

rolled out before us and there for us to walk all over: to devour, or to stub out our

cigarettes.


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At stake . . . is not only the production of inequality through the appropriationof labor effort but also workers’ and clients’ unequal entitlement to materialand emotional resources. . . .Customized service indicates to guests that they

are unique and deserving individuals.

Rachel Sherman (2007, 259�61)

The happiness of being envied is glamour. . . .Being envied is asolitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing yourexperience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but

you do not observe with interest � if you do, you will become less enviable.

John Berger (1972, 131)


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20th Floor of the Burj al Arab, Dubai (21 July 2007). In two days of coming and

going, we did not open our own door once. Our designated butler, Peter (not his real

name), was always there waiting for us. He waited, we were waited upon. Constantly.

Working hard to sustain our sense of entitlement. When he was not leaping up to

greet us, Peter sat behind the computer at his desk. From this computer, Peter could

see the photos of us scanned from our passports; here too were logged every guests’preferences (discernable or expressed): our dietary requirements, our rising times, the

fruit we ate from the bowl in our room, the pillow we had chosen from the menu of

12. Throughout the hotel we were recognised, greeted and catered to according these

‘needs’. Between service and surveillance is drawn a disconcertingly fine line.


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Orient Express, arriving in Calais (20 September 2007). Just one more chore for the

Concierge, Head Chef, Head Steward and Head Waiter � posing for photographs for

disembarking passengers. Reminiscent of the servants greeting and bidding farewell

to the Lord of the Manor coming home or leaving, these men stand to attention. It is

a deferential ritual bringing back the upstairs�downstairs divide in a ceremonial

display of courtesy. Their labour is thus decontextualised and echoed metonymicallythrough their uniforms. It is this sanitised image of service that the photographs will

carry for the passengers � no effort, all smiles and safe distance � with a gentle

reminder from the presence of Train Manager’s business suit and clip-board that this

is an orchestrated routine bringing to an end a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ journey.


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Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability tothe gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own

unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidenceby this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought

in [and] costly entertainments . . . are peculiarly adapted to serve this end.

Thorstein Veblen (1994 [1899], 47)

Symbolic capital, a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical‘economic’ capital, produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only

inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in ‘material’ forms ofcapital which are also, in the last analysis, the source of its effects.

Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 6, 183)


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Jean Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas (27 May 2007). ‘The World’s

Tallest and Largest Volume Chocolate Fountain’ rhymes perfectly with the enormous

‘dancing’ fountains in front of the hotel. An excess intensified by the desert location

of Las Vegas. As for the chocolate fountain, perhaps we should let the descriptive

detail of the sign alongside the fountain speak for itself:

White, medium and dark confectionary grade chocolate; 6 pumps circulate close to2 tons of chocolate; Over 500 feet of stainless steel piping; Chocolate circulates at120 degrees F; Climate controlled enclosure maintained at 95 degrees F; Chocolate rises27 vertical feet from lower level pump room; 6 ceiling spouts disburse chocolate 14 feetabove floor level; Chocolate cascades into 25 hand-crafted artistic glass vessels; 2 yearsof engineering, planning & design.


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Business class cabin of Emirates (22 July 2007). A striking image from Dubai and the

Burj al Arab were the flowers. Pinned to the flimsy bulkhead, these two silver sconces

filled with fresh flowers remind us of a choice we were forced to make on arriving at

the Burj al Arab: did we want the orchids in every room replaced with roses? A

question rivalled in its ostentation by only one other: ‘Would we prefer the Phantom

or the Silver Shadow for the trip back to the airport?’ Although there was also the

pressing decision about which tiny sandwich to choose from the trolley pushed downthe aisle at tea-time as we flew at about 30,000 feet and an hour West of Baghdad.

Flown into Dubai in order to be flown out again, flowers appear as poignant

markers of the ephemeral landscapes of luxury which are constantly rearranged and

replenished.


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The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power oftopography to conceal successfully the topography of power.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992, 8)

Bourgeois distinction is still defined . . . by relaxation in tension, easewithin restraint, a rare and highly improbable combination of antagonistic

properties./[It] is the expression of a relation to the market which canonly be acquired through prolonged and precocious familiarity with

markets that are characterized, even under ordinary circumstances, by ahigh level of control and by that constantly sustained attention to forms

and formalities which defines the ‘stylization of life’.

Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 311/1991, 84)


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Chalet at Rock Lodge, Phinda (10 December 2006). The real frisson of this plunge

pool is not that it is private � ours alone � but rather its thrilling juxtaposition with

the bush. Leopard Rock is just in view across the trees and we have been regularly

warned about the wild animals that wander close to the unfenced lodges. Phinda is

marked by a series of contrasting textures and spaces: new with old; rough withsmooth; exotic with the familiar; high design with indigenous craftwork; ‘Western’

with (colonial) African; meticulously maintained with pointedly unkempt; safe with

wild. There is, of course, little pleasure in the orderly without repeated reminders of

the disorderly.


