Tourism and Intercultural Exchange

Why Tourism Matters

Gavin Jack, Alison Phipps

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781845412654
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

This book asks the question; why is it that tourism matters? It looks at how it is we do tourism and learn to be tourists when we are on holiday. Tourism is a dynamic way of being that may facilitate or hinder intercultural exchange. The ways in which we do tourism and the places in which we are tourists raise practical, material and emotional questions about tourist life. This book draws on both empirical work and a range of theoretical frameworks, arguing that tourism matters precisely because of the lessons it can teach us about living everyday life with others.

Chapter 1

Why Tourism Matters

Tourism Matters

Tourism matters. It matters not because of the dystopian voices that call it a blight on the planet, or the desires of the functional servants of capital and/or the state that rush to tourism as economic saviour. Tourism is much more important than this. Tourism matters because it provides both a lens onto and an energy for relationships with everyday life. It invites us to engage in exchanges of life with others, and to remind us thereby of its most precious and vulnerable aspect: the intricate relativities of defining people who are not us. Tourism matters because, in a world of confusing connections and disconnections between human beings, our lives with others matter.

Exchange and Authenticity

People tell big stories about tourism. In Dean MacCannell's (1976) The Tourist for instance, we are presented with something of a grand narrative of tourism, that is, an overarching story about tourism as a search for authenticity against the background of the alienating conditions of working Modernity. Tourists play the role of ‘alienated moderns’ ensconced in the pursuit of ‘authentic’, ‘real’, ‘whole’ social relations denied by their position as labour in capitalist relations of production.

It is easy to see how this early work of MacCannell's might be considered a story of differentiated Modernity (Meethan, 2001). It paints a picture of the labourer toiling in the workhouses of industrial capitalism and then seeking retreat in changing forms of leisure. This includes 1930s and 1940s seaside resorts, 1950s holiday camps, 1960s and 1970s Mediterranean package holidays and now, in the contemporary diversity of travel possibilities, perhaps cheap flights for short city breaks, or tailor-made adventure holidays. Whatever the escape, the work–leisure binary, itself a modern idea, compared, say to premodern notions of work and rest in dialectical tension, shapes many a tale about the position of the tourist subject in Modernity.

In addition to the work–leisure binary, a further two elements are key to this story. First, there is the notion of capitalist relations of exchange and its constituent relations of production (the labour process) and consumption; and second, the trope of the Other and its authentic social relations. Both these elements suggest that tourism is a quest for the Other born out of the political economy of capitalist exchange relations and its differentiation of work and leisure, the public and the private spheres.

However, these two key elements, as presented in this early work of MacCannell, are problematic. Indeed, criticism of this early work of tourism is now well rehearsed. Toeing a neo-Marxian line, MacCannell's implicitly reductionist, abstracted and deterministic view of the tourist was always likely to be fundamentally undermined in subsequent sociological and anthropological arenas as these turned to questions of language, culture and representation inspired by poststructuralist and postmodern social and cultural theory. Here the tourist as the passive dupe of the labour process seems conceptually problematic.

A further key concern in tourism's literature is the concept of authenticity. Drawing upon Graburn and Bruner, Edensor (1998) points out that MacCannell's analysis serves to reify the concept of authenticity, in the process disconnecting any idea of it from the social, cultural and historical contexts from which it might emerge. Rather than some kind of essential or universal category of analysis, Edensor argues that we might be better served through a dynamic and emergent conception of authenticity that is attuned to the subject positions and historical and geographical settings of those talking about it. So, for example, the way in which indigenous peoples are now making crafts for tourist markets rather than for their own domestic needs might cause us to re-think our notions of the authentic.

To examine authenticity in terms of such subject positions is problematic because it conflates ideas of authenticity with alterity. In other words, it assumes, as in the above example, that alterity – Otherness – can be easily categorised as either modern or nonmodern. And yet, as our example demonstrates, the ‘modern’ entrepreneur here is precisely the one who is being consumed by the ‘modern’ tourist as somehow authentic and indigenous.

MacCannell's rather narrow view of authenticity, and for that matter, the fate of the labouring subject, is an outcome of the structures of the grand narrative he presents of modernity, that most particular of Western experiences of the development of industrial capitalism. In terms of narrative structure, MacCannell's analysis is possible because of its deployment of a dualistic mode of thinking which holds in place a set of binary divisions. Such thinking often results in the pigeonholing of social phenomena, tourism included, into ‘either–or’ categories e.g. tourism is bad, unethical and subjugating rather than good, ethical and emancipatory. Given that both MacCannell's work, and this dualistic mode of analysis would seem to be indicative of tourism research in general, it is hardly surprising that the kinds of positions in the tourism literature collected together in Box 1 have gained privileged discursive currency. For instance, journals of ethical tourism typically presume the inherent ‘goodness’ of their positions rather than examining the cultural dimensions that create a discourse on ethics in tourism in the first place.

This far from exhaustive list represents tourism, in the left-hand column, as an undesirable outcome of the socioeconomic basis of Modernity – a product of commodified relations between producers and consumers, an environmentally and ethically dubious set of social relations, an emerging global phenomenon, an alienating experience for the passive dupes of Modernity, a destroyer of culture(s). If this is true, then tourism can only ever be evil. And if the positions in the right-hand column of Box 1 are true, then this picture suddenly becomes the converse, utopian even. These frameworks and assumptions drive certain lines of analysis and questioning, leading to the characteristic stories we tell of tourism for good or ill. Breaking with such modes of thinking, however, thinking which Lévi-Strauss has taught us to understand as fundamental to the logic of Western thought and culture, is not at all easy.

