September 25, 2005
Scott's Response
For a humorous look at narrative and tourist experience: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34198
In Culture on Tour Edward Bruner provides a “postmodern” approach to viewing tourist productions and experience that is based in constructivism, where each participant (e.g. tourist, “local”, producer, agent) constructs the meaning of the experience with their own narrative. As opposed to MacCannell’s idea of “authenticity”, which investigates tourist sites in terms of various degrees of “front stage” and “back stage” (referring to the existence of an authentic, postulated original culture that tourists strive for but almost always cannot achieve), Bruner speaks of a constructed “tourist realism” that is authentic in that it exists in real life but which is depended upon the narratives assigned to it by those participating. This space becomes a “tourist border zone” where multiple new realities exist at the same time, and the binary of “authentic” and “unauthentic” breaks down.
Bruner also points out how touristic narratives and culture in general are rooted in multiple influences, including history, politics, economics, ethnicity, and the postmodern forces of globalization. These roots and specifics act of tourism impact the very culture that one presents or experiences. For example, Massai culture in Eastern Africa has been presented and experienced very differently depending on the players involved. Bruner utilizes three different productions to show this: Mayers Ranch, Kenya’s Bomas cultural center, and the Sundowner.
The Mayers catered to tourists yearning for an ahistorical, “primitive”, “tribal” view of the Massai, where the culture is carefully presented as completely separate from that of the tourists. The production provided a colonialistic view of the “native” unspoiled by modernity, and contrasted untamed wild nature with that of safety and civilization in the form of British genteel. While the described reenactment of colonialism can be seen as quite disturbing, Bruner points out that the production wasn’t exactly “inauthentic.” It carefully omitted much of Maasai culture which would “spoil” the narrative the tourists (and producers) sought. This “touristic untold” material included Western products of modernity and normal Massai cultural behavorial that that did not fit into the narrative (e.g. injured warriors who could not jump, the act of touching strangers or engaging in Maasai norms of personal space.) What was left were remnants of original cultural expression; but one may question what true culture becomes when it is separated from the touristic untold.
Bomas cultural center presents a narrative of the preservation of the disappearing Maasai tradition as well as that of nationalism and multiethnic unity. Unlike Mayers, which carefully removed as many markers of the tourist production as possible, Bomas emphasizes that what is being seen is a curated show and attempts to separate cultural practices from their sources (i.e. the actual people), much like a museum in London may show Egyptian antiquities. This narrative can be seen as successful or unsuccessful depending on the pre-narratives brought to the site by tourists.
The Out of Africa Sundowner production appears to not be so concerned with authenticity or presenting an unspoiled Maasai narrative, but rather is happy to offer an image that is a mixture of how Maasai see themselves, and a pop-culture narrative of Africa brought by the tourists and world community. One example is the performance of Hakuna Matada, a song borne out of globalization and recycled pop images. How “real” or “appropriate” the song is depends on the narrative one views it through. For tourists coming to see a Disneyfied or “New World” view of Africa, the song fits the bill. In the Sundowner production, conflicting narratives juxtapose themselves without concern. In the morning a Maasai man may work as a waiter in western garb (and be of little or no interest to the tourist gaze) while in the evening put on his ceremonial garb and perform a dance, satisfying the tourist narrative of the “raditional African warrior”.
I found Bruner’s book clear, engaging, and full of ready examples of this “postmodern” approach. Such a narrative approach highlights the complexities of conflicting interpretations, agency, and cultural property rights. For example, the history of Elmina Castle in Ghana spans five hundred years. People coming to engage with it bring different narratives. These narratives are not completely compatible in the sense that different people want and need different things from the site. Should the castle be a source of income for Ghanaians, a spiritual marker for diaspora blacks, or a museum of British colonialsm? Culture on Tour shakes up the question of “authenticity” by showing how tourist productions and culture are dialogic and ever-evolving. Balinese dance that once was developed for the tourist gaze has now become a full part of cultural identity and practice.
The more I read about tourism, the more I question my own experiences as a tourist, as well as behaviors that I never identified as belonging to tourism. For example, I worked and lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer for three years in a developing country. During that time I was quick to differentiate myself from tourists who came to vacation, stay in hotels, engage in the “inauthentic” tourist productions, and have superficial encounters with people. After all, I was living with host country nationals at their standard of living, striving to acculturate, and working with them on projects they owned and valued. While I still believe in a differentiation, I can’t help thinking that perhaps the Peace Corps experience is perhaps one extreme pole of an ideal touristic narrative.
Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:13 PM
Tourism: Creative, Dialogic, Narrative
I applaud Bruner’s ethnographic approach to tourism. He tackles the monolithic field by approaching specific situations. This is the only way to produce data and, eventually, knowledge on tourism that does not merely reproduce modernist totalizing “masternarratives” or the pessimistic postmodernist critiques that likewise are based on universalizing categories rather than the actions or experience of real, specific actors. The debates over “authenticity” and quest to understand grand themes results in myth-making about tourism that, in many ways, reinforces the very power relations the critics of modernity (who are often also the consumers of the exotic) wish to contest.
Like MacCannell, Bruner acknowledges the “differentiations” inherent in the tourism industry –the tourists are usually the privileged consumers of spectacles provided by people who need money. However, he does not let this political-economic given blind him to cultural creativity that is produced in the liminal “border zones.” His respectful attitude toward both the tourists as well as those who provide tourist spectacles is refreshing and insightful. The model of culture proffered by Bruner is one that is emergent, dialogic, and ever-changing. Regardless of the provenance of the cultural phenomenon, it is all part of local culture.
Some tourist productions, such as the Balinese frog dance, originally created for international tourists, subsequently have become reincorporated into their own culture. Rather than bemoaning the destruction of local culture by Western modernity, Brunner’s approach to these cases dignifies the cultures that adapt to the global flows. Where other’s see the apocalyptic triumph of the West over the rest, Bruner sees the birth of a myriad of creative responses. While tourism may not be the panacea that cures the ills of underdeveloped economies, it motivates the formation of important stages on which to perform local and national identities.
Another important move Bruner makes is to treat the messages of these performances as dialogic. In several of his essays, Bruner’s object of analysis is “narrative,” which he treats as an open-ended process of construction. He discusses the stories that are told before, during, and following the touristic experience by different actors involved in it. According to him, narratives, (like Turner and Bell’s idea of “ritual”) do not merely reiterate and reproduce hegemonic messages; rather, their retelling can contest dominant messages with other interpretations of the same story, as well as personalize them, incorporating the teller into the broader context his retelling depicts. In the context of tourism, the essence of a people (or historical period) are defined and dramatized for both internal and external consumption –with the aims of building nationalistic solidarity, distinguishing local identity from global or foreign influences, or to produce the experience of nostalgia for a lost paradise. Contests over meanings occur in the process of defining the nature of local identity and ideal lost states.
Bruner’s approach to creativity and meaning-making in tourist productions is very similar to Edensor’s approach to the tourist audience’s contestatory significations. However, in contrast to Edensor’s cynical, half-hearted response to the cultural impotence produced by postmodernist critiques of simulacra, Bruner’s case studies of sites such as New Salem and Masada drive home the point that these performances are aspects of everyday life that are experienced as real and that do matter to the people who participate in them.
Posted by Pilar Rau at 8:11 PM | TrackBack
Personal Observation on an Asian Phenomenon
Bruner, unlike MacCannell focusing on the structurality within tourism, is more interested in a reflexive way of reading touristic phenomenon (Bruner 2). In addition, Bruner introduces the concept of narrative offering an explanation of how travel agencies construct tourist attractions as well as how they manipulate the perceptions of tourists while they visiting certain destinations. Still different from MacCannell, Bruner does not presume that the tourists are in search of authenticity. Instead, he suggests that tourists might be fully aware of the constructiveness of cultural performances presented to them. Tourist, in Bruner’s point of view, might just want to enjoy “a good show” (Bruner 3).
Bruner contends that there are interactions between tourists and locals/natives, and the Mayers. He sites the Maasia as an example of how native people perform them selves to fulfill tourists’ expectation of Maasia (61). Yet Maasia, in many aspects, have control over their tradition and their way of living. It is unjust to say that they are controlled by tourists’ desire or the Mayers’, the ranch owners. This case offers a symbiotic model of the natives, the ranch owners, and the visiting tourists. In this model, there is no such group that has full control over the others. Interestingly, they reach certain kind of balance.
In “The Role of Narrative in Tourism,” Bruner applies the pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour narrative model to elaborate how destinations are constructed and modified. I am especially interested in the master narratives and the pre-tour narratives provided by travel agencies and/or presented in various media, including brochures, internet journal, etc.. The existence of these pre- tour narratives, and/or master narratives seems to imply that tourists actually, to some extent, have understandings of their destinations and have certain expectation of the tour they are going to take.
In the following paragraphs, I intend to discuss an Asian touristic phenomenon, which, I personally think, is an example of the effective use of the pre-tour narrative to construct the tour and manipulate the emotion of the tourists.
In recent years the growing popularity of Korean TV series makes rise to a kind of tours based on the plots of such series. In those series, the male characters are depicted as devoted lovers who, for some irresistible force, have to part with their princess-like girlfriends. Such TV series are especially appealing to the middle-age, married Asian women who play the role as loving mothers, perform their duty as home-makers and devoted wives. Now travel agencies in Asia offer tours on the “authentic” shooting locations of such TV series to provide the tourists, most of whom are fans of Korean romance TV series, with the romantic settings, within which the tourists can experience the romantic atmosphere. Like any other tours offered by travel agencies, there will be a tour guide introducing the sites to the tourists. However, unlike other tour guides focusing on the cultural and social aspects of tourist attractions, the guides of such TV series tours emphasize the romantic elements of the sites by referring specifically to certain romantic scenes appearing in TV series.
I find such TV series tours, to some extent, follow Bruner’s pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour narrative theory. Tourists’ watching TV series, I presume, can be read as receiving pre-tour narrative. Tourists acquire basic information from the series and gradually develop empathy with the suffering lovers. They might, in many cases, identify with the female protagonists and desire to pay a visit to the “actual” sites where they encountered their lovers.
Television is a very powerful medium for story telling, for it provides spectators with animate images which other media such as, brochures and travel books are unable to provide. The powerful medium, the easy-to-follow structure of the romance, and the desire of escaping from the mundane and searching for romance make such TV series tours popular among this group of people.
As they visiting those shooting locations in person, the tourists inevitably project their romantic thoughts on the sites. In this moment, the tour guide’s introducing the sites, which could be interpreted as on-tour narrative, in reference with the TV series reinforces the sentiments of the visitors. The sensory experiences of such tours are likely to be added to the post-tour narrative after taking such tours. The recount of the touristic experiences is likely to circulate among people who have similar back ground and interests, but have not yet taken such tours. This post-tour narrative could serve as an advertisement of TV series tours to encourage those who have not actually been there to pay a visit.
In these cases, the tourists are not interested in “authenticity”. They are, according to my personal observations, “willing to suspend the disbelief” and intend to enjoy “a good show” presented by the medium and the travel agency (Bruner 3).
I am ware that my analysis of this Asian touristic Phenomenon might be a naïve oversimplification. However, I think this might be the direction in which my project might go into.
Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 4:31 PM
Binary Bashing
Edward Bruner’s, Culture on Tour departs from McCannell’s structuralist tourist study theories that define tourism strictly as a relationship between authentic and real by emphasizing the role of narrative in tourist encounters. Representative of new tourist studies, Bruner debunks typical tourist study binaries, exposing a more dynamic cultural experience that emerges between the space of tourists and toured subjects. In un-Bruneresque fashion, it can be stated that McCannell represents a rigid strucuralist view of culture and tourist activities while Bruner defines an emergent cultural form worthy of investigation. Circulating around notions of narrative and performance, new tourist theorists must debunk the commitment of structuralists to reality because performance is an art form, art departs from reality and for the performance of tourism to be understood, it too must depart from a rigid commitment to reality.
Bruner’s theory highlights the limitation involved in McCannell which assumes something inauthentic is covering realness inside. McCannell’s view implies some form of stasis or a lack of flux and change and activity natural to human behavior. Rather than place weight on the binary between real and fake and place judgment on the binary of real as good and copy as bad, Bruner chooses to see the events and environments that develop around tourism as new. Looking at the new resulting or “emergent” culture allows for observations and conclusions on the actions and relationships without implying some sort of unfolding loss or grossness in tourist activities. Instead of seeing what is labeled as “inauthentic” as a phony lacking copy of reality, Bruner sees it as a new form of ritual, a new act, a new performance that is worthy of “serious anthropological inquiry” (Bruner, 5).
Definitive of Bruner’s theory is the relationship between narrative and performance in tourist activities. On the first level, narrative stands in for perspective, or the underlying story that gives an event and the person involved in an event a way to think about the event. Narrative bestows upon a tourist site its value. Narrative determines the form a tourist space takes as well as the way in which one receives the information of the tourist space. Bruner utilizes three different performances involving the Maasai in Africa to exemplify how different narratives dictate the forms with which a tourist experience is constructed. Narrative then correlates with power and control and is seen as an object of ownership that should be examined from the perspective of the owner. Whoever controls the narrative controls the space. This reveals the construction evident in culture as well as the forces that impact cultural construction. Since control comes out from narrative ownership, it is possible for the the culture on display to own the narrative and through such ownership, exploitation is moot. Bruner demonstrates that the Maasai understand the tourist engine and work to create space tourists will positively interact, success measured in economic terms. Such a clear comprehension of the dynamics of exchange dissolve any notion of a naive, unknowing group being exploited. Through Bruner, tourism can be understood as a much more sensitively dynamic ecosystem of events that reveal practices of cultural control exploitative more of the viewer than the viewed.
In Bruner, performance is the process by which the narrative of the event connects to the tourist. In performing culture, systems of the past can be reintroduced as events to be witnessed for economic exchange. Where narrative relates to the power of the storyteller to define the story, the experience, and in turn the memory or future telling of the displayed narrative, the role of performance dynamically shifts between the viewer and the viewed throughout tourist encounters. In last week’s readings we understood touring as a performative act of role play connected to the everyday act of mask wearing. Through Bruner, performance is understood from all sides of the tourist encounter with emphasis placed on the performance of the real, or the unfolding of invisible stages in tourist environments. When the Maasai’s go to the Mayers’ village to work, a new space and a new form is created which borrows its form from that which it represents (borrows, doesn’t own or duplicate, but takes reference from). The Maasai dances on display take form from Maasai practice but are not Maasai practices per se. The Mayers' village is an invisible stage without a confined rectangle. The culture on display is performing but so too are the tourists as they navigate within the space. A contradiction appears in Bruner when he states, “my conceptualization …. sees tourism as improvisational theater with a stage located in the border zone, where both tourists and locals are actors” (Bruner, 18). As he continues to prove throughout the book, though, the performance created by the toured group is less an improv role and more a predetermined role born of the dominant narrative constructed previous to any tourist encounter taking place.
Posted by Erin Madorsky at 3:02 PM
Tourism and Profit
In his text Culture on Tour, Edward Bruner skillfully outlines his research of the tourist industry and locals, contrasting their interests in proper and profitable representations of culture. Though their views obviously differ, they do share one common characteristic—they’re interest in profit.
Issues of exploitation, abuse, and invasion of personal space have been always been negative aspects of the tourist industry, but this hasn’t stopped tourism from becoming one of the top money-making industries in the world. One thing is for sure, tourists have always been willing to put out the bucks to be entertained. Tourist industries have taken this into account—and surprisingly (at least to me) locals have too. Locals have learned how to play the game, learning how to deal the cards and receive their share of the profit. Are locals making it easier now for a tourist to be a tourist? Are locals still being exploited?
Exploitation has become difficult to distinguish with locals agreeing to work for the industry, but it is not impossible. As Bruner mentions, Mayers Ranch was closed down in the late 1980s due to the exploitation of the Maasi (Bruner, 75). The government might have closed down Mayers, but the Maasi were forced to find other means of income in the same industry. Bruner mentions that some went on to work for hotels or other tourist productions, some Maasi chose to get involved in the sex industry (Bruner, 76). A couple of questions came to mind when reading the text: How did the Maasi receive income before tourism? Do the Maasi enjoy their jobs?
The Maasi might be able to profit from their picture being taken, but others do not have that privilege. Bruner mentions that Ghanaians find it very offensive when their picture is taken without their consent. One concern is the negative representation of their culture, and the other is profit (Bruner, 117). It appears that the Ghanaians are more concerned with profiting and representation than the invasion of their privacy. When a culture is willing to expose themselves for a few bucks, something is not right—a lot is not right.
Who is truly the pawn, the tourist or the local? As long one is being entertained or making money out of it, is tourism becoming more acceptable? It is obvious that one is more disadvantaged than other. Should we praise the locals for making profit, or are locals just encouraging the exploitation of culture? Should we express our gratitude to tourists for providing income opportunities to locals, or are tourists (and tourist agencies) just finding new and better ways to cover up exploitation?
Posted by at 1:29 PM
Agency, mobility and the borderzone
In _Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel_, Edward M. Bruner presents a lucid analysis of tourism grounded in fifty years of research and ethnographic fieldwork. This study elucidates and dispels much of the mystification around popular themes of tourism. Bruner brings tourism studies, which have been “chasing anthropology’s discarded discourse” (4), up to date.
His examination of tourism moves beyond a binary discourse of polarized opposites such as authentic - inauthentic, front stage - backstage, introduced by MacCannell (1976), and considers tourist productions “for what they are in themselves” (5) as authentic in their own right. Bruner rejects MacCannell’s sociological approach with its emphasis on “deep structuralism” and instead analyses tourism through the lens of what he identifies as the performative mode of ethnography (6). The view of culture as emergent, processual, constructivist and performative, shapes Bruner’s study and conclusions.
In the introduction to Culture on Tour, Bruner signals important political themes surrounding the question of narrative and metanarrative. Writing about contested sites he warns against “monolithic interpretations that are static and ahistorical, that homogenize meaning” (12) and emphasizes a need for a deconstruction of the “official” story or version of a site. Bruner asserts that contested sites “raise the key narrative question of who has the right to tell the story.” (12) In this regard, it is also crucial not to omit the question of who has the agency or political power to be heard. It is true, as Bruner writes, there are no persons without agency, but it is vital to remember that agencies are not monolithic. Bruner argues against fixed and “irreversible slots” of tourist and “native” and contends that local people who are subjected to the tourist gaze may subsequently travel to Europe or America and reverse the gazing process. The notion of reverse mobility is not so simple, however. The emaciated children of Tanzania running after cars full of tourists (98) have very different agency and are in no position to reverse the tourist gaze.
Bruner’s theatrical model employed for the examination of tourism is broader that those of MacCannell and Edensor. He moves beyond the metaphor of a proscenium stage to include an environmental theatre with the potential for improvisation. This playing field or space, he calls the borderzone. It is here that all players enact their “proper collaborative role.” (18) Yet it is also this site that gives rise to new meanings and relationships and where new culture can emerge. Bruner sees parallels between his borderzone and MacCannell’s notion of the empty meeting ground (1992, 2), which is a place of potentiality. The borderzone is a place where tourist productions are enacted but also a place of transgressions and resistance where tourist productions can be contested (19).
Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 1:25 PM
Sarah Zoogman Responds
Whereas MacCannell in The Tourist used the notion of authenticity as an organizing principle for his research, Bruner in Culture on Tour posits that authenticity is not a helpful mode of analysis. Bruner proposes looking at touristic experiences as “tourist productions,” realizing that all tourist experiences are constructed and therefore analyzing how, why and with what effects they are constructed.
