Sex, Tourism and the Postcolonial Encounter

Landscapes of Longing in Egypt

Jessica Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Illustrated by revealing interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book is ostensibly about western women who sleep with 'native' men while on holiday. Broadening the scope of issues involved, it examines the link between these holiday romances and a much wider romanticism of place and people - of the landscapes of paradise, deserts and the lure of the Bedouin sheikh - that are used to sell these destinations. It argues that the romantic stereotyping and deliberate positioning of 'Third World' resorts as places that somehow exist outside of the modernities the women come from is inextricably bound up in the relationships. Similarly, for the local man the tourist resort is perceived as a place other than his own cultural space and time and represents a modernity that is otherwise only found in the 'West'. The relationships that ensue can therefore only occur because the tourist resort acts as an intermediate space. In analyzing the interaction of these men and women within the context of modernity, the book provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality, as well as opening up the debate on sex tourism and showing this to be a lot more ambiguous and complicated than it might at first appear.

1 Nostalgia for Travel – Adventure Travel and the Ethnic Encounter in Egypt

DOI: 10.4324/9781315608518-1

Introduction

The term ‘geographical imaginations’ was adopted by Gregory (1994) to refer to the ways in which social life is ‘embedded in space, place and landscape’. When the term is applied to tourism and tourist practice it can be said to be a crucial element in determining the final choice of destination, because before we go anywhere for the first time on holiday we often have a strong idea of what it will be like. Indeed we choose one tourist destination over another because of how we imagine the social life of its space, place and landscape. But holiday-oriented geographical imaginations of place – what Löfgren (1999: 2) calls ‘vacationscapes’ – can sit uneasily when it comes to the holiday hotspots of the global South, where imaginations of exotic paradises peopled with colourful, traditional, friendly natives are also places of poverty, disease and despotism. Those who market these destinations understandably avoid mention of authoritarian rule, human rights abuse or the lack of access to good health facilities, clean water and education etc – unless it is aesthetically repackaged in a way that portrays local people as living a simple lifestyle devoid of all the hassles of modern day life. The tourist landscape is constructed, both literally in the shape of gated tourist resorts and theme parks, and symbolically through the geographical imaginations of tour operators and tourists.

Tourism seeks to capitalise on differences between places, often spatial and cultural in scope and as Momsen (1994: 129) notes, when this takes place in a developing country, tourism ‘has all the elements of domination, exploitation and manipulation characteristic of colonialism’. With their links to what is often termed the largest global industry, ‘vacationscapes’ tend to dominate other more local geographical imaginations and, indeed, often only manage to maintain their hegemony (and income-generating properties) by denying localised geographical imaginations. Of course, a complete tourist ‘bubble’ (McCannell 1976, Judd 1999) is difficult to maintain, but intrusions can be explained away by tourists and the tourist industry through spatial and temporal discourses of difference such as Orientalism and the racial and sexual stereotyping of ‘others’ which often (but not always) juxtaposes the modern mobile ‘First World’ tourist against a ‘Third World’ local who is a fixed identity without agency.

The hegemony of the tourist imaginary enables the tourist to enjoy his or her paradise. The tourist imaginary does more than blot out unwelcome thoughts of disparity – it constructs Third World destinations as ancient, timeless, immobile places populated by people who somehow manage to exist outside modernity.

Contemporary tourism however is not just a modern form of colonialism as Momsen argues, it is also a re-enactment or a return to the historical period when tourism was first established as part of modern Western culture, and nowhere is this more visible than in Egypt where the first package tour was established by Thomas Cook in 1869. Gregory (2001) has argued that there is a ‘vital continuity between cultures of travel in the past (in particular those cultures of travel established by European and North American tourists to Egypt between 1820 and 1920) and travel in the present which becomes visible as a form of ‘colonial nostalgia’ (2001:112). These travel experiences that were recorded in literature, photography and painting (and later through cinema) have retained such an extraordinary degree of appeal to contemporary tourists that today we find that the ‘fatal attractions of colonial nostalgia are inscribed within contemporary cultures of travel’ (2001: 113). Just as Said argued that Orientialism was legitimized through the constant citing of one text by the next in order to construct a ‘scientific’ authenticity to the discourse of colonialism, so contemporary tourism has invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) of colonial nostalgia that fill tourist itineraries and establish tourism as a force that claims to speak the truth about other places and cultures. The ‘truths’ that are created by the repetition of these nostalgic cultures of travel elevate, mobilise and privilege the subjectivity of the tourist/traveller, fixing the objectivity of the travelled upon. They also contribute to the imaginative creation of spaces of modernity and its supposed opposites and they go on to become a crucial element of the sexual ‘ethnic encounters’ that take place within these tourist landscapes.

