1.1 Introduction
because you get paid so little here (laughs) you can never afford to go back, and my family isn’t loaded so […]and the best times you know, when I took, I took the past four winters off, I had three months off each so I’ve done 260 days of boarding in the past four years, that’s fucking awesome you know?
The above quote comes from a 33-year-old British man who at the time of my fieldwork in Queenstown, New Zealand, considered to be the world’s adventure capital, had been living and working as a grounds person for a skydiving company for five years. For him, the little amount of money he earns in the adventure tourism industry is outweighed by his nonworking leisure time activities such as snowboarding, which carry much more cultural, network and thus symbolic capital within the subculture of the adventure tourism industry. From my 10-year comparative ethnographic study on the adventure tourism industry and long residency in Interlaken, Switzerland, I argue that the adventure tourism industry is located at the interface of labor, leisure, travel, mobility and migration, where boundaries are not only becoming “blurry”, but in line with Duncan et al. (2013), also collapsing. This means viewing the margins of work and leisure, labor and play as not necessarily separated or clearly regulated spheres of daily social practice.
This man’s quote above also resonates with Giddens’ concern about the “mobile nature of self-identity” (1991: 81) within postindustrial lifestyles where personal choice and a plurality of lifestyle options reign. Indeed, for some privileged individuals, like the one above, choices are “part of a new cultural tendency, and indeed compulsion, to develop life plans and relationship stories in ever more inventive ways” (Elliott and Urry 2010: 90–91). Individuals involved in the adventure tourism industry from the time of its establishment in the 1980s have and continue to lead alternative lifestyles that are characterized by particular sociocultural, political-economic trends, where work and leisure have become meshed and imbued with different sociocultural values and thus symbolic meaning for the ideological construction of identity both individually and collectively.
In fact, this particular individual and the many more that I spoke with during my time in both Interlaken and Queenstown is a prime example of the “mobile lifestyle resident” and western nomad, whose identities and life experiences are characterized by choice, shifting mobilities and lifestyle experimentation due to the development of niche markets within the global new economy, where tourism, and more specifically, adventure tourism, a now global and cultural industry, relies on the commodification of experience, thrill and risk. Like many other forms of cultural tourism, adventure tourism becomes a dominant site for the mobility of ideas, capital, resources and individuals, where places, characterized principally by their topographical features and laidback lifestyles, are specifically equipped, toured and performed by different groups of people both on and offline.
The quote above encompasses many of the themes discussed throughout this book that have to do with labor, leisure, mobility, adventure, place and performance. The data for this study stems from a decade of ethnographic work based on my long-term residency in Interlaken, Switzerland (2001–2014) and personal experience within the adventure tourism industry itself, which I discuss in more detail in both Chapters 3 and 7. Adventure tourism constitutes a major mode of tourist mobility—and one that is growing rapidly (Swarbrooke et al. 2003; McKay 2014). Within the context of adventure tourism, Interlaken, Switzerland and Queenstown, New Zealand have both become major global destinations, Interlaken due to its central geographical location within Europe and access to some of the highest peaks in the Swiss Alps and Queenstown because of its location in the Southern Alps marked by its “Global Adventure Badge” (Lonely Planet 2010: 301). Both towns are of similar size (15,000 inhabitants) and economically thrive on tourism. In fact, over 90% of the local economies of Interlaken and Queenstown are generated through tourism (Berwert 2006; Van Uden 2013), which are relevant for both countries’ national economies, making them key players within the global market of tourism.
With anywhere from 2 to 3 million visitors passing through annually, both places have become magnets for lifestyle mobility residents, lifestyle migrants, transnational migrant workers and adventure seekers (which I define in Chapter 3), making them ideal sites for investigating the social production of place, and how it has become meaningful for different groups of people (Tuan 1977; Agnew 1987; Cresswell 2004; Jaworski and Thurlow 2004; Massey 2005; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010, 2011a, b; Gonçalves 2018) as well as examining how places are embodied and performed linguistically, visually and thus semiotically by tourists, locals, tourism operators and marketing agencies to name but a few key social actors. In fact, it is precisely because these diverse groups of people and the combination of the anchored and the mobile feed off of each other that Interlaken and Queenstown become fascinating sites for social scientific inquiry and sociolinguistics more specifically.
For the most part, sociolinguists, applied linguists and linguistic anthropologists have been concerned with investigating language in tourism “as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political and social change” (Heller et al. 2014: 425). As such, scholars have focused their attention on fleeting encounters between hosts and guests, the symbolic (and meta symbolic) uses of language within tourism domains, tensions between commodification and authenticity, performances of self and other, and contestations of identity claims with respect to individuals’ multilingual repertoires. These are some of the ways in which Heller et al. (2014) propose tourism can be used “as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity” (ibid.). In these ways, scholars of language share a common concern with other social scientists (primarily sociologists and human geographers) around contested notions of “community”, “identity” and “place”. As scholars of language, a primary aim has been to better understand how language(s), multilingual repertoires and circulating discourses and other semiotic systems are deployed for reasons of authentication, commodification and meaning-making within the “new” economy that “foregrounds an intensified circulation of human, material, and symbolic resources” (Heller et al. 2014: 428).
In this book, which is situated within the subfield of the “sociolinguistics of tourism”, I am concerned with various complex processes pertaining to tourism and of adventure tourism in particular. First, I am concerned with the circulation of people as both tourists and transnational migrant workers in two global adventure meccas since these two distinct groups of people are currently considered to be the largest groups traversing the world to date, but for very different socioeconomic and political reasons. Second, I am interested in the ways in which places are experienced, performed and sold, and thus adopt a performative approach to place in my discussion of place-making practices. Third, I am interested in the semiotic industry of tourism and the commodification of adventure both online and offline, where thrill, risk and safety of “embodied challenges” are bottled up, packaged and sold linguistically, visually and thus semiotically, where individuals’ identities and bodies are reassessed and imbued with cultural, social and network capital. Fourth, I am interested in current theories of mobility that epistemologically question the boundaries and breakdown between labor, migration and leisure ...