For Bruner, letting go of the notion of authenticity and adopting a constructivist theoretical perspective, “which sees culture as emergent,” (9) opens up new ways of looking at tourist productions. Bruner “analyzes tourist performances not as representations, metaphors, texts, or simulacra of something located elsewhere, but as social practice to be studied in its own right, grounded by the methods of ethnography. This is taking tourism seriously.” (7) Bruner, Franklin and Crang in The trouble with tourism and travel theory and Edensor in Performing tourism, staging tourism, all advocate a more reflexive approach that looks at tourism through the lens of performance and lets go of notions of authenticity.
For MacCannell performance is an organizing idea that supports his notion of authenticity. He uses Goffman’s notion of front and back stage to illustrate there is an authentic experience that the tourist is striving for, but is always hidden from her. As Bruner articulates in Culture on Tour: “MacCannell sees modern tourists as being on a quest for authenticity but argues that what is frequently presented to them is ‘staged authenticity,’ a false front that masks the real back stage, to which they do not have access.” (93) For MacCannell there is a “real authentic culture” (93), obscured by performance. In contrast, for Bruner “real authentic culture,” is non-existent because culture is always changing.
For Bruner performance is both an object of analysis and an organizing idea. As an object of analysis, he examines specific performances for tourists. For example, Bruner examines three contrasting tourist productions of the Maasai in Kenya - Mayers, Bomas, and The Sundowner - in terms of the different types of theater they create: realist theater at Mayers, nationalist theater at Bomas and postmodern theater at the Sundowner. Bruner examines how these various performances are created and controlled. He also uses the organizing idea of performance to discuss the metaperformance of tourism: the constant negotiations between producers, actors, and tourists in constructing experience and making meaning. For example, at the Sundowner, Bruner describes how the Maasai workers were well aware of different ways to behave when “playing different roles,” i.e. waiter vs. Maasai warrior, so as to fit into the desired and expected narrative of the tourists: “each party to the drama performs an assigned role.” (89)
For Edensor performance is an invaluable lens for analysis to “explore why we carry out particular habits and practices and consequently, reproduce and challenge the social world.” (59) Edensor encourages examining tourism through the lens of performance in the context of the everyday. Franklin and Crang highlight how performance can be both an organizing idea and an object of analysis. For Franklin and Crang there are not only many staged tourist productions, but tourist behave according to set scripts of behavior, which “suggest a Goffmanesque world where all the world is a stage.” (18)
For Bruner, performance and narrative are intimately linked. Tourist productions help to augment, solidify, and sometimes disrupt a tourist’s narrative. In “The Role of Narrative in Tourism,” Bruner discusses the notion of metanarrative, or the master narrative told about a particular area and group, i.e. Bali as a South Sea Island paradise (2): “The master narrative is a perceptual framework that works as a filter which excludes as much as it includes, and offers the tourist an interpretive frame within which to understand the destination culture.” (4) For Bruner, this pre-trip metanarrative is articulated in guidebooks, tourist agencies, travel programs, and other media. Often information gained by tourist on their trip often simply fleshes out the pre-trip metanarrative.
The metanarrative is important because it organizes how touristic construct their own personal narratives of their experiences. Moreover, experiences that do not fit the metanarrative are often viewed as inauthentic, even though the metanarrative itself is an extremely biased lens to begin with: “the tourist’s conception about what is “authentic” may be based more on pre-understandings than one what occurs on site, primarily because most travelers have no way of knowing what is real or true or authentic or genuine in a foreign culture.” (3)
For Bruner there is some space to create alternative narrative, although the possibilities of those narratives becoming firm is slim because tourists lack the knowledge base with which to ground these new narratives. Tourist often dismiss occurrences that don’t fit into their narratives as cultural oddities (11), which contrasts which the ethnographer, who relishes these moments of incongruity as an invitation for further research. (10) Creating narrative is an active process, which happens pre-trip, during the trip and post-trip.
MacCannell is more interested with authenticity than with narrative. MacCannell’s interest in narrative lies in the way that authenticity is staged for the tourist ¾ the way the distinction between front stage and back stage is constructed or how tourists see the staged back region. (The Tourist, 99)
Edensor notion of narrative is focused around the framework of performance, with its directors, stage managers and the like, and can be used to understand different tourist encounters, tourist productions. Edensor discusses how different narratives, or for him “stories” are made available to the tourist, for example he talks about guidebooks as a “kind of master script for tourists which reduces disorientation and guides actions.” (73) Edensor is looking more at set narratives, rather than how Bruner examines opportunities for tourists to actively construct narratives. Franklin and Crang deal with narrative within the framework of Edensor idea about scripted performance.
Bruner is the most upfront about the ethical dilemmas inherent in his research, which makes sense because he is the only one talking about his ethnographic fieldwork. While it is important for all tourist scholars to acknowledge their prejudices and baggage, it is vital that those doing field work admit their prejudges because of ethnography’s long history of acting as monolithic interpreter of a particular culture. Bruner states: “Many postmodern ethnographers still struggle with the inequitable colonial relationship and vast differentials in wealth and power between themselves and the people they study. Further, ethnographers, as those who write, control how culture is represented.” (95) Bruner’s reflexive approach mirrors the shift in anthological research away from distanced looking as a supposedly authentic culture to an acknowledgement of the ethnographer’s presence and the continually changing nature of culture.
Franklin and Crang address the ethical dilemmas indirectly, by encouraging a moving away from the old tourist studies that “privileged the exotic and the strange,” (7) such as practiced by MacCannell and rather to “deal reflexively with the social arena of which it [tourist studies] itself is a part.” (8) In order to de-exoticize tourism and adopt a more reflexive approach Franklin and Craig advocate looking at the tourism of everyday life, bridging the gap between the touristic and everyday experience. Edensor also advocates this de-eroticisation and embrace of the study of the everyday.
In terms of the positive possibilities for tourism, Bruner, Franklin and Crang and Edensor all posit that it is possible for a community to gain a better understanding of their history and a firmer sense of their own identity as a result of communities becoming tourist destinations. However, the other side of what can happen when communities market themselves to tourism is rather than solidify and strength an existing identity, new cultural practices emerge for tourists that blur the boundaries between pre-tourist cultural practices and practices that emerged to be performed for tourists. For example, at the post-modern Maasai performance at the Sundowner resort described by Bruner, the Maasai perform the Hollywood version of themselves to tourists. Bruner ask: “How well will the Maasai continue to compartmentalize themselves and separate performance from life? The line separating tourist performance from ethnic ritual has already become blurred in other areas of the world with large tourist flows, such as Bali. The Balinese can be longer distinguish between performances for tourists and performances for themselves, as performances originally created for tourism have subsequently entered Balinese rituals.” (92) In Bali, the tourist production has become part of the cultural rituals. Here tourism has shaped Balinese culture towards a Westernized version accessible to tourist.
A key ingredient for tourism to be positive, seems to revolve around with how narratives are constructed. Who has the power to create narratives? The Maasai at the Sundowner are catering to the tourist existing metanarrative, playing the role of the “primate for profit.” (89) Tourists think the primate Maasai is “authentic” because it fits into the master narrative.
People travel to see difference and yet with globalization the world is becoming increasingly homogeneous. Are we setting up a situation in which third world cultures, which relay on tourism for their livelihood, must perform cultural difference for tourists even as they do not necessarily practice this difference in their everyday lives?
Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 1:09 PM
A Tale of Two Narratives
While reading Edward M Bruner's CULTURE ON TOUR, and keeping in mind a constant running comparison to Dean MacCannell's THE TOURIST, I was consistently struck by Bruner's use of the pronouns "I" and "we." Whereas in MacCannell these words appeared infrequently and fleetingly, mostly when he was introducing a new theoretical lens and explaining his own viewpoint of it, Bruner is not only the author, but also the narrator/protagonist of his own substantial work. He is constantly aware of himself as ethnographer, no matter what the situation is, either as a guest, tourist, tour guide, or "good-ole-fashioned ethnographer." Essentially, CULTURE ON TOUR is, using his own terminology, Bruner's massive post-tour narrative of a series of tourist and ethnographic encounters, one fashioned out of a lifetime of ethnographic experience, several decades of self-conscious tourist experiences, and a bit more in-depth knowledge than the average member of the Western "leisure classe."
What seems most important/crucial to me, though, is the fact that Bruner's PRE-TOUR narrative is radically different from that of the average tourist. He is more knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, the political and sociological issues that surround the areas he goes to visit, as well as the histories and narratives of those particular locales - this is why he more often serves as tour guide than as a "proper" tourist. It is only this pre-tour knowledge that really seems to enable him to pull away from his experiences enough to write these analyses, these personal narratives that are also ethnographic explorations. However, as Bruner himself admits - "I have had fun doing these studies and putting them together in this book, as I enjoy traveling and observing other cultures" (29) - he LIKES being a tourist, he is increasingly "appreciative of upscale travel and of making ethnographic observations from a more comfortable setting" (29). Essentially, he does not try to avoid the fact that he, himself, is a tourist, while I had a sense from MacCannell that he wanted to remove himself entirely from his analyses/observations, and serve as the bodiless theorist uninfluenced by the very factors he was writing about. Bruner, on the other hand, is completely aware of the effects upon himself of his own objects of study.
As I thought about this differentiation between the two writers, I found the key to it (for my own peace of mind, at least), within Bruner's focus on narrative. He is constantly aware of personal narratives, pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour (this is especially expounded upon in his unpublished conference paper, fascinatingly expanding the brief sketch he provides in the introduction to CULTURE ON TOUR), both those narratives of the tourists he travels with, those he studies, and, most importantly, those of himself and his constant travel companion, his wife. I am extremely hesitant to invoke "post-modernism" here, but it is the best term I am able to think of right now to use as an admittedly-reductive binary opposition to MacCannell, who invokes narrative but only in the sense of the overarching uber-narratives of modernism (marxism, structuralism, etc.). Bruner isn't looking at narratives of the world and of societies, though, he is looking at individual, fragmented, personal narratives of lived (or soon-to-be-lived/already-lived) experiences.
In thinking about Bruner's idea of tourism-as-story (that the entire tourist experience is designed around what stories can be told after the fact, rather than for the in-the-moment enjoyment of it), I kept coming back to my own areas of interest, of kitsch and amusement (particularly "amusement parks"). Whereas the former seems to be an entire system based around knick-knacks and items that stories can be based around, even if they are mass-produced items/stories sold by the dozen in plastic bins, the latter is certainly based upon somatic experience, the enjoyment of the "ride" and the thrill of the pre-produced show. I'm starting to ramble and not make much sense in this analysis, as I haven't yet fully formulated any of these thoughts, but it would be interesting to apply the idea of the post-tour narrative to a place like DisneyWorld, since EVERY BODY'S experience of, say, Pirates of the Carribean is the exact same, save in a case where, for example, the ride breaks down (and, even in such a case, this is at most a blip on the radar of the experience, a pause that is corrected when the ride resumes - as Jeff Goldblum's character in JURASSIC PARK points out, if the ride breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists).
As much as it pains me to end this analysis with a JURASSIC PARK reference, I'm afraid that I need to a do a great deal more thinking on the subject before I am able to further apply Bruner's tourist narrative theories to my own interests.
Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 12:58 PM
Borderzones, Narrative, Memory.
If tourism is ethnography’s unacknowledged illegitimate child, as Ed Bruner has suggested (p 198), then his project is to reunite and reconcile the estranged family members. The methodological opportunities offered by ethnography to the study of tourism are abundant, and of course ethnography will be changed by turning its attention to tourism, and vice versa. In many ways, though, this is a recognition of a kinship that already existed between tourism and ethnography; their imaginative economies are linked, and the distinction between tourist and ethnographer, while it may be personally grievous for an ethnographer to admit, is in many cases not cut and dry. There seem to be two borderzones in this book: one, a region of encounter between tourists and locals, a zone of emergent potentiality, and the other, a perhaps more theoretical zone of encounter between tourism and ethnography, both in terms of ethnographic influences on the meta-narratives of tourism, and also as a way of seeing Bruner’s own project. Just as the tourist encounters the local, the ethnographer encounters the ‘native’, : which in this case happens to be the tourist. It is more than just a structural similarity.In his dual role as ethnographer and tour guide in Indonesia, Bruner inhabits both borderzones simultaneously, and his experience observing and mediating these borderzones is one of the things that makes this book stand out.
Bruner is undoubtedly a part of the “new tourist studies” that we looked at last week (Edensor, Franklin, and Crang): he shares with them a performance-inflected analysis of tourism, an emphasis on change and emergence, agency and potentiality, a bracketing of the question of authenticity as an either/or category, and (related) a turn away from grand social theories of tourism (ie MacCannell) and toward an analysis which (in my view) privileges the uniqueness of a site without ignoring its connectedness to a larger order (or disorder). Bruner’s work is in line with the “new tourist studies”, but his approach differs from theirs (*from what I have read of theirs) in his inclusion of personal narrative in the work. My assumption is that this is method comes from a certain style of ethnographic writing - and my limited understanding of the history of ethnographic writing is that (at least these days) the ethnographer is far from producing a grand theory of social existence. The personal (and personable) style of Bruner’s writing in fact makes this kind of master theorization impossible. That is not to diminish the significance of the work - just to make an observation about narrative voice and the overall project. Bruner’s constructivist approach is necessarily narrative-friendly, narrative-centric, even - so it is only appropriate that the text take a narrative form.
The importance of narratives in shaping touristic experience is, to me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the book. Narratives are multiple, simultaneous and competing - they already inhabit the borderzone, and they are in the process of being born. He is careful to say that narratives are one facet of touristic experience, but since, like the physical tourist productions themselves, they selectively edit aspects of experience for presentation, they are emergent and constitutive, never completely independent but never without agency either. There are meta-narratives about a specific site that determine what the tourist is likely to know beforehand, and therefore has a certain hold on perception, and there is the story that the tourist will tell their friends, family, fellow travelers etc. after the fact. Does the expectation, the imagined embryo of this story shape the tourists experience, and even guide their actions? When my boyfriend and I rented a motorcycle to escape from a shady guest house in Thailand, it certainly made a better story than it would have if we had taken a cab. Did we do it for the experience or for the experience of telling the story? The horrible sunburn I got en route was an unpleasant result of our hurried choice - but it also makes the story more interesting. It effectively ruined the rest of my vacation, but we had a good story!
In his unpublished essay, “The Role of Narrative in Tourism”, Bruner revisits some of his ideas on tourist narratives in Culture on Tour. In terms of the narratives tourists themselves tell (as distinguished from but not disconnected from Master Narratives) , I am interested in this notion of the transition from experience to narrative, and the several stages he describes - the first inscription of the experience into the verbal, the first re-telling to another person... it does not sound to me like this process describes tourist narratives only, but is a model for the narrativization of memory in general. I would be curious to know what other research has been done in this area - it seems to me that tourism, is once again a rich laboratory, in this case because the transmission is largely oral (the use of photos, props and mementos notwithstanding) , and there are certain conventions that exist in the telling of travel tales. Bruner posits a hyperawareness that the experience may become material for a story - but for many this hyperawareness permeates non-touristic experience as well. Some might suggest that this is the touristic attitude, gaze, habitus - bleeding into the everyday. I am skeptical of this. While tourism is undeniably a huge industry, I’m not sure that it’s helpful to think of tourism as a ‘force’. Tourism is not a monolith - as Bruner points out, it is a complex, multivalent site of multiple negotiations, encounters, and contestations. I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to work out here, but it seems to have something to do with the generalizability of this model of narrative memory, and the rich and (maybe deceptively?) study-able phenomenon of tourism. Maybe it is that I am sensing a greater applicability of certain ideas in Bruner’s work, but I am also sensing a certain resistance in the text to extending the claim beyond the phenomenon of tourism, possibly because of his subjective stance and the turn away from generalizing ‘grand theories’. I wonder, though - it seems to me that this narrative model for memory would be in accordance with the constructivist approach.
Posted by Sarah Klein at 12:54 PM
Edward M. Bruner's Narratives
“Culture on Tour” is Edward M. Bruner’s arrival at Grand Central after forty-five years of travel; it is the theoretical and empirical synthesis of his anthropological and ethnographical life-work. Bruner not only exposes the new approaches he has elaborated in his extensive field work, but he also locates his theory of ethnic tourism within the general framework of tourist studies.
The core idea of Bruner’s work is that tourist productions are to be interpreted as ‘narratives’. He claims that different ‘narratives’ are inscribed and legible in tourist productions. He differentiates between the tourists’ narratives (dividing them into pre-/on-/post-tour sections), the locals’ narratives, the established master narratives and the metanarrative, which “places a frame around all cultural performances” (260n 11).
What is a common characteristic of all of Bruner’s narratives is that they outline a story that defines the ‘border zone’ – the concrete or abstract place in which locals and tourists encounter on another. The interpretation of tourism as ‘narratives’ helps Bruner to underpin his argument “against a fixed, static model that sees producers as in control, natives as exploited, and tourists as dupes” (12). New questions arise: who has the right to tell a narrative? Whose story is to be exposed? Is there one original/authentic story? An interesting example for the collision of narratives is the Elmina Castle in Ghana. The African-American tourists’ slave narrative competes with the Ghanaian local historical narrative here; which makes both the locals and the tourists participate in the formation of this tourist production.
Bruner, as many of the anthropologists of new tourist studies, seeks to explore the ‘performative’ in tourist productions, and he comes to the conclusion that “the metaphor of tourism is theater” (209). In consequence, Bruner suggests that tourist productions are performances constructed to entertain tourists. At the same time, there is a potential that these performances enter into ritual and ethnography (198-199) and become part of the local culture, as in the case of the Balinese frog dance. Bruner expands this idea in his paper “The Role of Narrative in Tourism” by showing the way that constructive forces in tourist productions influence local culture, and by claiming that “tourist constructivism describes culture that has been created or shaped” (Narrative: 12).
Interpreting tourist productions as performances allows Bruner to break with the traditional search for authenticity in the field of tourist studies. In his analysis of ethnic tourism, he demonstrates that tourists are more interested in good performances than in authentic experiences. He dismisses the idea of authenticity, questioning MacCannell’s investigation of the lack of authenticity in everyday life as well. To support his argument, Bruner emphasizes that it is mostly locals who visit the Indonesian ethnic theme park, Tama Mini. Here, local people attend the tourist site in order to reaffirm “an authenticity already known and experienced” (227). However, it is important to point out that while Dean MacCannell’s analysis concentrates on modern tourists (in other words the tourists of the Western world) exclusively, Bruner’s focus alternates between Western tourists in postcolonial countries and domestic tourism in third world countries. Simultaneously, Bruner’s focus alternates between entertainment and ‘activism’ as the function of tourism. He looks at ethnic theme parks as mythical sites, which “designated to resolve a contradiction between an ideal image of the nation and the reality of what a nation actually is” (230).
Franklin and Crang depict how tourism might intervene “in the construction of local identity: to constantly create and recreate a sense of belonging, past, place, culture and ownership” (10). At the same time, Bruner points out that narratives are “structures of power”. At this point, this is the field of tourist studies I am most interested in: how the ruling power establishes and reaffirms national identity through tourist productions. After the change of the system in 1989, nationalism has become the most important ideology in Hungary, which manifested itself in every cultural and political performance, including tourist productions. This over-emphasis on our national identities led to horrific anomalies in several cases, which I might attempt to explore in my research project.
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 12:36 PM
The Reawakening
By grounding his analysis of tourism squarely within the framework of ethnography, Edward Bruner is able to study it as a practice that is socially constituted, constantly changing, yet “real” and worthy of being dignified by scholarly anthropology. His method uses MacCannell’s notion of a front stage-to-backstage gradation of authenticity, but only as a starting-off point. Furthermore, Bruner integrates such notions as performativity, borderzones, and spontaneity, into his analysis and basis his ideas on the theory of social constructivism (thereby aligning himself with some of the basic ideas of the “new” tourist literature), yet departs from certain postmodern positions which prize the simulacra and undercut the value of the term “authentic” altogether.
