Tourism Encounters and Controversies

Ontological Politics of Tourism Development

Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, Carina Ren, van der Duim René

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317009511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The multiplicity of tourism encounters provide some of the best available occasions to observe the social world and its making(s). Focusing on ontological politics of tourism development, this book examines how different versions of tourism are enacted, how encounters between different versions of tourism orderings may result in controversies, but also on how these enactments and encounters are entangled in multiple ways to broader areas of development, conservation, policy and destination management. Throughout the book, encounters and controversies are investigated from a poststructuralist and relational approach as complex and emerging, seeing the roles and characteristics of related actors as co-constituted. Inspired by post-actor-network theory and related research, the studies include the social as well as the material, but also multiplicity and ontological politics when examining controversial matters or events.

Chapter 1
Tourism Encounters, Controversies and Ontologies

Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, Carina Ren and René van der Duim

1.1 Introduction

In order to address long lasting human–wildlife conflicts and persistent poverty around Bwindi, a small national park in the south-west of Uganda, gorilla tourism was introduced in 1993 (Ahebwa, 2012). The purchase of a US$ 500 permit now enables especially wealthy tourists from the North to visit the gorillas in their natural habitat. Through complex processes of habituation, in which they are getting used to the presence of human beings, gorillas are turned into ‘objects of the tourist gaze’ and acquire economic value. However, even before this new relationship to tourism and tourists, gorillas have also enacted other networks. For centuries, gorillas of Bwindi have co-existed with and competed for forest resources with hunter-food gathering and farming communities. From the late nineteenth century onwards, they were captured, studied and designated as “man’s closest neighbor” in a scientific network of biologists. Also, they eventually became “trophies” in an international hunting network or were poached and – as a reaction to that – protected as “endangered species” in a conservation network, initiated by the work of Dianne Fossey (see Van der Duim, Ampumuza and Ahebwa, 2014)

At this point in time, gorilla tourism has registered considerable success and has gained durability; predominantly by enrolling heterogeneous actors into a complex network. These are tourists with their dollars, travel documents, permits, cameras and other equipment, but also neighboring communities that connect to it through a variety of tourism revenue schemes and direct and indirect employment (see Ahebwa, Van der Duim and Sandbrook, 2012a; 2012b; Ahebwa and Van der Duim, 2013a; 2013b). However, the gorilla tourism network has also remained fluid, as various episodes of instability and controversy burst out. Some are minor incidents or occurrences, others are manifested in continuous negotiations or discourses over a period of time, while there are even examples of hardcore and violent conflicts. Scientists have for instance contested gorilla tourism, pointing at the possible health risks for gorillas due to their encounters with tourists (Sandbrook and Semple, 2006). Laudati (2010, p.726) describes how Bwindi has become ‘a product of wilderness, a wild and unspoiled destination marketed to foreign visitors’, arguing ‘that the “new” relations between people and parks created under ecotourism in Bwindi have in actuality created new forms of control and vulnerabilities’. In 1999, the Interahamwe (a Hutu paramilitary organization) attacked and kidnapped a group of 14 tourists in Bwindi. Eight of the tourists were eventually killed. The story was featured in National Geographic with the result that gorilla tourism was clogged for quite a period of time. Last but not least, stability is also threatened by the gorillas themselves as they continue to move outside the park boundaries where they are sometimes killed (Laudati, 2010).

Obviously, this example shows that gorilla tourism is about tourism. But at the same time, it highlights its relations to other things. Following gorilla tourism leads to a number of discourses (on the relation between humans and nature, and between conservation and tourism), to a variety of places and localities (scientific laboratories, zoos, lodges, villages, the forest, the international tourism market), to documents (legislative documents, permits, agreements with communities), objects (guns, dollars, snares, fires), organizations (like the International Gorilla Conservation Programme or the Uganda Wildlife Authority) and people (park staff, iconic conservationists like Leakey or Fossey, international tourists, tour operators, the Batwa and other locals) and to traditional livelihood, hunting, conservation, scientific, and tourism practices (see Van der Duim, Ampumuza and Ahebwa, 2014).

