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What do people think about tourism? Where do you go for holidays? Do you consider yourself an ethical tourist, and what practices make up the gamut of 'ethical tourism'? What is tourism about -- is it about a desire to 'slough off' the accoutrements of capitalist modernity, like micromanaged time, machines, skyscrapers, pollution, etc, and if so, why is it that only people who benefit from capitalism can actually afford to be tourists? Ir is tourism just about being somewhere different, no matter where? What about package holidays, package tours? What desire is being met in package holidays? Why is it that so many tourist haunts all seem so same-same? (But different?!)
I spent a month in Thailand recently. It was the first time I've travelled alone overseas, and I was doing research (blah blah, I've explained this in other threads) as wellas having a holiday. While I was there, I was reading Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, which is quite savage about the imperialist nature of tourism in general. Despite the fact that I wasn't traveling as either a 'world traveller' or as a 'tourist', I felt interpellated and, at times, weird about being an Anglo male in an Asian country. Weird about the different ways that money works, to buy social relationships or leisure activities, weird about the ways in which I saw other tourists behaving towards Thais.
I was also watching how I wrote about my experiences in Thailand. Instead of blogging about it, I wrote group emails while I was there -- a return to a really outdated form of internet communication, but one indelibly associated with travel in my head. How do people write about the travels you do? Do you use photography or flickr instead? Do you feel you have a responsibility to return from a holiday having documented it properly, and what does 'properly' mean?
I'm going to quote something from Travel Worlds, which I hope will set off discussion. It's in an essay called "Tourists, Terrorists and Death Value", by Peter Phipps. He's talking about two strategies used in writing about tourism and travel, and practing tourism, to deny one's own political position 'in the landscape'.
1. Deny the presence of mass, or any other tourists, in the visited locale. This is most commonly practiced in photography where frequent attempts are made to erase other tourists, and any other signs of capitalist modernity, from the frame; a symbolic destruction of the signs of the self and its possible multiplication. Any challenge to the claim that being here in this place is a unique, unrepeatable event, any rupture that might shatter the aura of the real, must be denied, erased and refused.
2. In those moments when the presence of other tourists is an undeniable and inescapable fact, the primary strategy is that of removal by distinction. Other tourists become the 'them': the uncouth, despised, insensitive, problematic, simplistic tourist, who threatens to give the whole game away and blow the 'real traveller's' cover (he or she in search of the real, the intelligence officer of romanticism.) This is a common strategy of travel writers from Paul Theroux through the more playful Pico Iyer or the ruggedly adventurist Robyn Davidson. Indeed, the claim to be more than a tourist, to see that which could otherwise not be seen, to travel with the purpose of gathering intelligence to write a report is the very currency of travel writing.
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All this leads to the conclusion that there is an underside of abject self-loathing, almost to the point of homicidal fantasy, in tourist ideologies. Tourist discourses consistently return to themes which deny, negate or obliterate the presence of other tourists where this comflicts with their commitment to contact with the authentic Other. Erik Cohen has a brilliant illustration of this in his account of beach and hill tourism in Thailand. He describes how foreign tourists go to the hills of the 'Goldren Triangle' to observe, photograph and experience the tribal peoples, cultures and costumes of the region. Cohen observes that when these same tourists go to the beach islands of southern Thailand they express and demonstrat almost complete indifference to the existence of 'exotic' and vibrant village life a hundred metres inland from the beaches... In the first situation, discovering authentic cultural difference is the tourist's inspired mission; in the second, the experience of 'nature' obliterates the local inhabitants as anything but service personnel.
This quote says quite a lot about Thailand, and I didn't intend it to. But maybe people can think of other places in which a similar differentiation between destinations takes place, or where something entirely different happens. Thoughts?
Lastly, I'd be interested in talking about the economics of tourism and its effects on particular places. |
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