First, I would like to trace how the term “authenticity” is contested, especially in chapters 1, 5, and 7 because I think his use (and deconstruction) of this term allows us to view him as in dialogue with both MacCannell and with postmodern writers like Baudrillard and Eco. Lastly, I wanted to make note of an article published today in the NYT Style magazine called “The Reawakening” which publicizes the new tourism Afghanistan.
The first case study, Mayers ranch, is portrayed as a space that is completely fabricated and produced for tourists, yet it is constructed in such as way as to elicit a sense of what BKG and Bruner refer to as touristic realism (a notion I found much more helpful than the tourist authentic). This can be understood as a virtual world that conforms to certain pre-tour understandings of how the Maasai should look and feel by suppressing the markers of its own constructed-ness (58). The authentic is being actively produced – it does not ontologically exist in the back of the performance, as MacCannell might argue – and the ethnographic methods used by Bruner and BKG allow us to see how this authenticity is pre-formulated and performed. It was never assumed that each tourist was on a quest for the universal authentic; I very much appreciated the extent to which Bruner spoke to, mingled with, and guided those who had traveled to the locations he was studying. Also, it seems that in some cases, what is considered real, authentic African culture by some Americans traveling to Africa is merely an extension of the popular global media images (some produced in America) portraying African stereotypes. That is, the sense of what is authentic is always being performed – both at the site and before arrival.
Authenticity, as a marker for something actual, is further contested in Bruner’s writings on Lincoln’s New Salem. Against writers who assume that Americans privilege the simulation over the real (or mistake the absolute fake for the actual), Bruner will argue that what is important is not the authentic/inauthentic theoretical binary (that is somehow being “used wrongly” by American tourists), but what is actually occurring at the touristic site: the production of meaning by all actors at Lincoln’s New Salem. His approach to New Salem, as well as his approach to Bomas, debunks the same types of academic/intellectual biases that were and are used to discredit religious movements. To assume that tourists at New Salem or travelers to Bomas operate under a shallow form of false consciousness is a ‘critique without analysis’ that fails to take into account the popularity of such sites. Similarly, to simply say, “You are getting it wrong!” to those practitioners of religion undermines any attempt to see religion as a socially constructed force in its own right. “Authenticity” is a functional (not an ontological) term, with, as we have seen, a lot of social mileage.
Bruner ends chapter 5 with the acknowledgement that a tourist site can express and perform a “utopian potential for transformation” that can engage social life in a revolutionary capacity (168). If one can understand domestic tourism in this way, can the same be said of international tourism? The juxtaposition of multiple locations in Bruner’s text – though a bit overwhelming at times – did serve to highlight the structural disparities between a site like Lincoln’s New Salem and a site like the Balinese Bautan festival. Here, the West confronts the East, and the phenomenon of international mass tourism is situated within a post-colonialist/orientalist discourse of power, stereotypes, and exploitative tendencies. The term “authentic” is once again thrown into the spiral of postmodern sensibilities: “Cultural innovation that arises in the borderzone… what anthropologists formerly called inauthentic culture,” writes Bruner, “eventually becomes part of Balinese ritual” thereby morphing into a seemingly “authentic” cultural expression (200). The tourist is completely implicated in the field of fieldwork. Yet are the potentials for revolution embedded in the Balinese re-appropriation of stereotypes to their own economic and cultural advantage? Can the stereotype/image ever be done away with? Or is all social life predicated on verisimilitude, performance and playing with past tropes and forms? Is the tourist production itself a microcosm of what occurs everyday? In that sense, does each of us harbors a certain tourist sensibility that, unlike MacCannell’s reading, does not express the modern quest for the authentic, but does illuminate the importance of narrative and performance in our daily lives? These are some of questions that arose in reading Bruner’s texts.
Lastly, in addressing this issue of orientalist stereotypes and the way they govern travel, I quickly wanted to note that the New York Times Sunday Style magazine did a piece on the new tourism in Afghanistan. I posted the link below, but here are some excerpts that begin to construct an authentic Afghan tourist experience. The article is even titled, “The Reawakening” which evokes Bruner’s lively, active, and creative borderzone and also alludes to the notion that land simply isn’t fully alive unless it is under the gaze of the western tourist:
“Afghanistan has always seemed impossibly foreign and mysterious and beautiful to me… After 25 years of war, fundamentalism and occupation, Afghanistan was once again becoming a place where Westerners, if not exactly heroes, were at least said to be welcome guests. In Kabul, luxury hotels were being constructed, quaint guesthouses remodeled, Internet cafes outfitted with milk frothers and wired with high-speed connections. If tourists were returning to Afghanistan, as rumored, I wanted to be one of them, to see the sixth-poorest country on the planet…
“A few tips: don't wander off paths and roads; there are still many unexploded mines throughout the country. Afghanistan is a very conservative Muslim country; to avoid offending Afghans, you should dress modestly. Never wear shorts, even when exercising. Women should cover their heads and arms in public. Visitors should not drink alcohol or appear inebriated in public view. There is a risk, especially for visitors from the United States and other Western countries, of kidnapping or other acts of political violence.”
The Reawakening: The people of Kabul are embarking on yet another heroic effort: tourism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/travel/tmagazine/25KABUL.html
Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 11:58 AM
Agency/Narrative
AGENCY
The question that had kept returning to my mind while reading Bruner was that of agency, or the relationship between the socially constituted tourist subject and the agency that allows tourists to write their own narratives. Bruner rejects a deterministic position that confines tourists in a discourse constructed outside their own physicality, outside their own “selves”, as he states outright that “of course tourists have agency. . . . there are no persons without agency, without active selves. . .”(12)
NARRATIVE
This question becomes more problematic as we move to the consideration of narrative. In his article on the role of narrative, Bruner breaks tourist narratives down to “pre-tour”, “on-tour”, and “post-tour” categories. It is important to note that the first is neither written by the tourists nor based on their own experiences. The pre-tour narratives are made up of tourist brochures, guidebooks, travel writings, abundantly supplied by the industry. On-tour, tourists encounter different experiences from those recorded in pre-tour narratives, although the extent of difference varies. Some seek more adventurous, deviant experience while others remain conformist. An existent pre-tour narrative gets replaced by ones provided by the tourists themselves. According to Bruner, “a grand narrative about Bali is replaced by one about the tourist as hero.”
It seems to me, however, that the space in which tourists get to write their own narrative is limited as their horizon of expectation is constructed outside them. For instance, the experience of backpackers, however free and uninhibited it may sound, is, to a certain degree, already narrativized, and cannot escape the discursive limit of the backpacker tourism. Although each tourist experience is unique and never identical, can be conformist, resistant, or even subversive, the forces that shape it are always external to the tourist himself/herself. Pre-tour narratives yield enormous influence, so do class-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-based assumptions.
Bruner’s episodes of post-tour parties at which stories are exchanged around the photos taken on tour are illustrative on this account. A National Geographic magazine circulated during the tour, or the house once occupied by Mead and Bateson, pointed out by an authoritative ethnographer/guide becomes a catalyst by which a shared, homogeneous political consciousness of a tour group is affirmed. Ethnic display of the Maasai at three different locations also exemplify kinds of narratives written for different groups of tourists whose expectations are socio-historically pre-constructed. The issue of “who has the right to tell the story” (12) looms large.
BORDERZONE
This leads to my reflection of a zone of contact and negotiation between and among hosts and guests, tourists and toristees, travellers and travellees. Discussions on who, which periods, and which versions of history should be performed at the restored castle of Elmina indicate a complexity involved in a production of a tourist narrative. Here, Bruner’s concept of borderzone is helpful because it transfigures an exploitative gaze and an assimilationist strategy of an ethnic theme park into a potential site of a minoritarian resistance and community maintenance, in which I hear an echo of Richard Hundler’s notion of “self-objectification”. The activities centered around the Toba Batak house at Taman Mini, in contrast to two other ethnic theme parks described in Culture on Tour, offer a hopeful possibility.
I would like to end my response by returning to the issue of agency. Tourism, in the late-capitalist gargantuan globalizing cultural market, never stops producing narratives of desire for consumption. Narratives, as the tourist experience moves from a static gaze to a sensory embodiment, seem to expand in their range and become more open-ended. But I am not sure whether we possess enough agency to write texts of our own. The market, propelled by globalizing economy in conjunction with controlling power of nation states grips our lives. As consumers, we often end up as choosers of pre-fabricated texts and not as makers. The challenge seems to lie in our ability to create an anti-normative borderzone in interstices betweem narrative layers by which we are surrounded.
Posted by Yuichiro Takahashi at 11:14 AM
Yochi's Response
Through out the reading, it is not hard to find out Bruner’s emphasis on authenticity. Instead of questioning the authenticity of object, he transformed his point into the authenticity of performance, such as the performance of the Maasai warrior, the reproduction of New Salem and the Balinese dance.
As critical and cynical audience or traveler, one may find uncomfortable in the situation of reproduced site, or as Bruner’s interpretation, the uneasiness caused by the questioning gaze. However, with the questioning gaze, the audience/traveler set up the assumption of the existence of authenticity, which in Bruner’s point worthy to be negotiated.
On page 48, one of the junior warrior mentioned that the performance in Mayer Ranch is a work. It is very obvious that the performers are conscious about their roles in this curatorial picture. You cannot say this is not a kind of cynicism of the performers, who realized the function of the dance transformed from a cultural ritual performance to a tourist highlight in order to present the African untamed power. And in Edensor’s article, he mentioned the ironic, cynical, “post-tourist” performance that cynically questioning the significance of a specific object (75). I am fascinated by the interaction that exists between the feeder and the receiver.
What is the solution of the tourism while modernity in a certain way influenced the attitude of the performer and also the perception of the audience? Interestingly, Bruner’s description about the Ramayana ballet responded this question, he said that the upscale tourist did not object the fact that a performance was constructed for the tourists, but they demand that it be a good performance (208). In the same paragraph, Bruner also mentioned that the audience stated the Javanese show is better than the Balinese one, because of the setting was more high-class and exclusive. This is a very interesting narration about the tourist for me; it indicated that no matter how cynical these tourists can be, they are still looking at tourism in a hierarchical structure of materialism.
In Bruner’s writing about the role of narration in tourism, he divided the narration into three periods; the pre-tour narration, on-tour narration and the post-tour narration. I am deeply bothered by his categorization of narration, especially the description about the on-tour narration. Bruner’s description about the en-route narration such as trail stories from other backpackers, the personal diaries or the internet travel journals are all narrations after experiencing the tour. This could be a question related to the definition of tour, personally, I think a major tour is consisted by numerous minor tours.
Usually a major tour is clearly begins and ends by a certain time point (the moment you pick up the luggage and step out your house, the day you goes back to your hometown.) or a special location (airport, train station.), but while you are on the tour, you are also making numerous plans of touring by visiting all kinds of small landmarks or sites. Like the tour to Empire State Building can be a part in the major tour of New York City, and also a minor tour itself. I know Bruner is trying to emphasis the transformation and importance of the master narration before/in/after the journey. However, in order to set the boundaries on the linear time line, I am confused by the differences between these three levels in his examples.
Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 10:06 AM
Fertile grounds
There is a lot to be said about ethnographic narrative – I thoroughly enjoyed reading the ‘lived experiences’ of the author, thereby making theoretical concepts alive and real. Bruner’s years of commitment to the field indeed added depth and perspective to my understanding of the field. I think these were very necessary readings (essay and book) – communicating what could have posed to be complex thoughts, in a clear practical way based on experience, at the same time demonstrating good ethnography – offering multiple interpretations, an insightful recognition of elements that warranted attention, reflexive, thorough, contextualized, and explicit. And definitely a project that “analyzes tourist performances not as representations, metaphors, texts, or simulacra of something located elsewhere, but as social practice to be studied in its own right, grounded by the methods of ethnography” (7). There were moments that really stood out for me in my reading – the role of narrative, and the borderzone in particular.
Thinking about narrative and its own story, I was also thinking about it as a process of ‘idealization’, as a persuasive means of representation, as ‘ideas’ that govern the images and behavior of tourism for its participants such as producers, tourists or ‘residents’. Secondly, Bruner writes about the imperialist nostalgia and the colonial narrative, which I think I could also articulate as ideological domination not only through colonialism but also through Christian evangelization in many cases, Nagaland for instance. Hence, the storyteller is as important as the story itself in channeling attention and focus of the readers to a particular aspect of the story. Keeping in mind the dialogic nature of narrative, I am curious to see how the meta narratives themselves can actually start becoming commonplace and worn. When a romanticized representation becomes commonplace, particularly with the educated tourist’s understanding of the role of authorial agency, one can often stop paying attention to what is ‘outstanding’ about a place, and new narratives must be found and experienced in secret back alleys and ‘underground’ performances. In the end, narrative seems to want to claim more and more territory, and power. Bruner’s privileging of narrative in his paper raises some important questions, and in a sense for me, reflects on life itself as the perpetually written story, the self as a narrative itself.
MacCannell’s insight of the front/back region, incisive as it is, Bruner’s focus on the ‘borderzone’ as a ‘point of conjuncture’ (17), a space where the tourist and the locals have the point of contact is exciting. Because it conjures up ideas of a space that is liminal but potent, a haven where players play their roles. What is exciting about it to me is the role the borderzone plays as a brewing pot of new emergent culture. Although this zone is not always necessarily demarcated as it was with the Mayers’, it still is a great ‘metaphor’ to visualize such an exchange taking place. Although the Maasai considered their stay and performances at the Mayers as ‘work’(48) and did not consider their being there as a way of becoming junior warriors as they performed for the tourists, the borderzone still was fertile ground where real exchanges took place, where women sold their handicrafts, where men had to act aloof, and the same space where they had to lock away their real lives behind closed doors. This activity cannot be passively contained in that zone, and I am interested in how these activities start meshing and intermingling with the real world, just as what began in tourism entered Balinese ritual. For my own research I am interested in how the ‘experience’ of performing in the borderzone affects the ‘experience’ of performing outside the borderzone, particularly for the ‘native’, and to delve even deeper, how can affect itself of a performance within the borderzone create a whole new genre and practice, how just by the very act of ‘acting’ (one’s knowledge that one knows that one knows that this is not real!) in that zone, a new genre is being born. Identifying that zone provokes great imagery and articulation.
Posted by Senti Toy at 8:42 AM
Rethinking backpacker
Although not directly pertinent to the writings of Edward Bruner, in this public forum I would like to call attention to a semiological problem with the word backpacker. Bruner, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and MacCannell all use the word quite readily and easily in their discourse on tourism, yet, all use it to signify different things. Bruner seems to define backpackers as individuals or small groups of young people who stay in hotels that cater to young tourists. MacCannell seems to align backpackers with the more rugged individuals who travel off the beaten track, perhaps exclusively referring to those tourists who camp outside. In class lectures, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett seems to fall in line with MacCannell’s definition, adding a personal tinge of reverence and admiration for these kinds of travelers (although perhaps humorously reflexive as well).
I bring attention to this point, because the two different definitions of backpacker commonly acknowledged delineate two very different sets of travelers that, thus far, seem to go undifferentiated in tourist studies. Until I traveled to Europe, I only acknowledged one definition of backpacker: a person who travels with all the things needed to camp on his/her back. Implicit in this definition is the voyage into more remote areas where one would need to set up camp. These are the rugged adventurers who travel away from civilization. This first definition of backpacker, however, radically changed once I entered Europe for the first time as a study-abroad student.
It seems that, at least among people of my generation, a backpacker is any person who travels with a backpack and stays in hostels. Typically, backpackers move from city to city using public transportation such as trains. My companions and myself frequently commented upon the disparity between the two definitions. Initially our comments entailed ridiculing those hostel-staying travelers, who called themselves backpackers, yet used the backpack merely as a glorified suitcase. The first definition of the word backpacker implies a higher status than is given to other types of tourists. This status assessment probably arises due to the view that backpacking is more strenuous, difficult, adventurous, and perhaps nobel.
The second definition does not elicit the same type of high status. To the study abroad students, there was not much difference between the backpackers we met in the middle of Paris and the average tourist. Therefore, it became necessary for us to combat the seemingly unfair status awarded to those who called themselves backpackers, yet did not participate in the activities we originally associated with backpacking. Eventually, because of the more pervasive use of the second definition of backpacker, I came to give primacy to this definition. Now, it is the privileged youths staying in hostels, Eurorail ticket in hand, which immediately springs to my mind at the mention of the word backpacker. Ironically, I bought a backpack and traveled around the world in relative comfort while referring to myself as a backpacker. Only in Cambodia did I find a backpack to actually be of more use than a normal suitcase, proving my original conclusion that backpacks are merely status creating suitcases.
To borrow Bruner’s terminology, two metanarratives exist for the concept of backpacker/ing. Before one meets a backpacker, or buys a backpack, one already has an understanding of the verb to backpack. When direct contact is made, whether while actually traveling or not, one’s personal narrative or definition may change, as it did in my own case. Interestingly, however, the metanarrative does not necessarily disappear or even become amended. When pre-stories do not change because of incongruities, Bruner finds that tourists fail to make adjustments due to their own perceived lack of understanding or authority. In some cases, when the initial pre-story is not directly proved false, a new narrative is created that runs a parallel course to the first. Although I have never seen nor participated in my first definition of backpacking, I have no reason to disbelieve that the first definition of backpacking is false. Both definitions are valid, and in frequent usage, which requires the scholar to be clear about the definition she/he works under.
(This was an attempt to answer ethnography with a bit of personal ethnography. Admittedly, I am worried that it is a failed attempt, as well as failure at properly engaging the text in a manner displaying competence and 200 pages of reading. Blaim it on the tourist's need to share their stories, as Bruner mentions.)
Posted by Lisa Reinke at 2:26 AM
Tourist Studies & the Ethnography of Modernity
“Tourism and revolution” Dean MacCannell explains, constitute “two opposing poles of modern consciousness –a willingness to accept, even venerate, things as they are on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other” (3). In this book, he in fact does succeed in establishing tourism as a worthy object of analysis.
In The Tourist, Dean MacCannell looks at tourism as a way of studying “Modernity.” He proposes that it not only reflects the ideological preoccupations of modernist thinking, but also that tourism spreads modern society. He proposes a fascinating method in which the subjects’ ethno- and/or meta-praxis informs the researcher’s. “The more I examined my data, the more inescapable became my conclusion that tourist attractions are an unplanned typology of structure that provides direct access to the modern consciousness of ‘world view,’ that tourist attractions are precisely analogous to the religious symbolism of primitive peoples” (2). By examining tourist activities, he explains, we can understand the taxonomies, values, ideologies, rituals, meaning systems, and differentiations of the modern world. The methodology becomes even more problematic as the culture he is exploring is “his own.”
The closest MacCannell comes to dealing with the subjectivities of the “tourees” is in his discussion of “Staged Authenticity” (91-107). The people who are part of the tourist spectacle mainly exist as symbols, as his description of semiotics reinforces (109-133). “The Ethnomethodology of Sightseers” (135-143). I agree with his contention that the international tourism industry does conventionally reproduce and reinforce the modernist ideological separation of the modern from the non-modern world (8). The non-modern exists as tourist attraction; ironically, when non-Western peoples begin to participate in tourist productions, they have begun to be incorporated into the ideologies and practices of capitalist modernity.
The strength of MacCannell’s analysis is his accurate description of this definitional game. As his goal is to study an aspect of Western Modernity through one of its institutions, this is an appropriate method. However, I find problematic the way in which he reproduces it’s logic in his analysis. MacCannell explicitly states his intention to consider the universalizing ideologies of both modernity and tourism. While acknowledging these to be characteristic of modernist thinking, he reproduces this logic by totalizing fashion. Tourism and Modernity appear as monolithic categories.