In this chapter I will explore how these vacationscapes that were first created over 100 years ago continue to be informed and validated by the paths created by colonial travelling. I draw upon Gregory’s (1999, 2005) analysis of Victorian travel writers in Egypt and compare this to discourses present in British adventure traveller tourism, in particular a talk given by a tour guide from the UK adventure travel company The Imaginative Traveller at the International Travellers World exhibition in Earls Court London in 1999.

Tourism is regularly divided into hierarchical categories, perhaps the most common being the distinction between traveller and tourist. While the tourist is often a feminised figure who travels in large groups and consumes parodic reconstructions of authentic cultural products, the masculine subjectivity of the independent traveller who travels alone ‘off the beaten track’ supposedly leads to a less mass-mediated ‘authentic’ experience.

However there is so much overlap between traveller and tourist (as we shall see package tourism even offers its own version of independent travel called adventure travel) and because so many people occupy both positions at different times in their life, I will use both terms quite loosely. All forms of tourism today – package tourism, adventure travel, independent travelling or a mixture of these forms of travel – offer different opportunities to experience an ‘ethnic encounter’, whether it is visiting a native village or getting to know the waiter at your hotel.

Tourism and the Colonial Legacy in Egypt

The term ‘Middle’ or ‘Near East’ used to describe the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia geographically positions the area in relation to the ‘Far East’. And indeed the colonisation of Egypt by competing British and French administrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, in many ways, a by-product of earlier colonial projects in Southeast Asia. Occupying Egypt meant control over crucial trade routes that linked India and the rest of Asia with Europe, culminating in the construction and control of the Suez Canal when it finally opened in 1869.

Although several proposals for a French occupation of Egypt had been advanced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was Napoleon’s invasion that first brought Egypt under European colonial control and influence.¹ Under the control of what was seen to be a weakening Ottoman Empire, Egypt was perceived in Europe as open for exploitation. Accompanying the military and naval forces of France, and later Britain, came European merchants and dealers who established flourishing business communities in the major cities, especially Cairo and Alexandria. Joining them came hundreds of archaeologists, literary scholars, architects, artists, geographers, explorers, travel writers and scientists to investigate, dig up, map, draw, write and re-write and most importantly ‘discover’ the European-imagined Egypt into being (Said 1978;Gregory 1999). As Said and many others since have argued, this led to the establishment of a new discipline of Orientalism (study of the East), defined as ‘a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ by,

…making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it… (1978: 3).

1 From the ‘Encyclopedia of the Orient’, www.lexicorient.com.

Although the French occupation of Egypt lasted just three years (1798–1801) it was a major turning point when the country was exposed to European military forces, systems of administration and ideologies that would have lasting influence. During the following century Egypt would become the object of competing policies between France and Britain, a part of the ‘Eastern Question’ and the intense focus of a new intellectual tradition in the West of Egyptology – an ‘ology’ that took off when a group of Bonaparte’s soldiers ‘discovered’ the Rosetta Stone, a stone tablet with a trilingual inscription making it possible for European scholars to decipher hieroglyphs for the first time.

With an Ottoman Empire generally felt to be in decline from the outset, the European intellectual focus on Egypt concentrated on its past at the expense of its present. This past was used, much as Ancient Greece was and still is, to establish a discourse on the origins of European civilisation (Bernal 1991). Egyptology became very fashionable in Europe – made even more popular by the accounts given and pictures painted by Victorian scholars who flocked to the region. Orientalist art and monuments were collected and brought back to an eager audience exposed to new monuments of Empire, and introduced through these collections to new themes such as cultural cross-dressing, performance and display at the international exhibitions, and contemporary museological practice (Hackforth-Jones and Roberts 2005). Egypt was also drawn into the European imagination through artist’s impressions of Egypt, its cities, inhabitants, the river Nile and its Pharaonic temples. An Egypt that was portrayed as full of decaying ruins (reflecting and reinforcing the idea that Egypt’s greatness was all in the past) with a population dressed in clothes that – for a European audience – resembled the costumery of the Bible. Such work had a profound impact on nineteenth century Europe and, as Europe’s nearest ‘Other’, it is unsurprising perhaps that it was Cairo and the Nile river that became the first foreign tourist destination to be offered by Thomas Cook in 1869 (the same year that the Suez Canal opened).