The same applies to this book, which is a book on tourism and tourism research. But it is also about other things. Mostly, it is about the different ways in which tourism interferes with, is shaped by and is entangled to “other things” such as money, future scenarios, food networks, coral reefs, cod fish and casinos and about the implications of such encounters and thus also how tourism is by itself an ordering force (Franklin, 2004; 2012). Our starting point and unifying argument of all the chapters of this volume is that tourism is a relational phenomenon. Tourism comes about and contributes to shaping our world through relational encounters and entanglements of diverse orders. Tourism not only affects and enacts particular “tourism actors” at destinations, such as the gorillas and local communities described above, but even the Earth itself (Huijbens and Gren, 2012). In this book, we wish to explore some of the entanglements of tourism to other things. More precisely, we wish to engage with the diverse ways by which tourism, for instance as a social practice or a business activity, impacts upon and is impacted by other ordering attempts and thus how tourism and “other things” co-constitute each other and work to co-produce the social and the Earth.

Our objective is to move from nouns to verbs (Law, 2009), when we think through the implications of tourism. This means that we must shift our attention from researching and understanding what tourism is, to focus on how tourism works, how it is accomplished in different relations and how it leads to different impacts. This argument grows out of concerns with how the boundaries between usual organizing concepts of tourism research, tourism experiences and businesses such as the tourist and the host, supply side and demand side, home and away are becoming more and more blurred. As also exemplified in mobility and performativity-inspired studies of tourism (Sheller and Urry, 2004; Larsen, 2008), it is questionable to what degree such distinctions and binaries remain useful to describe tourism in all of its complex richness.

We follow Latour and contend that classical critique of tourism has “run out of steam” (Latour, 2010). If the usual building blocks of the tourist system no longer appear stable and the distinction between production and consumption, home and away, host and guest is becoming increasingly blurred, it is impossible to draw ‘precise boundaries’ (Latour, 2010, p.473). We therefore cannot build our critique on the possible ‘discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances’ (Latour, 2010, p.475); we need to find alternative ways to address tourism development in critical ways. One way to do that, we suggest, is to approach it through a relational approach and in terms of ordering.

As a mode of ordering, tourism indeed (re)arranges people, things, technologies, discourses and values in certain, rather than other ways (Franklin, 2004; 2012). However, tourism is not a single mode of ordering. As conveyed by the example of gorilla tourism and many of the chapters of this book, tourism is materially and socially working on the world order in multiple ways, blurring hitherto clear definitions while also creating new and sometimes unexpected boundaries. As a consequence, the implications of tourism are palpable, also in areas which are seemingly external to tourism proper.

While we acknowledge the felt scholarly need and urge until now to carve out an academic space and tools for investigating tourism in its own right, we believe that time has come to tear down some of the often restraining disciplinary, methodological, as well as mental, barriers which have characterized much of the research on tourism. There is no such object as tourism lying and waiting for us to experience as consumers or describe as detached academics. As we hope to show in this book, tourism comes about through relational encounters. As such, it is a thing which comes about along multiple lines or threads of life (Ingold, 2008). Ingold draws on Heidegger in his description of the difference between things and objects. In his words: ‘The object stands before us as a fait accompli, presenting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection. [ … ] The thing, by contrast, is a “going on”, or better, a place where several goings on become entwined’ (Ingold, 2008, p.6). The thing denotes a gathering, in its ancient meaning (Heidegger, 1951 cited in Latour and Weibel, 2005; and see Pálsson, 2005). While an object can thus be conceived of as a billiard ball that only moves or has agency due to an external force (Emirbayer, 1997; Ingold, 2008) the ‘thing has the character [ … ] of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots’ (Ingold, 2008, p.6). Thereby a thing grows or emerges through relational movement that may or may not be ordered into a more or less stabilized form. As we argue in this book, tourism works in such emerging ways, which as we argue, may be studied for instance by taking a closer look at the encounters and controversies were extra concern and attention is devoted to its ordering. We will get back to this shortly.