In “Performing Tourism; Staging Tourism,” Tim Edensor, expands on MacCannel’s notion of tourism as performance and in particular his idea of “stage” regions. Edensor, however, makes the intervention of treating the tourist as performers, instead of just the passive consumer of simulacra natives, and he treats the experience of the Western tourist as an active site of meaning-production. He approaches “tourism” as a creative space in which “performance” can create identities and contest meanings. This is his symbolic antidote to the “dystopian future for tourism where every potential space becomes intensively stage-managed and regulated as part of the commodification of everything”:
“While there is no doubting the power to define the normative which inheres in these modes of promoting space and culture, such strategies can never eclipse the potential for innovative performances. However, at the same time as this homogenizing process, this closing in, there is an unceasing proliferation of tourist spaces and practices which open up the world, invade the everyday, and expand the repertoire of performative options and the range of stages upon which tourists may perform” (Edensor 79). While I find the optimism of Edensor’s argument unconvincing, I think he is moving in the right direction.
The emphasis of Edensor’s approach on creativity, specificity, and performance, has some resonance with that advocated by Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang in “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory,” their introduction to this journal of Tourist Studies. In this article, Franklin and Crang offer a broader notion of the “touristic” a word coined by MacCannell himself in the mid-1970s. They reproduce MacCannell’s thesis that tourism is “a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized” and purport that Tourism Studies’ new agenda needs to reflect “this growing significance” (6-7). They propose 6 points of departure that foreground the global and local social contexts in which tourism takes place, the perspective of the tourees, and the creative, performative, emergent meanings made in the performance and interpretation of tourist productions. Like MacCannell, Franklin and Crang also look at tourism as a “total social fact,” but they define the social from a different perspective. Whereas MacCannel’s “universalizing” viewpoint has come to feel inadequate and ethnocentric in today’s world, their “globalizing” viewpoint, which sees a multiplicity of actors, agendas and subject positions, promises to make tourism an exciting object of study with the potential to illuminate the workings of “modernity” in the manner MaCannell intended.
Posted by Pilar Rau at 1:03 AM | TrackBack
Justine's response
Tourism as social structure makes way for the ethnographer…
In Culture on Tour, Bruner’s affiliations are laid bare, and in such a way, he engages with types of tourism and players too messy and possibly irksome for MacCannell’s project of modernity – particularly, international tourism in a post-colonial and increasingly globalised era, where Western leisure, travel and adventure are aimed toward less developed destinations (Indonesia, Kenya, Ghana, China). In letting it all hang out, in speaking from a frank, personal and importantly, reflexive voice, Bruner makes himself and us aware of the inner workings of money, of control, privileges, biases, and also brick walls and difficulties that arise. He is attempting to understand for himself, from his position on the ground – and through him, we gain insight. This varies greatly from MacCannell’s effort to establish an overarching tourist social structure. Here, questions with no answers are valued, and analyses of specific situations (over quite an extensive period of time) are offered not as typical necessarily, not as examples to illustrate a unifying theory, but as a way to develop tourist studies debate.
Like Edensor, Bruner sees performance analysis as incredibly important to how we might understand tourism. He looks at tourist productions as performances – although the traditional theatrical space and context of Edensor, with a clearly delineated proscenium, audience, stage managers, etc is replaced by a model of more improvisatory performance. The stage is now located in the “borderzone” and is inhabited by both tourists and locals as actors, although roles are not distinct, they may change or be mutually held (as in Bruner himself – tourist, ethnographer, tour guide, tourist producer). Additionally, Bruner adopts what he sees as a “performative method” to his analysis, ie, a reflexive and ironic one. (6)
Important to Bruner’s work also is the idea of narrative – he sees an ongoing tension between experience and narration in tourism. Working from the three-fold distinction of trip as lived, experienced and as told, he distinguishes meta-narratives (concerning concepts governing the framework of tourism enterprise itself) and tourist tales (pre-tour, on-tour, post-tour narratives), which are more attached to particular regions and which can include routine as well as unexpected events. He examines the impact of one on the other – eg. the tour as lived or experienced may be directed by what will make good stories later. In The Role of Narrative in Tourism particularly, Bruner elaborates on the “master narrative” as a pre-understanding of the tourist destination, which becomes key appreciating Bruner’s rejection of the concept of authenticity as central. Tourism, for Bruner, is a performance of embodying the pre-tour narrative (24) and so any sense of “authenticity” is measured against the tourist’s preconception or pre-understanding, the “master narrative”, not some truly authentic notion, which is fictitious anyway as cultures are emergent and what is often identified as “authentic” by both tourist producers and tourists is a fantasy of the past, frozen in time (eg. the Maasai performance at Mayers Ranch).
I could go on and on. And I haven’t begun to talk about issues of exploitation. Power relations are not so easy to generalise in this view of tourism, which looks at so many players – the state, the impresario, the producer, the performer – and players whose roles may, again, not be fixed (as in the Maasai performers and waiters at Sundowners). Bruner engages with many of the big whammies of tourist studies concepts: MacCannell’s “staged authenticity” - Bruner refers to “tourist realism” instead, but stresses that it is only one of several possible tropes (others include nationalism, eg. Bomas). Also, MacCannell’s concept of front/back regions - Bruner’s critique points out that front implies a back that is more real and really exists (Bruner sees tourist performances occurring in a “borderzone” and relates this concept to the use of “the picture” at Mayers Ranch: “Being in the picture defines the limits of the borderzone.” (66)). Likewise, Urry’s “tourist gaze” becomes irrelevant in situations like Taman Mini where the Toba Batak visit not to “discover the Other but rather witness a performance of themselves in a different context.” (227)
I am thinking about a final project that deals with the feeling of being a tourist in familiar places (sort of badly articulated) and so Bruner’s expansions on home and away, front and back, and perhaps memory and the retelling jump out at me. Also, it seems to me that one of the keys to Bruner’s current work, is his quest for how his journeys in tourist studies and ethnography reflect and inform one another. The self-reflexive method of analysis that he employs is important to his work, and may provide a model for my project.
Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 12:28 AM
Saturday Night? Let's talk Ethnography!!! From Tyler
In his book Culture on Tour, Edward Bruner provides a prime example of what we might term “the new tourist studies.” Though he employs an ethnographic approach with roots reaching back into the 19th century, he adroitly adds a post-structuralist awareness to his findings that remains suspect of transcendent theories and concrete conclusions. Perhaps he puts it best himself, writing, “the studies in this book analyze tourist sites and performances as evolving and historical—or…more simply, alive” (Bruner 12).
While I appreciate Bruner’s self-reflexive and adaptive approach over, say, the rigid claims of MacCannell, there are ultimately a number of instances in which I found it unsatisfying or precursory. In short, I want Bruner to extrapolate more from his field research, going further out on theoretical limbs. Rather than fault Bruner, however, I prefer to acknowledge his excellent work as an ethnographer, and thank him for pointing out a number of limbs that my peers and I might venture out upon ourselves. Here follow some specific examples that I found most intriguing.
Referring to the delineation between the Mayers’ and the Maasai’s living spaces and their routines at Mayers’ Ranch, Bruner presents the Batesonion paradox of “not being able to distinguish between a nip and a bite, or between a play fight and a real one,” (65) that is, between “tourist time” and “life time.” These two categories suggest a division in life experience, “life time” somehow being more real or authentic than “tourist time.” Elsewhere in his book, however, Bruner argues against MacCannell and Boorstin’s notions of the existence of an authentic reality or culture. Based on Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s research, how do we reconcile these conflicting positions? If there is indeed a difference between the two time types, and the Maasai’s village is temporarily reframed as “a stage” each day, who is responsible for this reframing, and how does it occur? Is the presence of tourists necessary? Is it up to the Maasai and their attitudes towards their activities?
Bruner’s research suggests a symbiotic relationship between the Mayers and the Maasai rather than an exploitative one. Do we buy this framing of their relationship? Bearing in mind that in all three examples, the Mayers’ Ranch, Bomas, and the Sundowner, the Maasai are working for someone else, either a private or government organization, do we believe that they are benefiting from the tourist industry, or merely making the best of a bad situation? Where is the line drawn between exploitation and free enterprise?
On 202 Bruner relates an account of running into Hilly Geertz in Bali. What follows is an interesting juxtaposition of Balinese, ethnographers, tourists, and a tour guide, which leaves Hilly feeling like “an ethnographic object.” How do we define ethnographic object? Is there something inherent to the object itself, or is this definition dependent solely on the gaze of the viewer? Furthermore, if this is the case, then could one not always be “on tour” even on her home street? Therefore, what does it mean to be “on tour” or to be a “tourist?”
In his unpublished essay, Bruner introduces the concept of “master narrative.” What he does not explore is how these narratives are created, who is responsible, and what are the driving forces behind their creation. Is it touristic expectation, the “source” culture being toured, or a dependence on money, causing the narrative to go where the dollars are?
In a vein similar to that above, Bruner later refers to a “limited number of basic travel stories,” (9) of which the teller changes which details receive emphasis depending upon the context of each telling. I wonder what these basic story types are, how and when they each arose, and if this list of basic stories has historically been added to or subtracted from. Moreover, I’m curious as to systems or at least trends in the various framings these stories receive based upon specific contexts, and whether clear correlations can be drawn between context and story structure and content.
On page eight, Bruner mentions an “objective reality.” I find this phrase highly problematic, as there is always a subjective “perceiver.” This initial problem is further compounded with regard to Bruner as he has repeatedly argued against the usefulness and existence of “authentic culture,” a phrase that seems synonymous with the aforementioned “objective reality.” Is there a difference between the two terms, and if so, how is “objective reality” somehow less problematic than a notion of “authentic culture?”
On page 14 Bruner mentions a tourist whom he claims is indicative of a larger phenomenon, that of tourists who are more interested in listening to stories than actually seeing sites, “an essential feature of postmodernism.” To me, this seems like an unsubstantiated and sweeping claim unjustifiably used to serve his argument. This raises the question as to how much ethnographic data is necessary to make a claim with relative confidence, and where else Bruner (and other ethnographers) may have relied upon unsatisfactorily small data pools to draw conclusions about the subjects of study.
One final question is as follows. Bruner separates tourist narratives into pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour narratives. While the context of each telling is certainly different, it seems to me that the mechanisms of at least the last two telling types remain largely the same. A person relating the incidents of the day back at his hotel in the evening is already in the post-tour mode, though still on tour. Even in the pre-tour phase, in relating things he’s read or heard, though the teller mightn’t likely be the protagonist, he is still constructing selective narratives based on memory and the context of the telling. The area that interests me is not the stories or the context in which they are told, but rather the purpose they serve for the teller during these various time delineations. Do they serve to quell fears, as social capital, as a kind of creation of self through narrative, or something else? Further, during the post-tour phase, how does the function of each story change over large spans of time and in small social units such as families?
Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 12:28 AM
September 24, 2005
Sandra's Response
Edward Bruner’s work on tourism directly addresses the critique made by the “new” tourism studies (namely Franklin and Crang) of the literature on tourism that focused on the question of authenticity, and that that viewed tourism from an orthodox structuralist perspective, establishing tourism as an orderly system, and tourists as perpetrators and the toured as victims.
Bruner discloses his theoretical stance early on in the introduction of Culture on Tour, underlining his commitment to studying tourist productions as social practices worthy of being analyzed in their own right (7), paying close attention to the mechanisms at work in their construction (5), to the interpretative or meaning-making agency of the different participants, as well as the sites themselves and the larger local and global context (12, 18, 25), to the way tourism is structured through narrative (20), and to the various ways in which tourism and ethnography can be related, different to, or illuminating of one another (2, 7, 8, 28).
Bruner inserts his work within the “new” tourism studies by disagreeing with MacCannell’s perspective, namely on the question of authenticity. For Bruner, far from a quest for the authentic undertaken by alienated moderns, travel or tourism needs to be viewed as a social practice with different motives at work: a quest for leisure and entertainment (a good show), a status marker, or even a project of self-improvement (196). Bruner distances himself from the very core of the debate over authenticity, the notion that there is a “real” and a “fake” or simulacrum that is merely an imitation of an original. For Bruner, there is no such thing as the “real” vs. the representation. The representation/simulacrum is real, concrete and an object of study in its own right. This is where he disagrees with MacCannell’s use of Goffman’s front and back regions, arguing that these imply the existence of a “real” a truth in the back that is hidden, and therefore there to be discovered (5). Bruner is not interested in whether or not the tourist production is more or less “authentic,” or even accurate, but focuses rather on how the production is designed, what is left in and what is taken out, the mechanisms that create and frame the experience. For example, through his technique of controlled comparison (72), he shows how the seamlessness of a production like the Mayers’ Ranch where all markers of the production have been consciously erased/hidden, and the explicitness of a place like Bomas, where the bar in the back, the actual auditorium/stage and multiple signs frame the performance, make the two experiences serve significantly different purposes and create very different interpretive possibilities (73).
Indeed, Bruner is interested in how culture is performed (or curated), and how those decisions and their unforeseen consequences shape the tourist experience. Much like Tim Edensor, he believes that the theater metaphor is the most productive way to analyze tourism and tourist productions, focusing on performance, actors, role-playing, scenography, lighting, direction/editing, etc. He successfully shows that what is important to tourists is not the performance’s authenticity, but its verisimilitude (209). Bruner offers his reader a theoretical concept to describe the space of the performance, the “tourist borderzone”, which he describes as “a point of conjuncture, a behavioral field that I think of in spacial terms usually as a distinct meeting place between the tourist (…) and the local performers (…)” (17). This borderzone is above all a creative space (193) where culture is constructed. For Bruner, the limits between the borderzone and local culture are often spurious, giving way to multiple interactions and shifts. Perhaps the best example for this is how performances produced originally for tourism such as the Barong dance or the Ramayana have become emblematic of Balinese and Javanese culture respectively(201).
But who creates/directs the production? Although Bruner does emphasize the power relations behind tourism (namely economic, but also ethnic in Mayers Ranch, for example; gendered as in Xishuangbanna or class, as in Sundowner), he debunks the classic local victim/tourist perpetrator power dynamic. Bruner stresses the importance of agency in the meaning-making process of a tourist encounter. He highlights this by using terms such as “coproduction” and “collaboration” to describe tourist productions worldwide. None of the participants are passive actors, even if there are different reasons for the engagement. Thus, far from being an exploitative enterprise, tourism (despite its sometimes devastating consequences) is a constant process of multiple negotiations between different interests. Perhaps the example of the Maasai at Mayers Ranch is the most illustrative of this process as they managed to manipulate tourism and their relationship with the Mayers to counteract destructive government policies (57). This is what Bruner calls “strategic essentialism.” However, locals are not the only ones to have agency in Bruner’s understanding. Tourists are also not passive observers and often have a questioning gaze, as well as multiple ways of interpreting what the global tourism industry produces for them (95). Even sites have agency in themselves, inanimate objects suddenly coming to life to shape the way they are understood by their visitors (Elmina and Cape Coast castles are perhaps the most obvious examples). In addition to agency, and affirming his theoretical genealogy, Bruner looks at the slippages, at the unforeseen consequences of tourist productions, at the messyness and creative gaps. In his eyes, control or agency are never absolute. A drunk Masai may forget to take off his modern raincoat before the performance (61), or a theme park built to “nationalize” ethnic difference can become precisely the place where that difference is reproduced (224-230). However compelling and often proven to be this case, I find Bruner’s ideas on agency could also erase precisely the power dynamics his predecessors aimed to highlight. How does one deal with cases such as the Mayers Ranch or Elmina where clearly U.S sxensibilities intervene and often overpower African notions of heritage, performance and “strategic essentialism”?
On another note, Bruner takes on the “new” tourist studies’ focus on the quotidian aspects of tourism culture by unveiling the equal importance of the journey (the hotels, transportation mediums, etc.) and the destination in molding the experience, but also by highlighting the importance of narrative. Storytelling as well as stories told shape, structure and order the tourist experience both pre and post the actual traveling. Bruner shows how pre-tour stories can be conscious (tales told by friends who went on a similar tour) or unconscious, or masternarratives (the way a culture is portrayed in popular culture or education). Both of these are filters/scripts that shape how a tourist production is experienced. In addition, narrative structures such as plot, characters and tropes, as well as mnemonic devices such as collected objects, souvenirs, photographs, etc., order the way an experience is told and later remembered. The experience goes through a series of different “tellings” almost the minute after it is lived, acquiring a new life within the realm of narrative. In “The Role of Narrative in Tourism”, Bruner does stress that this is never a finished product, but a never ending cycle that is not linear, a dialogic process that continues to exist as the tourist tale is retold beyond the trip itself. Unfortunately, Bruner does not take his insights on narrative to discuss how tourism tales, as well as masternarratives about tourism and tourism places, penetrate the realm of fantasy and imagination in even more everyday forms.
Bruner’s work raises multiple questions that might be worth discussing. First and foremost, there seems to be an ethnographic problem in his work related to the question of access. In all of his fieldsites, Bruner, in a charming reflexive narrative about his own relationship to his fieldwork and to the changes in anthropological thought over the last 40 years, is explicit about his lack of data and his limited access (a constant concern of anthropology). However, his limitations too seem to have unforeseen consequences: in the Mayers Ranch study, the perspectives of Maasai people are seldom heard or appear only as unnamed, homogenous and univocal “the Maasai” (68). How can one study a tourist production that is so related to a business enterprise and get away from what the Jane Mayers’ of the world authorize you to study? How can one access the multiple layers Bruner discusses if one is so confined to a particular actor’s standpoint? Another ethnographic problem that Bruner himself comes up against is how to study the postlocal. Is multisited ethnography the answer to finding out how locality is produced? If this is the case, and in a world where migration and globalization are predominant, how many sites would be enough? Should the ethnographer focus on the center where the rituals of reincorporation take place (252)? And in the case of narrative and tourism, how could an ethnographer get a sense of how the tourist tale evolves over time and space? How many retellings are enough?
Posted by at 8:50 PM
Ethnography of Tourism
While Dean McCannell was preoccupied with a typology of tourism and the content of sites, Edward Bruner focuses on ethnography and function. With different tools, they explore different sites, which is probably why McCannel sticks to places and monuments, while Bruner looks at performances and events.
As much as McCannell helped raise fundamental issues about tourism and modernity, but doesn’t really know how to go beyond his uneasiness about this intersection, Bruner offers a very inspiring model of analysis, as well as a candid reflection about positioning (not to mention the fact that Bruner’s primary focus is on Africa and Asia). Where McCannell looked for clear typologies (see his markers and back/front models), Bruner is hungry for contested sites, which are probably the most fertile and interesting sites of analysis.
In relation to performance, Bruner provides useful and nuanced definitions of “tourist realism” and of the different meanings of “authenticity”, beyond traditional (and comfortable) binaries.
A performance offers an entry point whether we look at artistic, religious, or social performance, and brings the analysis to a polyphonic level: in the case of Mayers ranch, for example, the performance of the Maasai is examined in relation to the tea performance of the Mayers, along with the relation to the tourists, the anthropologists, the rest of the population, the government, the economy, religion, social behavior, contemporariness and globalization. Bruner’s analyses are so complete that they act as inspiring models for other case studies (my only resistance is when the description of the performance tends to overshadow the analysis, and when unique items (or sometimes anecdotes) are presented as systematic – in both cases, I got too distracted from the main and strong analysis).
Bruner also uses narrative analysis in a very fruitful way. McCannell does study guidebooks (written traces), but Bruner includes ephemeral leaflets, posters, advertising and oral discourse from before, during and after attending the performance. He doesn’t rely on written, authoritative texts, but on every possible bit of narrative produced in relation to the site. Finally, he looks at different narratives in the way they contradict each other, or disagree with each other. It seems to me that this is a method that is intellectually serious because it is candid, and doesn’t try to impose typologies or patterns on an experience.
