Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

TOURISM

See also: Interpretation, Literariness, Qualitative and Quantitative

Methodologies, Situation and Context

TOURISM

Tourism embodies the largest single movement of human populations around the globe outside wartime. In 1939, 1 million people are said to have travelled abroad; in 1990 this rose to 400 million. Estimates for the year 2000 are of 650 million international travellers and five times as many people travelling within their own countries.

More specifically, in 1990, 6 million people visited Hawaii; 108 people entered Notre Dame cathedral in Paris every minute, the breath and body heat of the multitudes entering the Sistine Chapel in Rome were damaging the frescos, while exhaust fumes from cars queuing to get to Alpine ski resorts were killing the local flora and causing avalanches and landslides. In a word, there is not a community, a country, an environment in the world which tourism does not affect in some degree. Sponsored by national governments, promoted by multinational enterprises, regulated by international agencies (e.g. the World Tourism Organization), engaged in by more and more of the world’s population, and with an annual turnover in excess of £270 billion, it is estimated that tourism is the world‘s largest international industry. Latterly, tourism has also been recognized as of major conceptual concern to anthropology. (It is mooted that only the somewhat disconcerting similarities between a touristic ‘quest for otherness’ and that of anthropology—‘professional tourism’—explains a wariness in treating the topic sooner (cf. Crick 1989).)

Tourism and travel

Tourism is frequently differentiated from ‘travel’. While travel, as Mark Twain once wrote (1869:407), ‘is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrowmindedness’ (après Augustine: ‘The world is a book; he who stays at home reads only one page’), tourism has nevertheless been deemed a derisive label for those content with ‘inauthentic’ experiences.

‘Travel’, after all, has etymological connections with ‘travail’—with work and activity—while tourism represents a packaged form of experience in which passivity prevails and contact with the alien and the real is avoided or prevented. Here is manufactured, emasculated travel, made safe by commercialism. Indifferent to local social reality, ‘suntanned destroyers of culture’ scavenge the earth intent on new pleasures, content

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to practise conspicuous consumption in front of the relatively deprived (cf. Turner and Ash 1976). At best, here is a short-term, instrumental relationship where tourists see locals and their culture as commodities to be bought, while locals see the visitors as resources to be milked. ‘The Barbarian of yesterday is the Tourist of today’, as English socialite and traveller, Nancy Mitford, quipped.

But is there more than mere snobbery to this stereotypical differentiation? Is it perhaps a question of history and of numbers? Hence, the eighteenth-century Grand Tour entailed the travel of European aristocracies in relatively small numbers, while the nineteenthcentury rise of European industrialism saw the birth of bourgeois travel on a somewhat larger numerical scale. But the twentieth century has witnessed an enormous growth in people with ‘annual holidays’ from work, with ‘times out’ from the work ‘treadmill’, with pensionable retirements from the work ‘rat-race’ (cf. Graburn and Jafari 1991). In particular, in the post-Second World War West, cheaper and faster modes of transport, specialized holiday companies (après Thomas Cook’s nineteenth-century lead), televised information on other parts of the world, and a surplus income to spend on leisure, has given rise (somewhat akin to the ‘teenager’) to the ‘tourist’ as a new category of social expectation and experience.

Smith (1989) defines the ‘tourist’, then, as: ‘a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change’. Anthropological work on these persons and the socio-cultural ramifications of their migrancy can be conveniently broken down into three main areas: economics; social and cultural change; and meanings and motivations.

Economics

In the 1960s, the primary exports of many Third World countries (coffee, and rubber, for example) declined in value; many turned to tourism as an alternative development strategy, something positively promoted by both the World Bank and the United Nations. Tourism seemed to need no vast capital-intensive infrastructural outlays but rather to rely on natural resources already in place: sun, sand and friendly people.

The experience of the past thirty years, however, has been rather different (cf. Nash 1989). First, the infrastructure (high-class hotels and restaurants, transport facilities) was by no means cheap, and once in place remained differentiated, spatially and qualitatively, from local lives; more was often spent on hotels than on state housing. Secondly, tourism turns out to be not so secure a growth industry; there are seasonal fluctuations

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in demand and cyclical swings outwith local control. Tourist tastes (and those of the tour operators) are fickle and faddish and destinations can succeed and fail in alternate seasons. Much decision-making rests with multi-national corporations who run hotels and car-hire firms as well as the airlines. Thirdly, most profit is ‘repatriated’ to First World countries; Third World access to hard currency remains restricted. Local profits tend to be restricted to local business and political elites, so that local polarizations of wealth grow. Indeed, to maintain the clean and friendly image of their countries, and their peacefulness and stability, local political regimes have become less liberal, with elites anxious to removal from the tourist gaze not merely unsightly natural detritus but also its human equivalents: political opponents, touts, beggars, slum dwellers and street children. Finally, the many local people who swopped their agricultural pursuits for work in the new tourist industries find themselves, at best, in menial service jobs; while governments often find themselves forced to import (more expensive) foodstuffs to make up for the shortfalls in production.

A caveat is necessary, however. For, an alternative weighting would emphasize the effects of tourism on countering local out-migration, and instilling a sense of pride in community and place. It can invigorate local artistic traditions and provide a market for work. It can nurture local practices of environmental up-grading, and to bring to the attention of a global audience the plight of exploited minorities, women and children (cf. Harrison 1992).