The study of tourism should therefore not be a rehearsal in pinpointing, delimiting or confining it to one specific area or one kind of research, development approach or management model. Rather, a study of tourism should strive to show ways by which it affects and is affected by various other entities, hence not being a study of tourism as an object but rather through and with tourism understood as a creative and formative process (Ingold, 2008; 2011).

By redirecting the scope from what tourism is (or is not) to how it is made to work, “external” entities are brought to the fore (Callon, 1999). The act of ordering, be it developing alternative methodological approaches to describe tourism or management models to run tourism businesses, always creates externalities that potentially lead to or are manifested in controversies. Rather than reaffirming boundaries between tourism “itself” and “external” conditions, field or actors, we wish to underscore the old anthropological insight that boundaries are the product of relations, but not vice versa (Barth, 1969). Hence, we would like to display how ‘everything is entangled with everything else’ (Law and Singleton, 2013, p.490) and approach the interferences between different orderings and agendas as generative events (Whatmore, 2009; Mol and Law, 2002; Vertesi, 2014). Such an approach draws attention to how relational ordering has ontological implications, as we will discuss further below.

This chapter proceeds by situating further the general approach of the book and points out some of the derived directions and implications. We first clarify how the notions of encounters and controversies can be described in relational terms. We do so from the approach of (post-)Actor–Network Theory, which has previously been our inspiration to deal with the relationality of tourism (Van der Duim, Ren and Jóhannesson, 2012; 2013). This discussion feeds into a section that addresses the epistemological challenges raised by a relational approach to tourism. The third and last part of this section presents the chapters of the book.

1.2 Tourism Encounters and Controversies: a Relational Approach

By affording and providing the grounds for the unfolding of a plethora of activities and interests by a vast array of actors, tourism continuously conjures controversies. This has been a particular object of study within tourism for decades. Already in 1975, Turner and Ash (1975) discussed the impacts of tourism in their famous book The Golden Hordes, arguing that ‘international tourism is like King Midas in reverse: a device for the systematic destruction of everything that is beautiful in the world’ (p.15). More recently, in their book Tourism Controversies, Mouffakir and Burns (2012) discuss controversies related to the impacts of tourism on people and places and show the way particular forms of tourism (hunting tourism, gaming, volunteer tourism, aboriginal tourism or mass tourism) have been subject to debate and polemics centering on processes of commodification, authenticity, participation or limits to growth. Also, the seminal Hosts and Guests edited by Smith (1989), as well as Boissevain’s (1996) edited volume Coping with mass tourism. European reactions to mass tourism, are examples of how the business, development and social activity of tourism are most often framed and perceived as battlefields of differences where the struggles are set between inherently different or oppositional hosts and guests with the tourism developers, entrepreneurs or local authorities as occasional controversy side-kicks (see also Shepherd, 2002).

In order to by-pass a common notion of encounters as clashes between two or more clearly separated orders (Emirbayer, 1997), we move away in this book from impact related controversies and take a next step by providing specific examples of how to study and situate contested events related to tourism in terms which do not replicate and reconfirm it as a clash between (fixed) identities, between insiders and outsiders, between a static or objectified local culture and mobile global flow of tourism, between “internal” and “external” stakeholders of various sorts, between “hosts and guests” or “nature” and “culture”. Rather, encounters and controversies are investigated from a poststructuralist and relational approach as complex and emerging, and the roles and characteristics of related actors as co-constituted.

This approach is in line with recent discussion of controversy within science and technology studies (Venturini, 2010; 2012) and geography (Whatmore, 2009). According to Venturini controversy begins ‘when actors discover that they cannot ignore each other and controversies end when actors manage to work out a solid compromise to live together. Anything between these two extremes can be called a controversy’ (2010, p.261). As creative or generative events, controversies emerge through ordering attempts and arguably offer us ‘the best available occasion to observe the social world in its making’ (Venturini, 2010, p.263, original emphasis; and see Jóhannesson, Ren, Van der Duim and Munk, 2014).