The same candidness goes for Bruner’s positioning. He has no qualms explaining his relation to the site, to the people, whether there is money involved, how much he discloses about what he does, how he travels, with whom and how he relates to the locals. To me, this is another model of wedding the gaze of an outsider and the one of a scholar in order to produce original analysis. McCannell seemed afraid to go beyond safe geographic boundaries of “known” places, like Paris or San Francisco. He is aspiring for the role of an objective and omniscient observer, a goal nobody will ever achieve or should even want to. Bruner, on the contrary, lays out his connections, biases and expertise, and uses all of them to deepen his understanding of the site. That’s how he has no problem exploring sites that reproduce colonial settings, or propagate national myths, or rewrite history (as long as he has no problem exposing such weaknesses).
I could go on raving about Bruner’s book, but I’ll end by focusing on for analytical models that he develops and that I find very stimulating for my own research about memorials:
- The conclusion of chapter 1, “the Maasai and the Mayers are merely players in a show written by international tourist discourse… They do not have to perform for tourists. If they choose to do so, however, they must follow the script” (70).
- The multiple narratives of one site (such as Elmina castle) and the multiple functions, old and new, assigned to the site.
- The relation of a specific site with its environment. I could replace the word “castle” by “memorial” in the following sentence: “Castles are a dynamic presence, places that produce movement between home and abroad, sites for the construction of narratives of time and narratives of space” (123).
And of course there’s more (such as the Bakhtin’s dialogic perspective and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s notion of “irreducible strangeness”, which I would like to twist to “irreducible void” in relation to memorials.)
Posted by Brigitte Sion at 3:57 PM
Siobhan Robinson
Siobhan Marie Robinson
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Tourist Productions
23 September 2005
First, I would like to say how much I enjoyed reading Edward Bruner. I appreciate his approach toward studying tourism. His critique is unlike any I have read thus far in tourism research. Perhaps it is because I love the stories that come from one’s individual experience, so I may be a bit partial. But instead of examining the problems within tourism he offers an approach I have not yet seen, which is the relation between narration and experience, pre and post the journey. He follows the story and this following for me has been a journey in itself. I also appreciate the way he does not remove himself from the problem. Most studies on tourism seem to criticize the dilemma as if from a distance, essentially lacking involvement. He admits how not all the chapters in Culture on Tour achieve the objective of examining local and world politics as they manifest themselves in the destination culture, which I think is evident in The Role of Narrative in Tourism. He seems to present a more local view of the on site location and then a local view of the tourist at home. He exposes how he and his wife were not exempt from conversation about their own authenticity as “experienced travelers.” Lastly, Bruner discusses his difficulty with not belittling tourists as he studies their experiences with other cultures. Bruner admits his shortcomings as an ethnographer and as a researcher instead of presenting a “perfect model” common in tourist’s studies, and for that his writings are appreciated. His honesty is authentic.
Speaking of which, I find it interesting how far removed he wants to be from the ideology of what is “inauthentic” when he himself seems to present an authenticity to explain the inauthentic. He discusses how cultures create performances that are not necessarily indigenous to the culture, but rather indigenous to the pre-conceived master narratives of the culture, usually synonymous with Western thought (i.e.: the exoticism of the Balinese culture.) This thought would present such performances or pre-conceived notions of a culture as inauthentic to the tourist. I find his objective to engage the tourists in a dialogue where they would think more deeply about culture, tradition, and representation to be authentic in itself. By authentic I mean rare, not counterfeited or copied, but having a verifiable origin or authorship. I admit that my knowledge of tourist’s studies is not that extensive and what I am cognizant of thus far comes from the readings, and my own experience as a tourist in Ghana, West Africa and Lima, Peru. Having said that I believe Bruner’s desire to examine tourist’s attractions, not as what they were presumed to be, but for what they actually were to be authentic to Bruner. He presents an authenticity for the inauthentic.
In addition to the above reactions to the readings, a couple of questions arose. The first was how has language changed over time from the 19th century and even the 1980’s when Bruner learned of the importance of narrative in tourism until the present day and how has this change affected narratives in tourism? I know this is a rather long and complicated question, which would take some time to deconstruct, but I could not help thinking about it as I was reading, wondering what the language was ( by language I mean sentence structure, the words with which people communicated, popular speech etc.) amongst travelers in the early 1900’s as opposed to 2005. For example, the views of Africans from a Western perspective has always been asinine and more than likely still is. But I am sure it was more so asinine in the early 1900’s as opposed to now. What would the narratives be for someone traveling to Elmina, for example then, than someone traveling there now?
The second question was that of Bruners, which sparked my interest as well. What would the style of story telling be for people of different ages? I think it would be interesting to hear differing experiences (stories) of a tourist who was 54 and a tourist who was 19. In addition, what would the difference be for people with different backgrounds such as class? For example, the experience of the upper class white majority as opposed to that of a lower class or even middle class minority. After returning to the States from Ghana and Lima I had a number of older African-American women (older than 54) approach me about my travels. Statements such as, “You make me so proud. We never had opportunities like that when we were your age,” and “I’ve always dreamed of going to Africa. It would be my dream before I die” were told to me by these women. Even my mom made the comment, “You’ve gone places your father and I never dreamed of.” I would be very interested in hearing the metanarratives that come from blacks from my parent’s generation, who were not granted scholarships and fellowships to travel abroad.
There was a question last week in class of what is home? How does one’s home differ from any other place they might go? My answer to this question is comfort. There is a certain comfort level at home where one does not feel the need to take pictures or prove their level of intelligence about their surroundings. Why is this? I would argue that it is due to a certain level of familiarity that people do not feel abroad for obvious reasons. I think Bruner discusses this well. He examines how hotels with their swimming pools, gourmet food, spacious rooms, and outstanding service provide a level of safety, security, and comfort that one finds in the home. To wealthy tourist the luxury offered by the hotels is what they are accustomed to in everyday life at “home.” Having said this, like Bruner, I believe that not all tours are “away” but alternate between being a tour and home.
Though I despise tourism in my own unique way, I found myself relating to much of what Bruner discussed in his narratives about narratives as they relate to my trips to Ghana and Lima. I thought of my own first-telling and second-telling narratives as I read. Though in an effort not to appear as a tourist in this paper (as hard as I try), I will refrain from discussing my own stories for now. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to explore and converse further the relationships between the aforementioned concepts and my narratives in class.
Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 9:05 AM
September 19, 2005
Case studies
In reading the responses for this week, several people mentioned cases. Cases are not just cases. The case--Paris, Elmina, Sepharad '92, Cardiff's Central Park Walk, Berlin Holocaust memorials, music in North India, District Six Museum--is not only good to think about, but also to think with (paraphrasing Levi-Strauss). This is crucial for understanding MacCannell, who focuses on mass tourism and takes as his case Paris, with particular attention to historical forms of tourism or the history of touristic attractions still functioning today.
Here are links to sites we might want to bring into the conversation today:
Elmina: #1, #2, #3, #4 (Flickr)
Te Papa
Paris
Berlin: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
South Africa: Robbin Island; District Six Museum, township tours--#1; #2, #3, #4 (Direct Action for Peace and Memory)
Sepharad '92
Posted by BKG at 1:51 PM
Scott's response
In The Tourist MacCannell claims that the structure of modern society can be best seen by looking at tourist productions. Drawing from semiotics, he views tourist attractions as signs of an underlying culture. These signs consists of [marker + sight + tourist]. Utilizing Marxist theory, he sees the modern human as alienated from her own society and thirsting for contact with “authentic” things. MacCannell heavily relies on the concept of “authentic sights” versus “spurious markers” of those sights. He discusses how the spurious markers becomes sights and objects in their own right, thus further alienating us from the very authentic experience for which we strive.
Perhaps it is important to look at the time and place in which MacCannell first wrote this book. I personally have a difficult time sympathizing with him regarding his rejection of “spurious” elements of society and the need for the “authentic.”
Perhaps 1976 was a time of backlash against the “plasticity” of materialism, where people wished to “go back to nature” or the “realness” of nonwestern cultures. MacCannell states, “Everyday life is composed of souvenirs of life elsewhere.” p. 158 Well, we live in a world where things and images are created and transported quickly to all places on the globe. Peoples and cultures appropriate things from one another all the time. The world in this sense is getting smaller. But that doesn’t mean that it is false. Maybe what is false is MacCannell’s yearning for a “pure” culture that doesn’t wish to imitate or appropriate imagery and identity from other sources. It seems that he rejects a sense of self-reflexivity in performance. The minute that something is framed “as” performance, it ceases to be the “real deal.”
“A spurious society is one that must be left behind in order to see a true sight.” p. 154. I disagree. You see what you are seeing. If you mean “true” in the sense of something that is not prepared or performed to be seen, then you wouldn’t want something “spurious” or prepared/performed for the sake of being seen by others. But so what? MacCannell is caught up worrying that his own everyday life is spurious. It seems to me that he wishes to return to the evolutionary adaptive environment where the visited society is completely hermetic and uninfluenced by other cultures.
Nevertheless, I found MacCannell’s thoughts on “authenticity” interesting and worth investigating. MacCannell states, “Sightseers are motivated by a desire to see life as it is really lived, even to get in with the natives, and at the same time, they are deprecated for always failing to achieve those goals.” I don’t believe this is exactly true. Sightseers do seem, generally, to want to experience the “real deal” And yet, they don’t. They want beauty and comfort and entertainment. These seldom, if ever, are congruous with the reality of everyday existence in the society of interest. Tourist may wish to go to Guatemala, but they don’t want to go to the regular neighborhoods of Guatemala City where “locals” live their normal lives. They instead wish to see the colorful markets, the “traditional” towns in the hills where preparations are made for tourists. They don’t wish to experience any Quatemalan’s daily routine of cleaning house, going to work or school, or watching tv.
Nevertheless, there is the stated touristic desire to get the “real” experience. So, that’s worth thinking about. People love talking about the “chicken buses” in Guatemala. They feel that experiencing a ride on a “chicken” bus with the “locals” is more authentic, more “Guatemalan,” than an air-conditioned and roomy tourist bus.
In looking at authenticity, MacCannell draws upon Goffman’s six stages of the touristic front-back continuum:
Stage 1: front region that exists solely for tourists (e.g., gift shop in the Guatemala City airport.)
Stage 2: front region that is decorated to resemble in some ways a back region (e.g. Antigua “native” market that is set up like a “real” market in the highlands but sells only local arts and crafts at tourist prices to tourists.)
Stage 3: a front region that is totally organized to look like a back region. (e.g. the San Francisco Ghiradelli Chocolate “Factory” inside the restaurant that is being used to make chocolate, but is being made solely for the purpose of being seen being made.
Stage 4: back region that is open to outsiders (tour of parts of the White House.)
Stage 5 a back region that may be cleaned up or altered a bit because tourists are permitted an occasional glimpse in. (I used to work in a winery in Napa Valley, CA. Part of the cellar was designated as the area where tourists walked through on their winery tour. In this part of the cellar, there is nice tile on the floor (instead of concrete) and the tanks are painting clean white (instead of remaining stainless steel like the rest of the cellar. When we were working in these tanks during the tour, we would often “perform” the role of “Cellar Rat” and take on fake “hick” accents and attempt to appear more “blue collar” than we really were. )
STage 6: Goffman’s true back region: (The rest of the winery where only employees could go; the private or “working” part of the White House)
These stages remain problematic in firmly identifying levels of “authenticity.” How would one define the Guatemalan chicken bus? It is not funded nor altered for the tourists, but some tourists do ride them. When this happens, the conductor may attempt to charge them more than locals. At other times, tourists get the same treatment and seem to be ignored. However certainly the behavior of local riders is at least minutely altered by the presence of the tourist. The very presence of the tourist perhaps eliminates the possibility of it being a stage six. If there are not tourists on it, then it becomes a stage six. The tourist herself therefore alters the reality of the tourist attraction.
I don’t know how the concept of authenticity with tourist productions will bring us closer to MacCannell’s desire to access the modern consciousness or “world view.” Yet the value of “authenticity” appears to be salient in tourist behavior and the performance of tourist productions.
He states that “primitives who live their lives totally exposed to their “relevant others” do not suffer from anxiety about the authenticity of their lives.” p.93 How are “primitives” totally exposed? Because they don’t drive cars? Because they may be bare-chested? This sounds suspiciously to me like a colonialist romanticization of nonwestern cultures. I need clear examples for this to make sense to me.
How is dye injected into a ham, or silicon injected into a breast so different than a “primitive” person misrepresenting his true feelings to another? Or saying that this rock came from one place when it reality it came from another? A television show about fictious people is no different than an oral narrative about a legend of a person who never really existed. This “authenticity” distinction here between “primitive” and “modern” seems manufactured.
Yet I don’t wish to completely reject MacCannell's ideas about staged authenticity and people’s thirst for “the authentic.” With the proliferation of markers of other things in society, it seems that people feel they are farther and farther removed from the true sources of the signifiers. Thus one may use authenticity as a means for defining tourist productions as located somewhere between the “ideal poles of touristic experience.” p. 101
Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:21 AM
Brynn's Response
The shift from MacCannell’s text to the Tourist Studies pieces we read for this week is one that (possibly) demonstrates a theoretical shift from the modern to the postmodern perspective. (But what can we mean by those terms “modern’ and “postmodern”?! What is interesting to me is the way they are used by the writers/theorists, how they function, what sort of behavior and notions they stand in for, etc.) Though ultimately interested in deconstructing – or de-familiarizing – most aspects of the tourist industry, MacCannell also seems to be constructing a grand theory of tourism. That is, he is asking, in a structuralist mode, what can tourism reveal about society’s deepest and most fundamental interworkings?
“Tourist attractions,” he writes in the intro, “are an unplanned typology of structure that provides direct access to the modern consciousness or worldview” (2). The touristic act of sight-seeing, he states, functions to help the ‘modern’ person over come, incorporate, or, simply, make whole the discontinuity and differentiation characteristic of post-industrial modernity (13). I wonder if his emphasis on social integration stems from his theoretical use of Durkheim who was interested in those things – those social facts of modes of collectivity – that sustained a society both materially and morally. Later, MacCannell will conjure Durkheim when stating that “tourist attractions and the behavior surrounding them are… one of the most complex and orderly of the several universal codes that constitute modern society” (46).
Contrary to this, the ‘new tourist studies,’ – especially as theorized by Edensor – focus on both the order and disorder possible in tourist spaces. Tourism, for Edensor, constitutes “commonly understood embodies practices and meanings which are reproduced by tourists through their performances” (71). The emphasis here on performativity establishes the possibility of normative, convention-inducing performances and tourist performances that deviate, ridicule, and rebel against established codes of behavior. Similarly, Franklin and Crang’s editorial emphasizes the necessity of analyzing the phenomenon of tourism through a multi-disciplinary lens, thereby preventing the use of one theoretical framework (like structural-functionalism). Now, there is not only an effort to de-familiarize the terrain of tourism but demonstrate that the contestations which are writ across that terrain undermine most attempts to formulate a grand theory of tourism.
The “new tourist studies” placed much emphasis on embodied practice, performativity, mobilities, gender theory, desire, and other “postmodern/postcolonial” approaches which did, for me, beg the question as it was presented in our syllabus: “To what extent are differences in perspective a result of changes in the very nature of tourism or a result of new theoretical approaches?” Is the American tourist in Paris in 1975 “the same as” the American tourist in Paris today? There does seem to have been a theoretical shift from modern to postmodern, a shift which affects and is sustained by many academic disciplines. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of touristic experiences, modes of traveling, sacred sites, sacred secular sites, and modes of mediations that alter, empirically, the ground under the broad umbrella of “tourism.”
Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 12:20 AM
September 18, 2005
Yochi Li's Response
I appreciated MacCannell’s effort in introducing tourism as a possible new theory in the 70’s. It suggested the possibility of valuing the modernity from the perspective of leisure by connecting tourism with different concepts and theories and analyzing the categorization of the attractions, the psychology of tourists and the approach of tourism. The notion of treating tourism outside daily life encountered challenge due to the globalization; tourism marched into a different domain, which indicates tourism is something carries the quality of quotidian.
Both Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang’s article, the Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory, and Tim Edensor’s article, Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism, they stated the phenomenon of tourism in the past decade, and the possibility of tourist studies. The cynical performance of the tourist in mentality, and the physical embodiment requests of the tourist reflected the demand of tourist changed dramatically after MacCannell’s introduction of tourism.
At the same moment of enjoying the reading, finding out most of the examples are appeared as the tourist form the western world to the eastern culture interests me. In Franklin and Crang’s article, they mentioned that “…that our understand of tourism has become fetishized as a thing, a product, a behavior – but in particular an economic thing. …” (6). Can tourism really sustain without fetishism? What is the personality of the tourist from eastern world when they encounter the western culture? While the superpower of the media still behold in the west, the mysterious veil is comparatively more translucent. Can tourist studies change not only with time, but also with space? I believe the answer to this question is positive, but if it is so, what would be the difference between the points of the West and the East?
Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 10:41 PM
Exploring "new" tourism
After reading Franklin and Crang, Edensor, and MacCannell it is apparent that tourism studies has evolved into a field, which presently, continues to branch out in exploration of not just want tourism and the tourist represent, but how they relate to society, culture, identity and everyday life (especially everyday life). Franklin and Crang suggest that maybe the dreariness within the field has to do with and the reluctant removal of the general definition of tourism studies, which they describe as “A discrete, enumerated occurrences of travel, arrival, activity, purchase…” (Franklin and Craig, 6). The objective now is to attach a more meaningful definition to tourism studies and continue the exploration.
In their article, Franklin and Crang list the obstacles that prevent tourism and travel theory to progress as it should, and which is undoubtedly evident. Edenor’s article on the staged performative touristic experience proves how carefully constructed the experience has become and which is anything but “stale, tired, repetitive, and lifeless” (Franklin and Crang, 5). It has evolved into a full-blown production. Edenor presents a very fascinating way of looking at what has become an elaborate construction of show-and-tell—and we all have roles is this creation.
Although outdated, I very much appreciated MacCanell’s introduction to the field. It allowed me to compare the tourist of the 70s to the tourist of the future. In his introduction, MacCannell describes tourists as travelers who are in search of experience (MacCannell, 1). It is a traveler’s experience that will continue to feed the hungry mouth of tourism studies.
Posted by at 5:26 PM
Sarah Klein responds
MacCannell’s Marxist analysis of tourism places the tourist as the central figure in a uniquely alienated modernity. MacCannell’s tourist, in his or her ongoing search for experiences, is clearly looking for something that they cannot find in everyday life. However, the search for authentic experience elsewhere cannot help but perpetuate this rift between everyday life and “living” (authentic experience).
Tourism is the modern person’s way of coming to understand society. That it takes this form is no coincidence, argues MacCannell. That we are forced to with look at ourselves in each other is a symptom of a new relationship between work and leisure that has played out in late capitalism. That MacCannell considers a tourism where Westerners look at other Westerners and visit sights within their own countries is significant, and has relevant potential not only because it describes a phenomenon which happens, but also because it challenges the idea of the tourist as a person who goes somewhere else. While it is certainly important to consider the behaviour of (North American) tourists abroad, the recognition of tourist productions within our localities points to a deeper societal condition that MacCannell examines.
The ways that these places, both local and abroad are changed by their encounters with tourism, go largely undiscussed. As Franklin and Crang note, tourism does impact the everyday life of residents, as the industry produces more and various productions, people’s everyday lives are impacted by the presence of tourists, by the use of tourist sites in education, etc. Perhaps at the time that The Tourist was written the local economies and governments had not institutionalized tourism to such a degree - and yet there is still a sense in the book that tourism is a different mode of life than the everyday, which is somehow untouched by tourism. What about the everyday lives of the workers who are “on display”, whose “backstage regions” have been to some degree reconfigured as “front”? Or the lives of any people who live or work in a place which is also a tourist destination? Even when one is not obviously playing the tourist role, they are usually implicated in tourism. Some of these figures are discussed by MacCannell, but he is really concentrating on the tourist and his relationship to the sight. Today, however, considering the spread of tourism into more and more aspects of everyday life, it seems to be problematic to divide “everyday life” and “touristic experiences” in the way that MacCannell does, despite the fact that we are as alienated as ever.
