Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 33 483–501 2008 ISSN 0020 -2754 © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Rhythmanalysing the coach tour: the Ring of Kerry, Ireland Tim Edensor and Julian Holloway This paper utilises and extends Henri Lefebvre’s ideas about rhythmanalysis to explore the rhythmic qualities of taking a coach tour. The paper investigates the Ring of Kerry tour in the West of Ireland and reveals both the reproduction and disturbance, through itinerary and narratives of the coach drivers, of anticipated discourses and visual indexes of commodified Irishness. Central to the paper is the ordering of different rhythmic assemblages, which connect and disconnect in multiple ways. It is argued that the rhythmic multiplicity of coach tours involve entanglements of embodiment, affective registers, technologies and materialities. The paper reveals how the myriad tempos and rhythms of the tour take on different consistencies and intensities at different stages of the journey, and investigates the capacities of these rhythms to affect and be affected by the pulse of the spaces moved through and stopped at. In so doing, a supplemented rhythmanalysis is suggested as a productive approach for apprehending tourist spaces, practices and landscapes. key words rhythm rhythmanalysis tourism mobility Ireland materiality embodiment Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M1 5GD email: t.edensor@mmu.ac.uk revised manuscript received 15 May 2008 Introduction Our lives and the spaces we dwell in and move through are composed of a multitude of different rhythms, temporalities, pacings and measures. Here, we take the example of a guided coach tour and examine it under the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s rich, suggestive rhythmanalysis (2004). Despite some scrutiny within human geography, the heterogeneous ensembles of spatiality and temporality examined in Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis have yet to receive extended investigation (although see McCormack 2002; Mels 2004; Matos 2007; Cronin 2006, Evans and Jones 2008). As Mels argues, rhyth- manalysis usefully emphasises the dynamic and processual, circumvents the reifications of place and culture and explores the multiple articulations of individual and collective; the subjective and the intersubjective; nature and society; body and world; and the spaces of experience, memory, symbol and action. (2004, 9) In this paper, we develop a more nuanced approach to rhythmanalysis for three reasons: to develop sociological and geographical conceptions of time- space; to further explore this in the context of mobilities; and to critique reified constructions of ‘the tourist’ as a duped, passive and shallow figure. By exploring its rhythms, we suggest that tourism is processual, ever-changing and in a flow of becoming, replete with planned and unplanned happenings, always and inevitably embodied, sensual, affective and informed by the dynamic characteristics and processes of the space within which it occurs and unfolds. More specifically, we deconstruct the char- acterisation of the tour coach as the archetypal insulated, air-conditioned tourist bubble, by appre- hending touring as an affective complex connecting with multiple rhythms. Nevertheless, attempts to impose institutionalised rhythms upon tourism cannot be ignored, and it is vital to explore how (commercial, political, bureaucratic) power attempts to order particular rhythms so they become habitual, embodied and thus difficult to knowingly contravene.