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Suite at the Burj al Arab, Dubai (20 July 2007). Double storey, floor-to-ceiling,

panoramic windows afford us magnificent views of the Persian Gulf, the artificial

Palm Tree Archipelago and the city of Dubai. Suspended mid-air on the twentieth

floor, we are inside and outside, yet completely protected from the sweltering heat

and the gaze of window cleaners. This is our climate controlled panopticon, ourenclavic refuge. The one-way glass that empowers us and liberates us from unwanted

attention is oddly reminiscent of the more sinister, voyeuristic powers of interroga-

tion rooms, passport control offices and CCTV cameras at airports. Safely inside our

Club Suite, however, we are invited to be masters of all we survey.


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The low is internalized under the sign of negation and disgust.But disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains,

apparently expelled as Other, return as the object of nostalgia,longing and fascination.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986, 191)

What we learn at school of history, mythology, poetry can be used inthe manufacturing of glamour. . . .The fact that these historical or

poetic or moral references are imprecise and ultimately meaninglessis an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should be

reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt.

John Berger (1972, 140)


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Federal Air building, Johannesburg (7 December 2006). Shuttled across from the main

airport, we are dropped off at this unprepossessing building to wait for a small plane

to take just three people to Phinda. Nothing much to do except to browse through

this ‘boutique’ selling safari garb: panama hats, bush jackets, pashminas and khaki

rucksacks. No elephant gun but a circa 1850 map of Africa (framed). Colonialcostume-shopping to fulfil the Out-of-Africa nostalgia of a private game reserve

experience. In a perfect moment of ‘genesis amnesia’ (Bourdieu 1977) we would soon

be flying out over the shanty towns of Joburg, swopping the colonial, apartheid

histories of South Africa for sundowners at Happy Valley.


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Dining car on the Orient Express (19 September 2007). Retro-eating. Like the rest of

the train, this dining carriage now ‘restored to its former glory’ recycles a once

outmoded means of transport and re-signifies it as glamorous and classy. Some of

the food may not be to the liking of all the passengers � we overhear a lone voice

complaining about her soup being served cold (gazpacho) � but most delight in the

level of service. At dinner, Caroline and Richard tell us, ‘We didn’t have so muchgood service before’. Back on British soil, in the last leg of the trip on a British

Pullman from Folkestone to London Victoria, a couple from Chester confide that

‘there was too much service’ and ‘how odd it was, all this retro thing’. Post-tourist

reflexivity in an otherwise anachronistic mode of travel?


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The global culture industry . . . is less a matter of the base determining the superstructurethan the cultural superstructure collapsing, as it were, into the material base. Hencegoods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual andthe economy more generally becomes cultural. . . .The image, previously separated in thesuperstructure, is thingified, it becomes matter-image.

Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007, 7)

Acknowledgements

It has been our impression that, from our first attempts to undertake this programme ofresearch on super-elite or so-called ‘luxury’ travel, we have constantly met with a mixture ofentrenched resistance (‘this is not an appropriate topic for funding’) or naıve ridicule (‘oh,research indeed!’). The wry remarks we quickly understood; the institutional reluctance,however, took a little longer to work out. We now recognise that, for all sorts of practical andpolitical reasons, there is sometimes a steep challenge for academics wanting to turn theircritical, investigative attention to the powerful, the rich, the elite. These are, of course, thepeople who pay to remove and protect themselves from unwanted attention. As TomNakayama and Robert Krizek express it: ‘When we try to pin it down, the center always seemsto be somewhere else’. Therein lies the true privilege of elite mobility. It is for this very reasonthat we are especially grateful for the research grant and subsequent fellowship Crispin wasawarded by the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund and the Simpson Centerfor the Humanities. Crispin is also grateful to Jerry Baldasty who, as chair of Communicationat the University of Washington, backed this project in key ways. For their on-the-groundsupport, we thank the Head of Public Relations at the Burj al Arab and the Train Manager ofthe Orient Express. Thanks to Cundard Lines and All Nippon Airways for permission to usetheir ads. Every reasonable effort was made to trace copyright holders and we are pleased to beable to quote the advertisements for the purposes of our scholarly analysis and critique. Lastbut not least, our very special thanks go to Shannon Palmer and Paul Ford for their designsupport.

Notes

1. Information from: Guardian (2001). See also Guardian (2007).2. Image on p. 1: Looking down into the atrium of the Burj al Arab hotel.3. Image on p. 6: Looking up at the Dale Chihuly installation in the lobby of the Bellagio

hotel.

Notes on contributors

Crispin Thurlow is Associate Professor of Language and Communication in the School ofInterdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington where he also holds adjunctpositions in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Communication.

Adam Jaworski is Professor of Language and Communication at the School of English, TheUniversity of Hong Kong. His research interests include critical sociolinguistics of mobility,globalisation, art and silence.

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elite mobilities: the semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

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