Socio-cultural change

The contact between individuals from very different socio-cultural milieux means that tourism provides anthropologists with fine examples of what was once referred to as ‘processes of acculturation’: the translation and mutual influencing that can occur when there is a new and rather sudden meeting between different world-views. However, since individual tourists are usually on holiday in a place for a short time while the local community may habitually have people occupying the category ‘tourist’, and since locals are catering for tourists in a work not a play capacity, it is often argued that borrowing is more likely (and more largely) to be seen on the part of the locals than their visitors. As the host community adapts to tourists’ needs and expectations it superficially becomes, if not more like a version of the tourists’ home milieux, at least a reflection of their ‘holiday’ expectations (cf. Urry 1990).

This has been dubbed, the ‘Coca-Colanization’ of the native way of life, implying both the process of Westernization (specifically

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Americanization) involved, and that of neo-colonialism. (In this context, the slogan of both the multi-national computer giant, IBM, and of the hotel chain, Hilton International: ‘world peace through world travel’ takes on a far more partisan and political colouration). It is further argued that as local people learn to market their culture ‘by the pound’, turning, for instance, their artistic traditions into bric-a- brac curios and ‘airport art’ (and themselves into queer exotics with quaint customs), so the native way of life becomes ‘trinketized’ (cf. Greenwood 1989). Here is the irony that having come ‘visiting a place away from home so as to experience a change’, tourists find something fashioned to suit their home tastes; or else a ‘staged authenticity’ of what tourists are thought to expect from native culture (cf. MacCannell 1989).

One of most rapid changes in local life concerns language.While few tourists may learn a native language, many locals become bilingual, those who speak more fluently then finding themselves with jobs as couriers, interpreters, tour-guides, waiters, and so on. The mediatory capacity grants them different status and more material return, which in turn may give onto a process of local polarization: a split of the host community into factions concerning attitudes towards tourists and tourism and the ‘advantageous’ changes in life that may accrue for some. Just as local elites are found often to share the lifestyle and aspirations of the foreigners more than those of their fellow-locals, so those who mediate with tourists at the local level are found more sympathetic regarding tourist ways than some of their erstwhile fellows.

In this way, tourism is sometimes seen to be a continuation of oldstyle colonialism by other means.The West takes what it wants from the Rest, while undermining local community solidarity and tradition.Thus, while Conrad Hilton claimed to be in the business of ‘peace and understanding’, he also boasted how each of his hotels was: ‘a little America’, and ‘doing its bit to fight socialism’. Likewise, the vicepresident of the American company, Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated, once expressed the desire to ‘buy’ the African nation-state of The Gambia; being one of a number of Third-World countries which, besides their UN ambassadors and their so-called independence, ‘had absolutely nothing. No economy, nothing’, the strategy would be to ‘merchandise’ the entire place as a series of ‘Tarzan’ vacation villages. However apocryphal these stories, one learns something of the context of debate in which Franz Fanon (1968) could claim that, through tourism, the West was turning the Rest of the world into its brothel (cf. Cohen 1977); the context in which the Greek Orthodox church could institute the prayer:

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Lord Jesus Christ (..) have mercy on the cities, the islands and the villages of this Orthodox Fatherland…which are scourged by the worldly tourist wave. Grace us with a solution to this dramatic problem and protect our brethren who are sorely tried by the modernistic spirit of these contemporary Western invaders.

But words of warning are in order; the anti-tourist rhetoric, above, is as ideological as that first heard from the likes of Mitford. It is also, in both cases, somewhat reactionary: a reaction against the wherewithal of mass travel before, and a reaction against the loss of so-called community solidarity and tradition now. But this latter is a myth. Socio-cultural milieux are (and were) never isolated, bounded or homogeneous entities, but environments always involved in change and always exposed to a range of influences (economic, socio-cultural, religio-political) which might seem to be alien and new. Moreover, inasmuch as socio-cultural milieux are heterogeneous and internally fragmented, the old anthropological canards of ‘culture-contact’ and ‘acculturation’ need to be clarified and complexified.

To appreciate ‘the impact’ of ‘tourism’ upon ‘Malaysian culture’ for example (King 1993), is to recognize that tourism is no unitary phenomenon and that its effects will be various, first; and secondly, that Malaysian culture is an ad hoc assemblage of beliefs and practices pertaining in varying degrees to different people. Here is a medley or assemblage of a multitude of cultural forms (practices, objects, symbols and meanings) without common denomination in active relationship with a pot-pourri of touristic happenstances. The outcome is dynamic, ongoing and non-generalizable. Of course, some claim to be the guardians or the chief exponents of ‘Malaysian culture’. But this is a rhetorical ploy, often by local elites or brokers, or those who would become such, to elevate certain partisan values to canonical status (and disseminate this information in tourist literature) for the purpose of political gain. This strategizing is an important part of the anthropological study of ‘tourism’ but it should not be mistaken for, say, ‘the detrimental effect new touristic processes are having on local culture’. For there is no ‘authentically traditional’ Malaysia beyond a diversity of contesting symbolic emblemizations.

‘Acculturation’, in short, takes place in a complex and piecemeal fashion, and is more a matter of give-and-take between individual world-views.To talk of the ‘socio-cultural changes’ wrought by tourism can be a shorthand only, part of a larger understanding of the way in which, universally, people go and look beyond themselves in order to be and know themselves (cf. Boon 1982).

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