MacCannell’s assertion of the existence of ‘front and back spaces’ and his analysis of the semiotic of attractions are still very useful for coming to understand the psychology of the tourist, and the ways that tourist productions exploit it (reflexively or not). He suggests that the mere existence of a ‘backstage’ space fuels a desire for ‘real’, ‘intimate’ and ‘authentic’ experience. To what degree the exhibited ‘back’ region is actually staged may not really matter; it is the idea that such a region exists that is urgently important to the tourist. This betrays an obsession with authenticity that is based on an inflexible division between what is real and what is staged ... I also sense an anxiety about being duped (this sense comes as much from myself as from my impression of the tourists described in the reading). There is an interesting relationship between tourist/audience/consumer and production/performers/product here, in that on the one hand a tourist wants what they paid for, (a product) and on the other hand there is a resistance to experiencing something which was produced for the purpose of their consumption (a performance; inauthentic). His analysis of sights and markers and their seemingly infinite configurations is useful in thinking about context (markers) in any performance situation - but especially those situations where there is actually very little to look at or experience, but the marker (“Bonnie and Clyde shootout happened here”) in combination with the presence of the tourist at the sight ( or non-sight) is enough to constitute an experience and a performance that simply reading the information in a book - the marker totally removed from the site - would not afford.
The New Tourist Studies -
Franklin & Crang and Edensor - Response
The “New Tourist Studies” calls for a widening of the spectrum of what can be studied and a widening of the spectrum of methods and approaches. The inaugural issue of Tourist Studies states its mandate(s) very clearly, but within that mandate is the invitation to a complex multiplicity of approaches. It knows what it is not, and it has ideas about what it can be, but it is in no way a complete or prescriptive manifesto on how to study tourism. Franklin and Crang explain that the phenomenon of tourism has ballooned at such a rate (and) that tourism scholarship has not caught up. Tourism has changed - it really is everywhere now. It seems that the invitation to work on this largely untheorized area and the invitation to multiple approaches is a way of ensuring the continuation of this field of research. The more nodes, the more different they are in subject and approach, the less likely is the risk of stagnation. This is what Franklin and Crang feel is necessary to emerge from and they do not want to go back! They elaborate several areas where tourist studies has yet to fully explore: the ways in which tourism has impacted everyday life even for “non-tourists”, the ever increasing and changing nature of human mobility and the complexity of the relationships between those who travel and those who are visited, the tourist as embodied - both in pleasant and unpleasant ways - as a challenge to the (dominant) visual model of the tourist as a sightseer, and the complex ways that objects function within tourism. The analysis of tourism as performance is one method suggested among many (ethnographic, humanistic, qualitative (Franklin and Crang 20)), and is one taken up by Tim Edensor in the same issue of Tourist Studies. While there are aspects (seeds?) of a performance analysis of tourism in MacCannell’s book [discussion of back and front performance regions - tourists monitoring each others’ performances as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tourists - discussion of staged authenticity - the function of markers for defining or delineating a tourist “performance space” (my wording)] Edensor takes the analogy all the way, equating tourist sites as stages and objects as props, complete with sets, directors, etc. He notes the distinction between highly controlled/directed spaces (enclavic) and more loosely controlled spaces (heterogeneous) but argues that the performances of the tourist within any tourist environment contain tensions between the unreflexive, embodied ‘habitus’ of the tourist within that particular space and the possibilities of performing otherwise. To me, this is a really interesting way of bypassing the ‘bad faith’ view of tourism - by emphasizing the agency of the tourist*. This is not to condone exploitative tourist practices, but to expand the possibility of studying tourism beyond a condemning criticism. It seems that this is one of the main goals of the “New Tourist Studies” (and it was present in MacCannell too): that to simply criticize tourism as ‘bad’ is not productive enough especially as this huge industry has such an impact - though it may be invisible or extremely visible - on our day to day lives.
If I can make it happen, the project I am considering will involve visiting a historic recreation in Nova Scotia (which I have started researching and plan to go in early/mid october). The elements from the above readings that I think would be useful to me are the MacCannell’s notion of the function of markers, and how they function within something so complex as a historic simulation. Also, the habitual behaviours of tourists and the potential to act differently in this highly controlled (enclavic) context would be interesting to consider (and cross my fingers that some people behave unexpectedly. I definitely will be behaving in an unusual manner to the site, though it may not be obvious). I would also like to consider the ways in which the local community has been incorporated into this particular site. I would not be surprised if this were the only industry in the immediate area, and I know that tourism is one of the main industries in Cape Breton, since the steel and coal industries are both now dormant.
* I am aware that MacCannell has written a recent essay entitled “Tourist Agency” in Tourist Studies that I have yet to read, but I imagine it would inform my thinking on this topic.
Posted by Sarah Klein at 4:00 PM
Trouble with tourism and travel theory
In their article, The trouble with tourism and travel theory?, Franklin and Crang attempt to delineate the contours of modern tourism as well as signal anticipated directions of the ‘new’ tourist theory. Breaking away from the narrow, fetishized understanding of tourism with a theory tied to the pragmatic aspects of its industry, they expand the notion of modern tourism and situate it as “central part of the understanding of social (dis-) organization.”(7) Tourism is seen as a “a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized.”(6/7) Franklin and Crang see a clear move away from a tourist theory bound by marketing research on the one hand and a positivist obsession with taxonomy, classification, and labeling on the other (6) and envision a shift to a new tourism seen as a laboratory for the exploration of and experimentation with identity, social relations, and other devalued social practices such as daydreaming and mind-travelling.(7)
One of the new directions in tourism studies that Franklin and Crang gesture toward, is the enactment and performance of tourism. This movement seems to grow out of an endeavor to go beyond the consideration of the representational aspects of symbolic categories toward an exploration of the performative nature of semiosis.(17) Franklin and Crang identify, in particular, two pioneers in the emergent field of “tourism as a system of presencing and performance” as Tim Edensor and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.(17) Looking at tourism through a prism of performance may prove to be fertile to the field, particularly in regard to the way in which performance works to destabilize fixed notions and ideas, unreflexive behavior, and the coherence of self. Thus, the “transformation and transmutation of the performative” (18) may the be a contestation of the prescribed and normative behavior of the tourist as well as the refashioning of tourist studies.
Dean MacCannell’s, The Tourist, a classic sociological examination of tourism first published in 1976, is primarily concerned with the uncovering of the deep structure of post-industrial society obscured by “modernity constantly ‘shifting grounds.’”(x) MacCannell applies a modified version of Ervin Goffman’s model of the performance of everyday life, as point of departure in the examination of the structural features of society. MacCannell sees social space as inextricably entwined with tourist attitudes and practices.(105)
In Performing tourism, staging tourism, Tim Edensor follows suit with the Goffmanesque examination of tourism, which is highly informed by the “inherently dramatic nature of social life.” (60) Edensor’s essay centers around the role of the tourist as performer, framing the experiential and performative aspects of tourism with the elements of production that resemble the design, choreography, as well as other aspects and techniques of theatre. Edensor examines various tourist spaces which he roughly groups into two categories. The first he terms enclavic space, and describes as a strongly circumscribed space which imposes the adherence to rules and induces a conformity of behavior.(63) The second is a heterogeneous tourist space which is a ‘weakly classified’, contingent, multi-purpose space with blurred boundaries.(64)
Edensor’s emphasis and examination of tourist habitus as unreflexive, embodied, and encoded is fascinating and incites further exploration. His notions of identity-oriented, non-conformist, ironic, post-tourist, resistant, improvisational and involuntary tourist performance, paraded around as exciting slogans advertising an enthralling treatment of the dark underbelly of tourism, yet in the end proved to reveal only a superficial and fleeting glance at the exoticized ‘other’ of tourism.
Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 3:43 PM
The new tourism
MacCannell’s approach to tourist studies, as he suggests in the introduction, is not based entirely on theories. His personal observations of the tourist behavior and of the tourist phenomenon are also essential to the composition of his book. However, I personally find that MacCannell constantly reads tourist phenomenon in relation to theories; and cultural, social, as well as economic aspects. I would like to say that he is not obsessed with a particular theory, or clinging to the authority of the existing theories. By referring back to them, he sometimes reaffirms theories, or, in some cases, raises questions about the application of theories on tourism.
In chapter two, MacCannell analyzes the structure of tourist attractions and the construction of the attractions. He indicates that a site, or an object, has to go through several stages to be sacralized and become a must-see for tourists. I am personally concerned about the process of mythologization of attractions, and find MacCannell’s analysis useful. He explains structuality of sacralization as well as the structurality within attractions themselves (46). In addition, his analysis of itineraries’ structural elements, which I failed to notice, also interested me. I wonder whether the tours designed by travel agencies also reflect this kind of structuality of itineraries.
While reading MacCannell’s Tourist, I realized the necessity of adjusting my research approach. Honestly, I tend to cling to the authority offered by existing theories as well as well-established scholars. MacCannell’s approach reminds me of the importance of keen observations, and his critique of Levi-Strauss and Goffman makes me aware of my inadequacy of thinking critically in the process of doing a research.
In Franklin and Crang’s “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory,” they indicate possibilities of various directions the investigation of tourism might go into as well as the insufficiency of the discipline, upon which the researchers should improve. In their article, they remind us of the problematic approach that reduces tourist phenomenon to “a set of economic activities.” Franklin and Crang suggest that the social and the cultural dimensions of tourism should not be overlooked.
I am especially interested in Franklin and Crang’s idea that tourism has developed into an interactive model in which tourists no longer passively observe the environment; instead, they actively participate in the activities taking place in the environment. As they mention in the article, “tourists are seeking to be doing something in the places they visit rather than being endlessly spectatorially passive.” The evolution of Japanese tourism is an example of such active participation in the surroundings.
Another point which I appreciate is that Franklin and Crang remind us of the necessity of researchers’ developing vocabulary to articulate the corporeal experience of tourism. The experience of taste, smell, and any other sensory experiences can be as proper as subjects that are traditionally considered serious and worthy of studies. Such idea is revolutionary to me, who originally came from the region where people downplay the sensory experiences and value the intellectuality. I realized that I have extremely small vocabulary, both in English and in Chinese, to describe the sensory experiences. I think that mainly because my unawareness of my cultural ambiance and my unwitting practice of the dichotomy of body and mind.
In “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism,” Edensor suggests that tourism is performative, and can be analogous to a stage performance. The idea resonates with Franklin and Crang’s description that tourist culture “is the preparation of people to see other places as objects of tourism, and the preparation of those people and places to be seen.” In his article, Edensor indicates how cultural performances are designed and presented in a way which serves the appetite of the tourists, who attend such performances with their expectation of observing exoticism of the native. This type of performances can not therefore be regarded as “authentic” representations of the native culture. Rather, they are constructed based on the projection of the tourists. It is not irrational to read these performances as the physicalization of the tourists’ stereotype of the culture and the people residing in such cultural milieu.
The reading assignment introduces me to various dimensions of tourism, which failed to notice. I have to admit that, like western tourists visiting the “primitive” and “exotic” places, I also have stereotype of New York City and the western world in general. As a tourist, I am disappointed or/and surprised when realizing the discrepancy between the way things actually are and the way I presumed them to be.
Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 2:53 PM
Erin Madorsky responds
Dean McCannell’s, The Tourist seeks to define modernity through a structural analysis of the modern phenomenon of tourism. Central to McCannell’s theory is that as modern man stopped organizing around work, he organized around leisure. Growth of the leisure activity of travel and tourism to mass proportions says something about modern man and a look at tourism using structural differentiation offers insight into modernity as well as diagnostics of modern illness like fragmentation, disorientation, and inauthenticity.
McCannell describes modern man’s rebellion against the dulled senses born of industrial society values. Modernity pushes to break the everyday, to experience further, to sense more. Rituals grew out of this desire to push the body into foreign realms and site icons as well as practices of location worship replaced traditional religious values. McCannell employs semiotics to understand the relationships of all the moving parts of tourism: marker, sight, tourist. He demonstrates how tourist values virally distribute themselves and what starts as a self contained point of interest that draws crowds, organically expands into a region with tourist value assigned down to the location markers for getting to the tourist site itself.
The extent to which humans travel, tour, move has drastically changed over the last twenty-nine years. Tourism has shifted to become “touristic culture.” An isolated act of choice has morphed into an entire culture characterized by its practice of touring. Like a garden of cross-cultural experiences, tourist studies more broadly looks at what happens when we all get a chance to confront each other within familiar and unfamiliar spaces only newly made possible by mass transit and communication technology developments. The extent to which McCannell’s theories still resonate is evidenced in the writings of new tourism theorists like Tim Edensor, Adrian Franklin, and Mike Crang. Franklin and Crang’s “The Trouble with Tourist and Travel Theory?” defines the faults with the discipline until 2001 and outlines the direction the field needs to go in to maintain relevance. McCannell is all over their mission describing tourism as emblematic of modern life: mobility, restlessness, and the search for authenticity. They define the need for research that is not born of the industry itself. The wrong people had been doing the research and social and cultural theorists need to replace the heavy influence of marketing on the topic. They demand a break from the mold of earlier formed ideas on the topic and urge for tourist studies to focus on tourism as a representation of cultural choice and social phenomena. Franklin and Crang bust the clichés inherent in tourist studies and question the overused established polarities of: home as female domain vs. away as male domain; exotic vs. banal, leisure vs. work, authentic vs. corrupted.
Definitive to the new new tourism studies outlined in Franklin and Crang is the debunking of previously held notions that tourism is a unique and exotic act limited within confined spaces. Referencing Rojek and Inglis, Franklin and Crang redefine tourism as an all encompassing act that is so normative it deserves labeling as ‘everyday.’ McCannell laid the groundwork for defining tourism as an everyday experience through his analysis of signs and labels. McCannell described the growth of perception of tourism away from a self contained site and towards an all encompassing event: the site, the site marker, the site reproduction, the site marker reproduction. Tourism penetrates beyond the moment of viewing a site and he wrote about the separation between the education of a future experience, the experience itself, and the memory of the experience. (The memory often more rich and favorable than the original act.) We assign value to an event or object in advance of the experience, based on how frequently that event or object has been reproduced and appeared in reproductions we’ve digested and been directed to. There is no doubt an affect on the experience of the object and therefore a relationship between the time of experiencing a tourist event in a tourist site and the time of viewing it in the everyday realm. This opens the door for tourist studies to examine the everyday.
The notion of tourism as an everyday event moves tourist studies into the territory of performance. Edensor describes in “Performing tourism, staging tourism” how everyday life is a role play incorporating various masks to meander through day-to-day life. Edensor hinges his tourism as performance metaphor on an interesting dynamic between everyday life and role playing. Performance transforms tourism from an isolated unique event to an everyday occurrence because although tourism implies the desire to escape, new socially coded roles of how to escape determine for the tourist how to behave and what role to play. Tourism by way of its being a role play becomes an every day act of performance. He describes the role of the tourist and the ability of a tourist to act in a prescribed fashion based on cultural and social queues. An interesting irony arises in that the role playing act of tourism involves removal of everyday masks but inherently puts on another mask. Edensor’s view of tourism as a performance opens as a very beautiful metaphor. He applies the language of theater to the act of tourism, for instance noting how guidebooks become scripts that direct tourist actors to areas of significance and tell tourists what they should value or not. (This too sounds McCannell.) Quickly though, Edensor loses his metaphor. Through examples, he becomes too literal, referring to actual theatrical arrangements that are categorized as tourist events.
Franklin and Crang connect tourism to performance on the grounds of the body. Understanding that tourism is not just a visual act, Franklin and Crang point to social desire for more, to digest more, to experience further, to move within, to act, to absorb, to sense. Here is the performance of tourism; not a visual show but an active participation, a visceral, bodily experience. Where tourism goes beyond the surface, it enters action and depth, involves the body and through the body becomes a performance.
My project will look at the cultural production of “Sepharad ’92.” In examining “Sepharad 92” as a tourist production I will be looking at how the events unfolded as a tourist act by incorporating McCannell’s categorization techniques. I will be more interested in the why it unfolded the way it did, to whose benefit, and to what effect? McCannell wrote that cultural productions establish models for copying and also offer new combinations for existing (McCannel, 26). Applying this to my topic, what values were cultivated and disseminated during the events of “Sepharad 92” and to whose benefit? How was the Jewish cultural community changed by such a production, and what happens in the space of an intra-communal tourist event (Jewish tourists touring themselves). My project will also incorporate questions of the exotic vs. the banal as dichotomized between Sephardic vs. Ashkenazic culture.
I want to end with a question. Were the needs to change tourist studies really born of changes in the industry itself or more as a survival tactic for an emerging academic discipline? The enlarged definition of tourism to the everyday seems a rather self conscious act to expand the repertoire through which tourist theorists could engage in dialogue. Where this becomes dangerous is that something all encompassing and ever expanding often becomes useless in itself. For example Edensor tends to define tourism in all dichotomies, it’s reflexive and unrelfexive it’s planned and spontaneous. Is tourism so amoebic in form that it can be described as anything and everything and as all sides of something and if so, doesn’t it become dulled through vagueness?
Posted by Erin Madorsky at 2:24 PM
Aniko Szucs responds
Dean MacCannell looks at tourism as one of the most important contemporary social phenomena, which is to be analyzed and systemized by the tools and methods of social sciences. What makes his book and approach unique is that the examination of tourism inevitably leads to the examination of society. In fact, he does not narrow his research to the field of tourism; he presents ‘the model of modern culture’ (145), where the act of sightseeing is the ‘formulated and refined representation of the true society’ (158). Therefore, the more thoroughly we analyze the dynamics of tourism, the better we understand the dynamics of society as well.
MacCannell’s investigation is two-directional: on one hand, he explores how society produces tourist attractions, the process, through which ‘sights’ are being ‘marked’ as attractions. In describing the social process of the production of social attractions, McCannell refers to Goffman’s differentiation between the ‘front’ and the ‘back’, and explores different ways societies and institutions make the ‘front’ or the ‘back’ accessible for the public. McCannell’s terminology of suggests that what we are in reality witnessing here is the formation of a cultural performance, in which performers (the attractions, or the society that establishes them), the audience (tourists), and the excluded (those who stay away) are all subject to analysis.
On the other hand, he seeks to understand what motivates tourists in seeking the ‘back’, ‘real truth’ and ‘authenticity’. He also poses the question: what characterizes the society, in which the act of traveling and experiencing other realities play such an important role? What kind of escape tourism might be?
The alpha and omega of MacCannell’s writing is man’s alienation in society. He starts his research by exploring how the industrial epoch alienated people from their work. At the end of his work, the idea of alienation returns as related to modernism; claiming that tourism is motivated by the modern man’s alienation from his everyday life, the search for other – more authentic – realities.
MacCannell’s approach to ‘authenticity’ is revolutionary in the field of tourist research, for it is not the inauthenticity of tourist productions MacCannell seeks to explore, but the inauthenticity that characterizes the everyday life of modern man: “authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those moderns who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to ‘live’” (159).
Therefore, the aim of tourism is to authenticate everyday life by experiencing other realities. In 1975, MacCannell is still convinced that the tourist’s experience on his/her journey can only be authentic. However, in 1998, after thirty years of commercialization of tourism, he feels the need to revise his earlier points in the Epilogue in 1998 by demonizing global corporations for poisoning the purity of tourism.
