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

TOURISM

Meanings and motivations

‘Tourism’ has been anthropologically classified according to a range of types (cf. Cohen 1979): domestic, international, resort-focused, religious, adventure, ethnic, off-the-beaten-track, educational; ‘tourists’ likewise: from bourgeois FITs (free independent travellers), to working-class package-junkies, to latter-day hippies. What links this range, however, is the sense that tourists and tourism are concerned with a time and place beyond the ordinary and everyday: with travel, even ‘pilgrimage’, beyond the site of working practices and relationships. Drawing on Turnerian ideas of the way human beings organize their lives in terms of regular oscillations between periods of structure and ‘liminoidal’ periods of our non-structure or anti-structure (Turner 1982a), anthropologists have therefore explored the meaning of tourism as pertaining to the division of social life into periods of work and play (cf. Graburn 1983a). Tourism signals a ritual departure from the workaday world and its routinizations. One quits adult obligations, perhaps, in an experiential bubble, or ‘package’, where everything is provided. One plays like a child again, except with adult capacities; one enjoys extra-marital sex, nude sunbathing and drug-taking, perhaps, in a socio-cultural milieu where one knows these things are foreign. On holiday, one is a foreigner from oneself.

Combined here with the liminoidal idea of the inversion or reversal of the everyday, and an overriding of everyday distinctions and categorizations (child/adult, improper/proper) is the theme of pilgrimage; one is on holiday (etymologically, ‘holy day’) in spiritual quest of ultimate goods: love, oneself, one’s past, one’s future, the body beautiful, health, music, art, and so on (Smith 1992). Through ‘play’, a temporarily ‘free sphere of activity’ with its own distinct, captivating rhythms, which can engender the sense of the limited accomplishment of a perfect space and world (Huizinga 1980), one self-consciously quests for recreation and renewal. Relieved and rejuvenated by the experience, the performance, the tourist returns to the workaday world a new person.

Not that tourism and the annual or regular holiday is without its tensions and stresses. Not to ‘go away somewhere’, to ‘stay home’ and simply ‘do nothing’, must be explained by other non-routine events: the end of a relationship, a crippling overdraft. Once away, there is the pressure to ‘have a good time’, amid the uncertainties of weather, foreign food and germs, and the possibly unwelcome attentions of other holiday-makers, and locals.

The expectations and motivations of locals in interaction with tourists, and the pressures they feel, will be equally complex and

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varied. Anthropological work has explored how the tourist is locally categorized and known: from ‘tourist’ heard and understood as ‘tous riches’ in the Seychelles, to the Trobriand Isles where the most suitable local category for the invaders was felt to be ‘soldiers’. In the Simbu province of New Guinea, meanwhile (Peach 1997), the Keri speakers employed the new pidgin word, ‘turis’, to imply a new form of locally created wealth. In the same way that people were traditionally responsible for the axes or the salt or the pigs which they locally made or grew, so now they were proud of ‘their’ tourists.These were people whom they ‘made’ to come and partake in social relations: a form of wealth which gave onto further, intrinsically local, exchanges. For the Keri, frustration arises from the fleeting nature of the tourist presence, rather than tourists as such; the difficulty is in engendering long-term relations based on reciprocity and exchange, and so maintaining those relationships’ inherent value.

European tourism

It might be thought from the above account of anthropological work that tourism entails exclusively the visitation of the West upon the Rest, the more wealthy upon the less, and with mostly unfortunate consequences. This, however, is not the case. Europe remains the world centre of international tourism, in terms of tourists’ destinations as well as their origins; most tourist money is spent there and most crossing of international boundaries (cf. Bouquet and Winter 1987). Furthermore, a thriving trade in domestic tourism can be found in Japan (Hendry 1996); while traditions of ‘voluntary and temporary visits to foreign places beyond workaday worlds’ are probably universal. Graburn (1983b) thus discusses the difficulties of distinguishing between modern tourism and the traditions of ‘temporary and voluntary movement’ as pilgrimage which have characterized milieux as seemingly distinct as Australia, Arabia and Ireland for centuries.

Perhaps tourism, in this way, calls attention to the limitations of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’, First World and Third, as categories. At best, with the ubiquity of contemporary global movement of which tourism is such an important part, these terms can only possess metaphoric (and not geographic) referentiality. Great Britain is now the Third World, therefore, with its theme parks and the trinketization of its ‘heritage’, where (Conservative) politicians describe the Notting Hill Carnival, run predominantly by London’s West Indian émigré communities, as ‘Britain’s foremost cultural festival’ (cf. Cohen 1993). It is European seasides and beauty spots, likewise, which seek to accommodate

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themselves, economically and socio-culturally, to the wealth of the visiting hordes (cf. McDonald 1990; Rapport 1993a).

Tourism has been described as one of the keys to our consciousness of the modern world (Pollock 1994); something equivalent to past religiosity as a global experience, and to colonialism in its global consequences. Operating in a ‘global ecumene’ (Hannerz 1992:34), a global socio-cultural, economic and cognitive space, tourism feeds into both the creolization of local identities and their reinventions and rebirths (cf. van den Berghe 1987). It is a potent source both of sociocultural change and of anthropological theorizing.