Box 1 Positions in the tourism literature

Tourism is either cast as…	Or…
Commercial bubble	Economic saviour
Commodification	Sustainable
Unsustainable	Ethical
Colonial	Ecological
Detrimental	Restorative
Homogenising	Developmental
Fake	Educational
Imperialist	Connecting
Unethical	Agentic
Separating	Oneness
Unecological	Intercultural nirvana
Greedy
Disconnected
Alienating
Creating dupes

These lists can be used to construct exactly the kinds of sweeping pictures of the works that constitute a literature on tourism of which one might be critical, in the same way as we have been critical of MacCannell's research. Our intention, though, is largely a rhetorical, evocative positioning of this work within the field of tourism. There are of course a number of diverse studies and approaches that critique and offer alternative visions of tourism to those presented in Box 1. We return to these in more detail in Chapter 2.

Postmodern analyses of tourism attempt to pick apart this knotting together of tourism, commodified exchange relations and the search for authenticity. They show the playfulness of the tourist subject, resisting the structures of global capitalism and reading ironically the privileged sites of tourist destinations and other so-called stages of tourism (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). Similarly, several recent pieces reflect critically on the stranglehold of quantitative work on the production of tourism research, and call for a more theoretically sophisticated approach to its study (Franklin & Crang, 2001; Koshar, 2000; Meethan, 2001).

Despite these conceptual questionings, the story of a differentiated Modernity, that most periodising and spatialising of stories, has created a lens through which many sociological analyses have been refracted. And if anything, the deployment of postmodernism serves to offer us yet another grand narrative dressed up as new social theory in the area of tourism. It is a scepticism, which itself becomes a grand narrative.

In this book, we align ourselves with calls not only for more theoretically driven approaches to tourism research, but with research that calls into question some of the key assumptions and tropes of the big story of tourism as a consequence of the differentiation inherent in Modernity (Meethan, 2001). In this latter regard, we follow Koshar (2000), who suggests that tourism studies, far from requiring grand narratives, will be better served by the development and grounding of concepts. As Foucault (1978) reminds us, discursive technologies can have the duplicitous effect of rendering things both visible and invisible – we can therefore only see certain things through the lens of specific frameworks, such as those we visited in Box 1. However, this is as much a choice as an inevitability. We can and have to read old stories in fresh ways, as Bauman (1998: 5) reminds us:

Not asking certain questions is pregnant with more dangers than failing to answer the questions already on the official agenda; while asking the wrong kind of questions all too often helps avert eyes from the truly important issues. The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering.

What would happen, for instance, if, returning to our earlier box, we take neither the position that tourism is only evil nor the opposite view of an intercultural, ethical or economic nirvana? What if we render suspicious some of the binaries that frame much analysis in tourism? What can tourism become if we ask different questions? What if we try working critically both with, and against the grain of universal stories? What might happen for instance if:

• We look at tourism not as a reification of a set of social relations, but as an outcome of social and material processes and practices in everyday life?

• We understand tourism not just as an exotic search for the Other, but also as a banal activity that enacts the routines of everyday life across the binaries of work and leisure?

• We see tourists living through different experiences, not as products of either micro- or macrostructures?

• We consider the influence of the traditions in which we come to work on tourism and with tourism?

• We examine the emotion, the work of the imagination and the sheer buzz that comes from and generates tourism?

• We consider the way tourism is animated by narrative?

In short, how else might tourism, understood as a participatory set of interactions-in-the-world (as opposed to a search for, say, authenticity) look beyond the narrative confines of the stories already told by others about the dualistic micro- and macrostructures and behaviours of economic and cultural relations in late capitalism?

About this Book

This book presents work that addresses these concerns. Through it we attempt to engage the traditions of tourism research and the understandings of tourism handed down to us. We endeavour to ask how the material and affective dimensions of tourist experience are played out in the myriad interactions of everyday tourist life. Crucially, the book sets out to address these questions by exploring a neglected area of research in tourism studies, namely intercultural communication and the way this is constructed and mediated through material culture and through language.

The fact that tourism is an intercultural activity, constructed within and through language, has been largely ignored in tourism research until very recently. This is unfortunate, since a study of tourism as a form of intercultural communication could be instructive in relation to the notion that tourism involves, to repeat, a quest for a participatory set of interactions-in-the-world, and not, importantly, for authenticity. Authenticity has become a perennial cul-de-sac in tourist research, we would argue.

The term ‘intercultural communication’ usually encompasses the notion of interaction between members of different cultures, understood loosely as different national groupings. We use the term in this sense throughout this book but we would want to add certain nuances to this overarching definition. Because we understand intercultural communication to be a participatory set of actions in the world, we see it as taking form in dialogical and material exchanges between members of cultural groupings. We see cultural membership as marked variously by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, class, age and gender.

We neither subscribe to utopian nor dystopian views of intercultural communication. Intercultural communication can take many forms from extreme conflict to peaceful harmony. This is as true for international politics as it is for a brief encounter between two tourists in a youth hostel kitchen. The intercultural communication literature is studded with examples of attempts to model positive and negative intercultural interaction and to suggest ways of ameliorating encounter. This liter...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Tourism Matters
• 2 The Give and the Take
• 3 Doing Being Tourists
• 4 Packing
• 5 Packers of Culture
• 6 Bag-sized Stories
• 7 New Habits
• 8 Exchanging Stories
• 9 Changing Spaces
• 10 The Return to Routine
• 11 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index