In my opinion, MacCannell’s earlier conclusions have never lost their validity and cannot (or should not) be refuted in this age of commercialized tourism either(1). Nevertheless, a slight modification needs to be done. MacCannell sees the experience of the other reality as the source of authenticity. At the same time, he implies that the act of traveling itself has the power to authenticate everyday life. To me, this is MacCannell’s ultimate conclusion, even if he never exposed it in an explicit way: it is the act of traveling, of leaving the accustomed everyday life behind that has the power of authentication.
I would like to refer to Tim Edensor’s article “Performing tourism, staging tourism” to support my thesis. Edensor looks at tourist productions as social performances. Following Goffman’s theory of “reproduced recognizable performative conventions’ and everyday performances, the author analyzes the schemes of performances in tourism. And what he finds is the same role-playing structure with the same participants and attitudes as what Goffman explored earlier in everyday life.
In consequence, touristic experience in reality is often very similar to everyday experience. Still, I do not think that its authenticity is to be questioned. For its authenticity lies in the act of traveling, of leaving the everyday life behind, in the mobilization, which is always an inherent part of the tourist experience.
Notes:
(1)The significance of MacCannell’s writing is conspicuous in Adrien Franklin’s and Mike Crang’s article, “The trouble with tourism and travel theory?”. Although the authors of the article does not explicitly refer to “The Tourist” in their investigation of the relationship between tourism and everyday life; traces of MacCannell’s work, his focus on everyday life in the analysis of tourism is to be recognized.
Posted by BKG at 1:51 PM
Points of contact
Dean MacCannell’s 1976 book The Tourist was a groundbreaking analysis of the social structure of tourism (the tourist site or attraction, the tourist producer, the tourist herself etc.), revealing tourism to be a major force in and expression of modern culture and society. The enduring strength of the book lies in MacCannell’s identification of a need to expand sociological methodology through engagement with both theoretical and empirical application.
Particularly, he presents a five-stage model of sight sacralisation (43-45), and extends Erving Goffman’s theory of front and back regions to a scale of six (ch. 2) in an effort to further understand a preoccupation with (staged) authenticity in tourist settings: “The empirical action in tourist settings is mainly confined to movement between areas decorated to look like back regions, and back regions into which tourists are allowed to peek.” (102) MacCannell goes on to engage his tourist study with semiotics, looking at the relationship of tourist “sight” to tourist “marker(s)”, and ethnomethodology.
Issues such as (in)authenticity in tourism are central – “The progress of modernity depends on its very sense of instability and inauthenticity.” (3) and “The expansion of alternative realities makes the dialectics of authenticity the key to the development of the modern world.” (145) – and become keys to thinking about modernity generally.
In terms of application to performance analyses, I am particularly taken with the front/back model of staged authenticity. Goffman’s original two regions have obvious direct correlation to the traditional theatre – backstage, front of house, and the liminal stage between – and I am interested in how MacCannell’s scale might elucidate nontraditional performance (eg. where the spectator is called on the perform as in Janet Cardiff’s audio tour) or performances not defined as such (eg. performances of the everyday). The global scale of tourism and the consequent confrontation of different cultural modes also seem important to test against the multinational nature of the performing arts (international arts festivals) and particularly intercultural performance’s collaborative processes.
The book’s over quarter-century old publication date becomes apparent in some obvious ways: there are references to countries that have altered their boundaries, had eruptions in national identity and makeup, or just plain do not exist anymore. And as MacCannell himself addresses in his new introduction, the book precedes major developments in feminist discourse (which might have deepened his reading of tourism in terms of hidden power structures) and the wave of forced migration of refugees that has so marked the last thirty years (important perhaps in its relationship to the mass movements of tourists across the globe). Somewhat in line with this, I find his concentration on the Western capitalist tourist problematic in the current time where mobility is not always reliant on affluence (eg. the refugee), and where greater affluence is creating more leisure time and desire for touristic experiences in places beyond the West, beyond capitalism and beyond the “developed” world (eg. China).
These ideas are very much picked up by the two articles from the first edition of Tourist Studies, in developing the “new” tourist studies begun by MacCannell in 1976. Key to the new program is a call for rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses; recognition of tourism on a transnational level, recognition of flow and movement in terms of tourism, the two-way street; the “enhanced spatial flows of people” (Franklin & Crang: 10) brought about by a routinisation of touristic sensibilities; tourism in the face of increased mediatisation; tourism as a system of performance rather than representation; self-reflexive awareness of the tourist, and importantly, an emphasis on the body, embodiment, the sensory, contact, the experience.
Franklin and Crang write, “tourism has broken away from its beginnings as a relatively minor and ephemeral ritual of modern national life to become a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized,” (7) and later,
Tourist studies have perhaps too readily colluded in writing the body out of tourism. As Johnston argues ‘Tourism studies, and most social research, tends to base its research on a universalised, contained, rational, and self-knowing subject.’ Echoing the brochure world where bodies are either perfect or invisible, we risk also downplaying tourism as actually involving fleshy, baggy bodies – that are tired, get ‘Delhi belly’, burn and peel, or otherwise intrude on the pristine representations of tourism. (14)
There are many points of similarity in thought between these two essays from 2001, and the beginnings of thoughts put down by MacCannell in 1976. Changes in the scale and nature of tourism and world travel in general are important and unavoidable here: the social world changes. And the field of tourist studies has made understandable advance so that we start to notice more and more different types of tourism. Edensor, in particular, in his application of performance studies theory to tourism seems to encompass a wider view. From clearly observable performances of actors in period dress to an important acknowledgement of the performances of normative and unreflexive tourist behaviour (and more self-reflexive and/or subversive ones), Edensor gets us thinking specifically about the breadth of possibilities available from looking at tourism in terms of performance while employing a traditional theatrical model and terminology (‘scenography’, ‘stage managers’ etc.), and important performance studies concepts (‘dark play’). In the sense that the “new” tourist studies centers around the experience of tourism, performance seems to have something interesting to say. Franklin and Crang write, “Performance tends to this work against ideas, fixity and stability – to have an ontology of doing and acting rather than being.” (18)
In my reading of these three texts, I was constantly aware of points of contact between the types of performance I am interested in – particularly ones in which the spectator and performer are one and the same – and questions that arise regarding tourism. It seems that in answer to performance analysis elucidating tourist study in interesting ways, I might be able to go back the other way.
Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 1:31 PM
Sarah Zoogman responds
While “old” tourist studies focused around an examination of the strange and exotic, the “new” tourist studies takes a much broader view of tourism characterized by a much more reflexive approach, that examines the hybrids (Franklin and Crang, 15) of the touristic experience. MacCannell was at the forefront of touristic studies; he mission was to do ethnography of modernity, to provide a framework to conceptualize the structures of modernity through tourism. He used a metacritical or anthropological approach. Because MacCannell had already provided a general structural framework from which to work off of, Franklin and Crang are free to advocate the study of both the everyday and the way the tourist mentality permeates into many aspects of life, both less traditional areas of inquiry in tourism studies. Edensor is interested in using the theoretical lens of performance; he is responding to the extremely orchestrated nature of modern tourist productions and is conceiving of ways to subvert those performances.
MacCannell in The Tourist envisions tourism as a performance in which the social structure of modernity is revealed; he found tourist attractions to be “an unplanned typology of structure that provides direct access to the modern consciousness or ‘world view.’” (2) For example, MacCannell looks at Paris at the turn of the 20th century as a case study of “when modern mass tourism and its support institutions were fully elaborated as we know them today.” (59) He examines how objects perform, looking specifically at guidebooks. He contrasts two guidebooks for Parisian tourists, one for the wealthy and one for those on a budget, in order to see how the constructions of the guidebook affect the touristic experience.
Franklin and Crang in “The trouble with tourism and travel theory,” envision tourism as a theater in which symbolic categories are “performed, repeated and changed through tourist practices.” (17) Tourist performances both strengthen existing symbolic categories and change then. Franklin and Crang advocate studying the everyday as a way to de-exoticize tourism (8).
In “Performing tourism, staging tourism,” Edensor applies the performance metaphor to the touristic experience to explore how set norms and customs can be strengthened or subverted. Just as MacCannell was interested in the construction of the modern subject, Edensor’s use of the metaphor of performance is apt because the modern subject is always in the process of “becoming” rather than “being.” Edensor looks at tourist stages as “stages of action,” regarding the subject as having a “becoming nature . . . rather than a stable masterful human subject,” having a “lightness of selfhood” (Franklin and Crang, 18). The touristic experience speaks to the self in modernity that is always searching for something or some experience that will better or complete oneself.
Specifically, Edensor examines the scripts and staging used by the tourists themselves. Edensor wants to look at the “unreflexive, habitual, unintended enaction of tourists” (60), and also how the everyday threatens these habits. (62) He uses the structural components of performance – directors, stage managers, cast members, sceneography and stage-design, rituals and dramas stages for tourists, mediated spaces – to explore how the tourist experience is mediated and how it can be subverted.
In large part, this broader approach to tourist studies is a response to globalization, in which there has been a rapidly expanding tourism market and the distinctions between tourist and non-tourist, leisure time and work time are becoming more and more unclear. Franklin and Crang articulate that in this post-Fordist economy there has been the proliferation of tourist attractions – everyone both lives in potential tourist attraction and is themselves a tourist. The permeation of “touristic sensibilities in everyday life” (Franklin and Crang, 10) is also the result of easier flows of people and goods; mobility is a highly accessible, normalized component of modern life.
New research is being called for that examines the everyday. Tourism is firmly rooted in the everyday as evinced by MacCannell description as a “skeptical second gaze” (Franklin and Crang, 12) of the more reflexive tourist, who is “interest[ed] in the minutiae of everyday life and often dismissive or scathing or touristic offerings.” (Franklin and Crang, 12) Whereas “Old” tourist studies focused primarily on the touristic gaze, MacCannell highlights that there are many different gazes at play.
Not only is studying the everyday called for, but also to examine the experiential aspects of tourism, especially an examination of the bodily pleasures of the touristic experience. (Franklin and Crang, 14) Tourists have recently demanded more that just an interesting viewing experience, but rather desire a sensorial and active interface with their environment. This sense of “kinesthetic sense and flow” (Franklin and Crang, 12) is something that could prove fruitful in my own research. Observational studies augmented with interviews would be helpful, in for example exploring the difference between those who take a traditional audio tour of Central Park versus taking a “touch tour” of the park. In addition, using by own bodily experience while taking these non-traditional tours will be helpful as a starting point in my research. For example, if I am exploring the Soundwalks and I take note of which sensorial stimuli I enjoyed and how they added to by experience I could then use those moments to spark theoretical inquiries into how pleasurable sensorial stimuli deepen the experience of guided tours in general.
Posted by BKG at 1:04 PM
The new tourist studies
Overall, I found Dean MacCannell’s book an interesting and pleasurable read. However, while MacCannell’s text serves well as an introduction to many of the key topics in tourist studies, I was left unsatisfied at numerous junctures by the superficiality with which he addressed (or failed to adequately address) a variety of topics. Perhaps the most salient example of this shortsightedness is MacCannell’s decidedly west-oriented approach to tourism. His working definition of a tourist appears to include being from North America or Europe, and the same can be said of the sites he addresses, with the exception of Disneyland Japan, though this is ultimately a western site imported from the U.S. to the east. Edensor is slightly better in this regard, including the Taj Mahal and some brief discussion of eastern tourists, but his perspective is still decidedly oriented towards the west.
Both MacCannell and Edensor’s neglect of the eastern tourist makes me wonder how touristic practices vary from culture to culture. MacCannell states in his introduction, “I do believe that all cultures are composed of the same elements in different combinations” (2). This may hold true, but even so, it makes me desirous of an exploration of these different combinations, and the varying modes of seeing and engaging with sites and other tourists that they would inevitably lead to.
I also experienced a similar yearning for more information stemming from MacCannell’s approach as a whole. He offers his book as an introduction to a “structural analysis of modern society” (3). However, only very briefly (in the epilogue) does he address the roots of the structures he describes. One could say that he focuses on the “what” and the “how” of tourism without addressing the “why.” When he does briefly address the “why” of the tourist, he assumes a desire for human solidarity. I question whether this assumption holds up. Might tourists travel not to commune with others societies, but to separate themselves from their own, both physically and in social status? Might they also visit tourist sights to reinforce their belief in the superiority of their home surroundings or conversely to challenge their habitus and that of others? Edensor certainly suggests the latter possibility stating, “the confrontation with difference that is part of tourism can facilitate improvisational performances… to force oneself to challenge habitual behaviour or… to try on unfamiliar roles” (76). It appears equally likely then, that the tourist’s motivation mightn’t be towards solidarity at all, but instead towards making separation from others and making her world appear strange.
Though Franklin and Crang do not address the above possibility, they raise numerous others, many of which I find totally fascinating and left unexplored by MacCannell. Three of these that I find the most interesting are the following, all of which involve a decided shift in perspective on the part of the researcher. First, I’m interested in turning my critical gaze away from the tourist, and towards members of the tourist industry. Aside from earning money, what are their motives? How do their visions of the tourist differ from someone like MacCannell’s? Second, I’m interested in shifting the gaze away from the tour itself, to how the tourist represents the tourist site and her trip in general. Franklin and Crang mention postcards and the notion of “doing Italy” (16). I’d like to pursue this area further, using tourists’ representations of their travels as a window into their motivations and their subjective engagement with the sites encountered. Third, I’m interested in alternative modes of tourism as raised by Franklin and Crang on page 11. How do the attitudes and interactions of refugees, immigrants, or “suburban gypsies” differ from those of MacCannell’s tourist?
In closing, I must say that this week's readings have whetted my appetite, leaving me hungry for more. Most of the questions that I have asked will require further reading to find sufficient answers. Thankfully, I look forward to carrying this reading out.
Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 12:29 PM
Lisa Reinke responds
The modern world is a confusing place, especially when the 6 train jumps to express for no apparent reason. Dean MacCannell posits in his book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, that tourism is a way for people to overcome these confusions. Presumably, at places like the Transit Museum, explanations for the subways’ mysteries might be explained. Tourism serves to demystify work [like the Paris sewers], a necessary function in a society where “extreme specialization and fragmentation of tasks in the industrial process . . . did not function to integrate its holder into a synthetic social perspective, a world view” (36). For the alienated modern person, tourism serves as a forge between one’s own work and one’s culture. Under a tourist’s gaze, elements of this world become compartmentalized. This facilitates in creating order within a seemingly highly disorganized society. The superficiality that people may experience in their everyday lives can be overcome by the observation of authentic experiences in places far from their homes. The experience of the “authentic” reassures the tourist that truth still exists in the world.
MacCannell provides an extensive look at tourism’s role in society. Yet the applications he proposes to his theory are a bit problematic. His solution to the problem of unequal tourist distribution is “to increase the number of marked attractions and support facilities for tourists on a worldwide base” (167). Yet, earlier in his work, he defines genuine attractions as those that “must always appear as if they would continue to exist without the help of sightseers” (156). An important distinction for him is between the genuine attraction that exists without having the tourist expressly pay for it, and the fake attraction, such as Disneyland, in which the tourist must pay for what she/he sees. To increase the number of attractions, it would seem necessary, for the most part, to increase the number of fake attractions, rather than genuine attractions that exist already. Granted, there are, probably, still genuine attractions that have yet to be touted as tourist destinations, but these must be “discovered.” The quality of a genuine attraction seems to be its non-orchestrated marker creation. Markers must accrue accidentally, by chance or by nature’s machinations, not by the hands of man. Humankind cannot, therefore, increase genuine sights. It can only purposefully increase fake attractions. Considering MacCannell’s negative stance towards Disney, it is hard to believe he would endorse further creations of this nature. In his epilogue, he further examines the sheer power of commercialism, which he did not initially perceive. He remarks that genuine attractions apparently can be bought and sold, indicating that, perhaps, his original distinction between fake and genuine is not as solid as originally thought.
Nevertheless, the foundation that MacCannell lays allows others to continue an in-depth look at tourism. For MacCannell, “the postindustrial or modern society is the coming to consciousness of industrial society, the result of industrial society’s turning in on itself, searching of its own strengths and weaknesses and elaborating itself internally” (182). Tim Edensor describes the ironic and cynical “post-tourist.” To be a “post-tourist” one must turn in on oneself and point the “artificiality and staging of much tourism” (75), including ones own implication in the act. Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang seek to expand, not only upon MacCannell’s work, but also on the collective work of tourism studies worldwide.
Works Cited
Edensor, Tim. Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism. Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59-81.
MacCannell, Dean. 1999 [1976]. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Posted by BKG at 12:26 PM
Sandra Carla Rozental responds
In The Tourist, MacCannell’s main contribution is to shift the locus of tourism studies away from the realm of the cultural criticism approach that saw tourism as a social ill, a degenerate spillover of modernity, to a more productive approach that understands tourism as an integral part of modernity, an expression of what makes modernity modern, and thus, a perfect place to study its inner workings. According to MacCannell, tourism (or mass leisure) is what gives modernity cohesion, where consensus in this new type of society is formed, a new religion of sorts that ties modern society together. As he states, “sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiations of society.
Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for the transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into a unified experience” (13). Perhaps this understanding of tourism as a unifying social force is also why MacCannell pinpoints the middle class as the main participants/ initiators of the tourist phenomenon. The class struggle of industrial capitalism described in Marxist theory appears to give way to a new system where the players are no longer the capitalists and the working class. In MacCannell’s eyes, this seems to have to do with the birth of a new system of value where value is no longer a function of labor, but of experience (23). This is perhaps most clearly explained in his example of the Parisian printing office where what matters is how work is represented (the experience of work) rather than work itself (68).
MacCannell is especially successful in treating his subject of study, tourists, with respect. He manages to escape the easy critical approach of looking at tourists with scorn, as lost individuals easily ridiculed for their conformism and uncritical gaze, and manages to understand them “ethnographically” as links within a larger chain, a structural part of the chain of modernity. He goes even further by showing that the disdain for tourists expressed both in mainstream society and in the early literature on tourism is intrinsic to the way tourism and modernity work (10). Although this might seem obvious to us now, I imagine that in 1976 (and given the quotes from Boorstin cited in the readings) this was rather groundbreaking.
What I found most useful from MacCannell’s book is that he provides us with a certain vocabulary to study tourism in fruitful ways, a taxonomy if you will to classify and discuss the different elements involved in a tourist production and experience. The most interesting of these terms in my eyes are the definitions and discussions he provides on “attraction” (41, 48-56, 77-89), “cultural production” (24-29), “sight sacralization” (43-45), “tourist districts” (50) “staged authenticity” (98) “markers” (131-2), “sight and marker involvement” (112-117) “truth markers”(137-9), “front and back regions” (93-94, 105) and “spurious vs. genuine structure” (158). MacCannell’s categories are perhaps far from perfect, but they useful as ideal types that can be applied to the study of any tourist production or experience.
As an anthropologist in training, I was also very impressed by how MacCannell placed ethnography and anthropology very much at the center of the discussion. This is all the more evident since many of the voices that he seems to be conversing with in the book are the totemic ancestors of this particular discipline: Levi Strauss, Redfield, Kroeber, Sapir, Mauss, Mead, White, to name only a few. Although he mentions ethnographers as potential tourists and tourists as potential ethnographers, he seems to have a hard time defining precisely where the limit lies, although he clearly does see a difference. Is the line also drawn by the commercial? I would be interested to know how other theorists on tourism have thought about this thin line.
Where I think MacCannell is flawed, in addition to the incredibly strange last chapter on applying tourism theory to policy, is in the complete lack of evidence and data to support his arguments. I get no sense from the book of how he came to his conclusions. He states that he conducted fieldwork in Paris and made interviews with random samples, but there is no explicit reference to this data in the book. In fact, many of his examples seem to be drawn from personal experience… or that of his aunts and cousins! This is at least what I think is criticizable of a book written in 1976. Where he falls short is less due to his theses, but to his démodé structural approach to culture, despite his efforts in the 1989 introduction to frame his book as postmodern avant la lettre.