See also: Home and Homelessness, Liminality, The Rural Idyll

TRANSACTION

According to the bon mot, economics is about how people make choices while sociology is about why people do not have any choices to make. An anthropological emphasis on transaction within socio-cultural milieux, and its theorization as ‘transactionalism’, or ‘action/practice theory’, amounts to an attempt to mediate between these positions.

Transactionalism has represented an important corrective to earlier functional and structural emphases which managed to reify the institutional features of social life (offices, rules, rights and duties), and essentialize corporate groups so that they somehow persisted irrespective of the actions of distinct individuals. At best, individual actors appeared as conduits of social-structural effects, their actions and ‘choices’ simply causing to be reproduced the systems of marital or economic (et al.) exchange in which they were mired; here was no individuality or will, and little change. By contrast, a transactional perspective attends to the dynamism of social process and the creation of cultural forms. Sociocultural milieux consist of individuals in interaction, cooperation and competition, struggling to make meaning: to express themselves, to reach one another, to satisfy themselves, to control one another.Their engaging in strategic thinking, decision-making and initiative-taking, and their engagement with one another, give rise to socio-cultural processes and forms of varying duration and legitimation which are consented to and employed to varying degrees, for a variety of purposes, in various contexts. It is not system which is the a priori but individual agency, process and movement.

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Formative development

Building upon Raymond Firth’s distinction between ‘social organization’ and ‘social structure’ (1951), the former representing the present social system as derived from the sum of a series of decisions made by a group of individuals, and the latter the perduring factors which influence (constrain and direct) the choices about which individuals decide, Edmund Leach (1954, 1961b) explored the gap between behaviour as ideally prescribed by social-structural norms and that actually decided upon. The only actual socio-cultural order was statistical in nature: the patterns and changes to which a host of individual decisions incrementally and incidentally amounted. Moreover, individuals reached their decisions as a result of conscious and unconscious attempts to gain power over their lives—and thereby those of others. This, Leach concluded (following Nietzsche), was a universal human trait.

It was in the next generation of anthropological theorizing, in particular in the work of Fredrik Barth, F.G.Bailey, Robert Paine, and those associated with Max Gluckman’s Manchester School and after (Clyde Mitchell, Bill Epstein, Emanuel Marx, Bruce Kapferer, Anthony Cohen and John Comaroff), that transactionalism as such was formulated.

For Barth (1959, 1966), it is necessary to collate the strategic, the symbolic and the structural components of socio-cultural systems. The first thing to be said, however, is that system—the aggregation and integration, consistency and regularity of socio-cultural phenomena—is not axiomatic and is, in fact, variable. To the extent that they exist, normative systems are generated and maintained by individual actors making strategic decisions that reflect and maximize their individual interests. The ‘whole’ effect is one of feedback and flow; structural arrangements are the cumulative result of a number of separate choices, made by individuals in symbolic interaction. These arrangements then serve as ‘canalizing factors’ for future individual decisions; the symbolic and the structural may thus be conceptualized not as somehow other than the individually strategic, or superior to it, but as different generations of it. But individuals are not determined to relate to one another; if they are constrained by their past actions and choices, then they are liberated by them too. Socio-cultural order and pattern is made up of ongoing relations between political actors, actors who can also manipulate the order, and change the pattern, in pursuit of their goals.

For Bailey (1957, 1969, 1971), through employment of a key analogy of individual actors playing a game of power, one is able analytically to account for any number of different kinds and levels of socio-cultural

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interaction, sociation and institution from neighbourhood and village, through regions, to nations and beyond. ‘Social structure’, then, can be understood as the current ‘rules of the game’, within which individual actors make strategic choices, which then influence the institutionalization of future rules. ‘Institutions’ represent the officiations of individual actors wearing masks, whose role and authority have the consent (or at least the apathy) of those other individuals who act as institution members. All the time, moreover, ‘normative rules’, amounting to publicly accepted customs and routines by which the game of sociation is played and evaluated, are offset by the ‘pragmatic rules’ of private, individual wisdom, strategy and interest. Socio-cultural exchange, in short, may be conceived of as a game which individuals make up as they go along.

Critique

Developments of transactional theory such as Bailey’s and Barth’s met with the reactive critique of systems analysts—from the original functionalist and structuralist camps to arriviste Marxian and poststructuralist ones. There was a reiteration of the belief that only some form of methodological holism could apprehend the system and structure that was culture and society (thereby reinstating the axiomatic nature of these variable and processual phenomena). Only a top-down analysis, treating overarching or underlying socio-cultural forces and factors, could account for institutional patterns of relations between (socalled) classes, castes, clans, nations, bureaucracies, roles and genders.The notion of individual actors and their agency is a culturally specific one, it was further claimed, and it is ethnocentric, not to mention unwieldy, to seek to track the interested outcomes of the rational choices which they make. As Asad put it (1972), an emphasis on the rationality and voluntariness of individuals’ actions ignores the fact that outcomes are often unpredictable and unexpected. Moreover, a history of past action comes to restrict present choice, while it is the case that present action is equally, variously, compelled.

Notwithstanding that these criticisms in large part reiterated the holistic and deterministic assumptions and agenda which transactionalism had set out to reform, there was some attempt to effect a conciliation between the perspectives. Might it not be possible, Kapferer pondered for instance (1976), to bring together Barth and Asad by drawing upon Blau’s (1967) notion of the ‘emergent’ properties of institutions, relations and organizations which, once they have been set up by individual agents, can then exert an independent effect? This

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