According to this approach, it is by studying relational encounters and controversies that we can partially describe the making of realities or what Ingold (2000) describes as weaving of the world. Relational encounters and controversies in tourism manifest, in other words, the doing of tourism and its entanglement to other things. They result from alternative efforts of competing orderings, which frame and enact realities that have multiple implications. They can reach a temporary stabilization and even become an institutionalized social phenomenon between different groups (see Pellis, Duineveld and Wagner in this volume). But still, they should be taken as growing out of heterogeneous relational encounters and as such continuously taking shape as well as shaping future encounters.

This view assigns primacy to processes of formation as opposed to their final products, and to flows and transformations as against states of matter. Importantly, this move does not mean that less attention is given to power relations and politics. On the contrary, we seek to shed light on the complex and political nature of tourism development (see also Jolivet and Heiskanen, 2010), slowing down the process of knowing through tracing the ontological movements of the world. Instead of starting off with predefined entities that more or less clash with each other, a relational approach follows the connections and encounters that may potentially lead to controversy and formation of entities that can be defined as oppositional.

In this book, power appears as a thoroughly relational accomplishment (Latour, 1986) and the spaces of political activities as multiple (Amin, 2004). Every constituent – humans, materials, technologies, buildings – of what we denote as tourism or as another ordering attempt – conservation, development, policy – is a relational accomplishment. The trajectories of diverse constituents are bundled together in diverse topological combinations (see Ingold, 2008). Power and politics relate to how such “bundling” can be affected, ordered and even managed. Lury, Parisi and Terranova (2012) argue that at present we live in a topological society where ‘movement – as the ordering of continuity – composes the forms of social and cultural life themselves’ (p.6). This is the description of a globalized society where ‘it is the mutable quality of relations that determines distance and proximity, rather than a singular and absolute measure’ (Harvey, 2012, p.78). It follows that who, or what, is included or excluded in every ordering attempt depending on heterogeneous relations and thus it is imperative to follow, engage with and describe how different modes of relational ordering matter.

This type of research focuses on how ontologies are or may be constructed and enacted in different ways, and how their “overflows” and encounters resulting from multiple tourism and non-tourism enactments, evoke controversies. Hence, it diverts from a predominantly management-oriented view which highly influences, some may argue, current research into tourism, to a multiplicity-oriented approach (Law and Hassard, 1999; Vikkelsø, 2007). Such an engagement enables us to examine and describe the fluxes and flows of many different networks and the enactment of multiple versions of for instance destinations or things, which may seem singular at first (Ren, 2009; 2011). It also opens up for critically addressing how certain (e.g. managerial, political, conservationist or cultural) practices are part of the enactment of certain realities rather than others, but also how different tourism realities and orderings may co-exist and how ultimately, tourism is not and can never become a singular, unambiguous or hegemonic practice.

In relation to the tourist destinatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Tourism Encounters, Controversies and Ontologies
• 2 Shaping Money and Relationships in Touristic Cuba
• 3 Reef Controversies: The Case of Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia
• 4 Entrepreneurship and Controversies of Tourism Development
• 5 Mapping the New Nordic Issue-scape: How to Navigate a Diffuse Controversy with Digital Methods
• 6 Real Things, Tourist Things and Drawing the Line in the Ocean
• 7 Conflicts Forever. The Path Dependencies of Tourism Conflicts; the Case of Anabeb Conservancy, Namibia
• 8 The Tourist-Vampire and the Citizen as Ontological Figures: Human and Nonhuman Encounters in the Postpolitical
• 9 Hotel California: Biopowering Tourism, from New Economy Singapore to Post-Mao China
• 10 A Fish Called Tourism: Emergent Realities of Tourism Policy in Iceland
• 11 Topological Encounters: Marketing Landscapes for Tourists
• 12 Possible Greenland: On ‘Futuring’ in Nation Branding
• 13 Postscript: Making Headways, Expanding the Field and Slowing Down
• Index