For the most part travel writing during the British presence in Egypt, whether by men or women, both reflected and informed the dominant discourses of the time. As Said has argued these discourses were largely concerned with legitimising the colonial project through the establishment of an Egypt and Middle East composed of exoticising, Orientalist stereotypes of the region’s history, landscape and people. Crucially writers on ‘the Orient’ must always locate themselves in regard to the Orient:

…this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kind of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text – all of which adds up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient and finally representing it or speaking on its behalf (1978: 48).

Theatre, Text, Scripting…and Film

Much of the groundwork in the creation of the tourist imagination lies in the practices of colonialism that often ‘wrote’ newly occupied places into being for the reader at home. The colonising gaze was translated and disseminated – and in so doing arguably became far more powerful – through the medium of theatre and text.

The power of the written word within the colonialist project to spread the ‘gaze’ of the eyewitness traveller has been noted by Said:

…people, places and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes (1978: 93).

For Said, the Orient was (and is) a ‘theatre’ for the West with the representation of places and landscapes making up the ‘text’. In both imagery and text, of the place and the people, the resulting Orientalism was used by the intellectual elite of the European powers to maintain the project of colonialism, act as a counter-strategy against the fear of the unknown and in doing so help define what is Western or European by defining what it is not – Oriental. Their work, as Mitchell (1988) says, was necessary for the colonial project that needed a country to be readable, ‘like a book’.

Building on Said’s metaphors of theatre and text in the construction of Orientalism,Gregory (1999) argues that the consequent production of travel and tourism is a ‘scripting,’ that is:

…a developing series of steps and signals, part structured and part improvised, that produces a narrativized sequence of interactions through which roles are made and remade by soliciting responses and responding to cues (1999: 115).

Gregory has chosen the term scripting in order to focus on the actual practice of travel and its performative nature. Scripting, he argues ‘accentuates the production (and consumption) of spaces’ and ‘brings into view practices that take place on the ground’ (1999: 115). Examining the scripting produced through the literary efforts of European and American travel writers visiting Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century he argues they constructed an Egypt for themselves and their readers which was a ‘transparent’² space and,

…exposed the gaze of the observer who had the power – and the duty – to sweep aside the mask, or in a visible sexualized project of discovery, to remove the veil (1999: 116).

2 The idea of a ‘transparent space’ is also crucial to imaginations of the desert in Europe which will be examined in later chapters.

Today’s theatre of tourism has the added influence of cinema and television and while contemporary tourism is often portrayed as a predominantly visual activity (Urry 1990), it is not always the visual activity at the site itself but the reproduction of iconic imagery that is the most influential. The following section examines some of the enduring methods used to stage and perform ‘Egypt’ expressed in Gregory’s accounts of Victorian travel writers that can still be found in the independent travel industry in the late 1990s. In particular I refer to a talk ‘Egypt: Not Just A Pile Of Old Ruins’³ given by tour guide Adam Greener from The Imaginative Traveller (a UK-based adventure travel tour company that specialises in ‘adventurous’ tours to the Middle East).

3 ‘Egypt: Not Just A Pile Of Old Ruins’ was part of a series of talks offered at the Independent Travellers’ World held at the London Arena on 5 February 1999.

In the next chapter I adopt the same approach – comparing the work of Victorian women travel writers with a contemporary talk on women and travel given by two women who run an independent travel agency – to examine the ways in which Victorian women’s approaches to the ways of performing and staging travel are still with us today.

Travelling through Time

Representations of people, places and landscapes in Western literature and popular media do not function alone, but are distilled through travel to the sites of colonial encounters and accounts. It is the way Western tourists travel that builds up and reinforces imaginations of tourist landscapes. As Gregory notes:

The routes of most tourists are routinized, and each trip in its turn contributes to the layering and sedimentation of powerful imaginative geographies that shape (though they do not fully determine) the expectations and experiences of subsequent travellers (1999: 117).

The travel writers he cites visited Egypt between 1820 and 1920. Nearly 200 years after these travellers first published their accounts of Egypt, the ‘routinised’ routes and the sites and sights they mapped out have gone on to make up much of the itinerary of both contemporary package and adventure travel holidays – whether it is a trip to the Valley of the Kings by donkey with Explore Worldwide, seeing the Pyrami...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Nostalgia for Travel – Adventure Travel and the Ethnic encounter in egypt
• 2 Writing Women’s Travel
• 3 Paradise and Deserts – Tourist Landscapes on the Margins of Modernity
• 4 Becoming a Nomad – The Ethnosexual Encounter Today
• 5 Re-imagined Masculinities – From Marginal to Hyperreal
• 6 Negotiations in Tourist Space
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index