Indeed, MacCannell fails to see the unforeseen effects, the gaps and the slips of tourism. He separates tourism from everyday experience and creates a realm where it only exists in sites, sights and other tourist spaces. He splits the cultural producers from the cultural consumers and simply does not deal with how tourism as a mass phenomenon, but more accurately as a culture, influences daily life through dreams, imagination, desire, etc. This shortsightedness is precisely what the most recent scholarship (and the Tourist Studies journal) is hoping to vanquish. In their editorial, Franklin and Crang make an initial call to extract tourism studies from its traditional stomping grounds: the realm of the extraordinary, the realm of the powerful tourists exploiting the powerless attractions, and the realm of the visual. Their first and most important point is that tourism needs to be seen within the scope of everyday life, to “de-exoticize the activity from what other people do when they are somewhere else” (8). They also attempt to debunk old notions of tourism as a victim/perpetrator relationship as they show the presence of more nuanced positions where power relations can be reversed or at least challenged (9). In their understanding of tourism, less as a phenomenon than as a culture, the unforeseen consequences are as important, in fact, perhaps more important, windows through which to understand its inner workings. Finally, they show that tourism has been viewed primordially as a visual experience, as a traveling and hungry gaze, but that other sensual/body experiences have largely been ignored (13). The image of the Japanese tourists seeking to “participate in their own skins” (13) could not be a better illustration to show the embodied nature of the tourist experience.
Although Tim Edensor’s article is less of a manifesto as to where tourism studies should be heading and more of a direct attempt to tackle some of the issues pending, his ideas on the metaphor of performance as a productive way to look at tourism can easily be interpreted as where he thinks the field should be going. Although MacCannell had already sowed the seeds of this parallel by using Goffman to discuss front and back regions, and by looking at concepts such as staged authenticity, audience, production, etc., Edensor takes the image a step further by looking at tourism as a performative process, “a process which involves the ongoing (re)construction of praxis and space in shared contexts” (60). In such a process, culture, habit, repetition and signification are not fixed, but subject to change. Following Derrida and Butler, Edensor looks at the potential for disruption by looking at the different players involved in the tourist performance: the directors and stage managers, the performers, the intermediaries and how each of their roles can be acted out or challenged within the actual performance in unforeseeable ways. Despite the existence of scripts, no performance (read tourist experience) is every played out according to a plan.
There is always the possibility for productive change. These possibilities are what Edensor seems to be placing at the center for analyzing tourism. Thus, irony, mistakes or involuntary performances, humor, etc. are key places to look in order to better understand how tourism really works. Edensor provides us again with a new taxonomy: “enclavic touristic space”, “incorporating rituals”, “pleasurable carnivals”, “tourism sceneography and set design”, all of the key workers mentioned above, and my personal favorite “the post-tourist”.
Regardless of the advances in new new tourist studies, and the initial and ahead of their time (although not quite postmodern) contributions of MacCannell, I still have many questions and doubts. Where are the people? Who are they? How are they different in Malawi and in London? Is there a way to know how real people experience this tourism culture? How can one study a culture where everyone in the world is involved (are we all tourists?) but that is experienced so differently by a Zapotec rug making community in Oaxaca and a group of French tourists in Rome? How can such a huge and yet dynamic “community” be understood? Is there a tourist community? How can we look at the influence of tourism on other forms of mobility (migration, refuge, fieldwork) without classifying these communities or individuals all under the same rubric as tourists?
Posted by BKG at 12:19 PM
Structuralism v. Postmodernism
Dean McCannell’s The Tourist is a good foundational text for the study of tourism because it offers a typological approach and an efficient theoretical framework. But at the same time, its structuralist perspective, along with the Cold War context in which it was written, and the focus on Western tourism to Western destinations make this work in urgent need of an update.
McCannell takes tourism to offer “a kind of ethnographic report on modern society” (XV), and his method could seem quite innovative 30 years ago. It also sets the ground for more sophisticated theories, such as the ones developed by Edensor with the concepts of performance, behavior, regulation, embodiment, repertoire and commodity.
The body—this is an example of the gap between both studies. McCannell focuses on one sense, sight, and barely explores movement. Edensor is much more inclusive and addresses culinary tourism, sex tourism and other interactive forms of tourism that involve smell, touch, movement to name a few. McCannell writes at a time when the multiple directions and roles of sight have not yet been complicated by Foucault and others. Nowadays, tourism studies can’t avoid addressing the notions of voyeurism, and of self-conscious staging, for example.
Another issue that has evolved since McCannell’s first edition is the tension between (behavioral) guidelines and blurred functions of a tourism site, somehow another way of opposing structuralism to postmodernism. Guidelines or rules of behavior are clearly borrowed from religion, and include a ritual of visit (imposed by the guide or tourism authority), the sacralization of a site and an expected respectful behavior from the visitor. But contemporary reality erases such clear-cut patterns or comparisons. Edensor expands the comparison of tourism productions to performance (which includes religious or quasi religious rituals) while at the same time making the notion of guidelines and behavior relative. In a time of blurred lines between the tourist-performer and the site-performer, between the new and various functions assigned to touristic sites (entertainment, education, remembrance, political statement, to name a few), and between adventure and framed tourism (or between freedom and surveillance), McCannell’s typologies can’t contain the postmodern and globalized expressions of tourism. Edensor tries to create new typologies that would include these new occurrences, but he must also conclude, “most stages are ambiguous, sites for different performances” (64). This is a fascinating aspect of tourism to me, as I study memorials and the tension between expected and actual behavior of visitors in a site commemorating the murder of millions of people. What is acceptable, and what rules are established? What is actually being done by visitors that is considered (dis)respectful and why? Do memorials need explicit rules of conduct, or should they intrinsically inspire a certain behavior?
McCannell’s chapter 3 offers an inspiring use of old guidebooks to understand the evolution of tourism in a site, which is absent from Edensor’s focus on lived experience and embodied practice. For my research, guidebooks are definitely worth looking into, as they indicate when Holocaust memorials have been incorporated in sightseeing tours of Berlin, how they are described and, more generally, how dark tourism has been included in contemporary tourism. McCannell’s analysis should be expanded, though, as it is too much limited to the contents of a site (whether museum, park or memorial) and not at all to the functions. The political situation has also changed since McCannell’s time: the Cold War is over; new countries have become tourism destinations (Burma, Mongolia, Libya…); the “first world” shows traces of pauperization and countries formerly known as “third world” or “developing” send tourists abroad (China, Brazil, Poland, etc.). “Off the beaten track” tourism has to enter new unexplored grounds, while other natural sites have become so domesticated that they look fake (Niagara Falls, Gizeh pyramids).
Modern tourism has also seen the commodification of tourism, from the ubiquity of gift stores, to mass production of souvenirs, to settings allowing visits en mass (parking lots, cafeteria, multiple ticket counters, expanded visiting hours, etc.). On the tourist’s end, visiting a city or a country equals checking items from a to-do-list and digest as much as possible in the shortest period of time. Franklin and Crang address statements such as “we did Italy and France last year, we are doing Costa Rica this week” and other judgmental expressions. They also offer an inspiring look into virtual tourism, and the displacement from “I was here” to “I wish you were here”, and the shift from the actual touristic site to representation of the sites that gain in authenticity (souvenirs, photos, stories). In other words, a photo of a street sign that says “Broadway” gains more authenticity and significance than a photo of Broadway itself.
As for McCannell’s usefulness for my own project, his classical structuralist sources such as Goffman, de Saussure and Levi-Strauss should be kept in mind. I could extend his application of the concepts of “signifier”, “signified” and ‘sign” to my sites, and move from the descriptive to the interrogative: how many signified [functions] have been attributed to one signifier (memorial)? How different are contemporary signs (sites) of memory from the first half of the century? He doesn’t spend any time on dark tourism and memorials, which is probably also a sign of time.
In general, I think that McCannell offers a good starting basis that needs to be expanded with more sophisticated concepts that take into account the hybrid nature of tourism productions, embodied practices and issues of regulations and authenticity. Franklin and Crang open more doors of study, while Edensor offers performance-based extension to McCannell’s, from a theoretical perspective, and leads us into a touristic maze worth exploring. His study could be well complemented by ethnographic observation and practical examples. Tourism is rooted in lived experience after all…
Posted by Brigitte Sion at 11:54 AM
Andrew Friedenthal responds
MacCannell's book, The Tourist, as BKG said in class, very much seems to be a product of its times, a late-70's Cold War mentality where the entire world was in the thrall of the grand modernist narrative of capitalism/socialism. At first I found it jarring to find that the two names most invoked and quoted from by MacCannell were Erving Goffman (understandable) and Karl Marx (what the--!?). As I read further into the book, though, I realized just how much MacCannell, even if he disagreed with some of Marx' theories, was intrigued by a liberal/socialist view of the world and its labor/ product values. To a large degree, particularly in his preliminary focus on work displays as the primary mode of tourism (I couldn't help but feel a it shocked, from my own touristic experiences, that he put work displays above such sites as museums and national parks), he seemed to focus on tourism as a commodity, which, in hindsight, certainly fits in with his examination of the tourist as a member of the "leisure class," as the subtitle of the book so clearly points out.
As BKG said in class, though, the simple truth about tourism DOES mean that "the tourist" (who, throughout the majority of The Tourist, would seem to be a white, heterosexual male body viewing the rest of the "exotic" world out there) is of a certain class and economic stature that allows him/her to travel and actually engage in the tourism experience.
Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang's introduction to the TOURIST STUDIES journal, on the other hand, seems to be a sort of state-of-the-discipline address, almost thirty years after MacCannell's writing and publication. With the advent of post-modernism, and the breakdown of the grand modernist narratives, MacCannell's analyses, in many eyes (including his own, to read his new introduction to the book), no longer hold up. Franklin and Crang, indeed, call attention to the very problems of tourist studies as it now stands, which to a large degree seems to be that it is stuck in an outdated mode of thinking, ignoring the complications of an increasingly disjointed and, paradoxically, globalized world, which effects the experience of that world through the eyes of the tourist. As they point out, "tourism is entirely populated by hybrids, and future investigations will need to enumerate and analyse their potencies," an investigative and analytical calling that they enumerate in the journals mission statement at the end of the article.
Edensor's article, then, in the same issue of that journal (the inaugural issue), is an example of this "new" tourist studies, viewing tourism as performance. Edensor seems to draw upon a more theatrically-grounded view of performance, using definitions of directors," "actors," and even "stage managers," than MacCannell did. MacCannell, using Goffman, looked at the performance of everyday life, the acting out and presentation of the self, and applied that to both the tourist industry performing for the tourist, and, at the same time, the tourist performing for himself/herself, or other tourists, and even for those whom he/she is "observing." Edensor, on the other hand, draws upon a more "Performance Studies" approach, looking at tourist productions as a SELF-CONSCIOUSLY theatrical/performative mode - in his eyes, the tourist industry has grown more complex, and, crucially, more SELF-AWARE, and is now CREATING its own performances, whereas MacCannell looked at it as an industry that performed without necessarily knowing it was performing.
It is here, with my interest in kitch, theme parks, and rides, that these readings intersect with my own project. Theme parks, especially, and to a certain extent kitch, as well, are EXTREMELY self-aware of their performative value, to the point that Disney theme park employees are even referred to as "cast members." They have become the type of tourist production that Edensor describes, and, in this respect, I am personally a bit more interested in further examining Edensor's work, and returning to his article, than I am in going back to MacCannel.
The "new" tourist studies, the more self-aware and self-reflexive tourism, is what interests me, and I am becoming more and more intrigued by the idea of how a site, such as Disney World, can literally invent itself, turning a muggy swamp into a tourist spot of the first degree, all through public relations, advertising, and, as MacCannell tends to put it, extreme "hype."
Posted by BKG at 11:15 AM
Siobhan M. Robinson responds
I strongly agree with the fact that tourism and travel theory have become monotonous in identifying the problem within. I think it is safe to say that the problem with tourism is evident, and if it weren’t, there are a plethora of research articles and theories in tourism studies that have redundantly reiterated these problems. I appreciated the fact that the assigned readings offered a new approach to studying tourism. That is, not just identifying the problem, but studying tourism from a different angle, another theoretical perspective, specifically referring to performance studies.
Tourism can be viewed as a theatrical production. The language that is sometimes associated with tourism, such as actors, directors, set, and stage, indicates that of a performance. I have been in the midst of such performances when I unfortunately found myself as a tourist. For example, the readings discussed “directors” of tourism as those people who dictate what the tourists are seeing and experiencing rather than letting them experience for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
In Ghana, West Africa I traveled to the Cape Coast and encountered Elmina. Elmina is a slave dungeon that imprisoned thousands of Africans. There, I had a tour guide who took us through the dungeons where men were held, the dungeons where women were held, and the many dungeons where Africans were raped, brutalized, and eventually led to the awaiting ships. Throughout the experience the guide or “director” explained everything we were seeing from the historical aspect to what the Africans were experiencing emotionally, physically, and mentally in each dungeon. I wanted to draw on some of those experiences myself rather than someone else making those conclusions for me. Like Muslims who consider the Taj Mahal a holy place instead of a touristic site, I saw Elmina as sacred space, a space where people should recognize the atrocities that occurred caused by the prejudice of an “elitist” group. I did not want anyone telling me what I should be seeing. I wanted to see it for myself. Furthermore, I was enraged by people on the tour who were calling Elmina a beautiful castle. One man was actually slapped across the face by a woman who took offence to such an asinine comment. Later, I learned that these people were familiar with Elmina because of Sankofa, a film about a young African woman urged to never forget her past by reliving the pain of slavery. The beginning of the film takes place at Elmina, and so, Elmina became a mediatized space, a “memory bank” for tourists based from a particular film.
I have to say this is one of my issues with tourism. Although Sankofa is one of my favorite films, I feel that sometimes films reduce sacred spaces to a money-making attraction. I wish I could offer a solution to rectify this problem but I cannot. People visit touristic sites for various reasons. To some it is a pilgrimage to a sacred place and to others it is a time to enjoy and relax. I do however, appreciate that about tourism as a performance. People go to various performances to enjoy and learn and on a positive note, I believe that is what performance tourism does for most of us.
Posted by BKG at 11:12 AM
Cassandra Michelle Brown responds
New tourism studies engender new paradigms to be birthed in the womb of the performance studies discipline, illuminating implications for the concept of tourism in the sphere of the every-day. In the realm of the every-day, tourists may place emphasis on the mundane and banal nature of tourism reflected in Franklin and Crang’s article "The trouble with tourism and travel theory?".
This article challenges the exoticizing and fetishizing that lies at the heart of the tourist experience. By emphasizing the performativity of the extraordinary in the every-day, tourist studies can begin to “de-exoticize the activity from what other people do when they are somewhere else” (Franklin & Crang, 8).
MacCannell’s assertion of tourists as social scientists offers one approach to the performative nature of the every-day in tourism. Perhaps, as social scientists, tourists may explore the tourism in the perfunctory, in a world distanced from the “visiting outsider.” With this tourism can be viewed as any site where observation takes place, escaping its former straitjacket (Edensor, 59).
By staging tourism in the sphere of the every-day, one recognizes that we are often tourists most of the time, highlighting the idea of the extraordinary and the ordinary having a blurred distinction. This is further supported by Edensor’s assertion in his article Performing toursim, staging tourism that “tourism is never entirely separate from the habits of everyday life, since they are unreflexively embodied in the tourist” (61). This constructed unreflexive behavior opens a realm of potentiality for tourist studies and its implications for cultural studies. The emphasis of the every-day suggests a positivity for the future of tourism, where it does not have to be chic to deride tourists (MacCannell, 9). One does not have to go far to be a tourist. Tourism of the every-day occurs anywhere and everywhere.
Posted by BKG at 11:08 AM
Sentienla Toy responds
My memories of Agra as a child (where my parents took us to ‘point’ to the world famous Taj Mahal) is dominated by images of the Elvis imitator in sequined clothes and big side-burns that entertained us over dinner at the hotel. I was fascinated by him and his gyrating performance. The images of the Taj Mahal and Elvis juxtaposed against each other in my memory are revitalized as I read this week’s readings. This memory symbolizes for me quite aptly what Edensor exemplifies as the many ways that tourism can be staged and performed.
What he points out to me importantly is that tourism is not just about an experience and a ‘change of scene’ for the ‘visiting’ tourist but it is as much about an experience and an ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ experience and performance for the ‘host’, that we are talking about a two-way street, as well like Franklin and Crang points out, it is the tourists that can often be the object of the ‘gaze’and the object of desire. F & C articulates for me that tourism is as much about the creation of new social relations, new transnational communities, new forms of consumption and leisure and aesthetics, always changing and recreating itself. This is the ‘new’ tourist studies. MacCannel's early observations of 1976 (some of them written even earlier in bits) on tourism looks at it as a way of understanding social phenomenon, particularly modern society, as a way of making sense of and structuring an analysis of modern consciousness and social structure. The ‘new’ tourist studies takes this original observation further and says ‘but tourism is social life itself, it is the everyday, it is the embodied habits that people enact all the time establishing community, it is not necessarily the obvious ‘touristic’ performance, it is an everyday disposition’. I am thoroughly interested in the tension between unreflexive and reflexive disposition that Edensor raises in his discussion. The idea of Bakhtin’s carniveleque resounds when Edensor cites MacCannell - that ‘authentic’ selves are discarded and everyday masks are discarded (60), yet at the same time these are reflexive habits inasmuch as they are identifiable codes and embodied habits. For me particularly, with my interest in musical research, how do I distinguish ‘resident’ listeners from ‘tourist’ listeners, or how do I begin to examine how performances that ‘residents’ produce start to become the ‘real’ living culture, the unreflexive culture as it were becoming the reflexive….how does the ‘front region’ start blending into the ‘back region’ or does it…the idea of a spurious society with a spurious culture being left behind to take in some ‘real’ culture that MacCannell discusses leads me to reflect over the ‘spurious’ culture that is constantly in the making at the ‘mercy’ of these very same tourists…. I hope to be able to articulate better on this!
I think Mac Cannell’s book is revolutionary particularly because he stretched established theoretical ideas of institutions like Marx and Strauss beyond what people had come to believe, redefining the concept of value as not simply based on labor but on the experience, and finding and identifying a coherent framework by which to analyze a seemingly ‘unanalyzable’ modern chaotic society. His semiotic analysis was definitely beneficial but did not reveal or stretch that concept further for me – I 'm not sure how I would try to further that thought and how crucial that would be for my research – I would love to delve more or hear more on that. For my research I believe I will begin by looking at the ‘intentional’ tourist and the ‘intentional’ tourist productions of art and culture (old tourist studies? going backwards am I? oops) and so it is extremely useful for me to see how MacCannell has a structural approach at looking at the collective experience of social groups. For I want to look at how a collective genre of music gets recreated in different ways, in style, delivery and ‘feel’. It is an interesting place for me to start as I try to develop these ideas. Tourism seems like a subversive way of expressing and maintaining difference, and a way of fulfilling both the needs and imagination of the hosts and the tourists as I ponder over Naga music and its direction. I daresay that for me, music might well be what will articulate these ground-breaking concepts and ideas in the field of tourism....I think I'm over 2 pages now: )
Posted by BKG at 11:00 AM
September 14, 2005
Reclamation tourism after Katrina
KATRINA UPDATE
For years, FAF has made annual cultural exchanges to a small city just south of New Orleans, Houma, Louisiana. They and several surrounding suburbs of New Orleans, still inhabited, NEED YOUR SUPPORT ... by your presence.
After January and throughout the rest of 2006, FAF is appealing to ALL concert tour and other travel groups: SUSPEND YOUR 2006 TOUR PLANS AND COME WITH FAF ON A RECLAMATION TOUR TO LOUISIANA
These are highly acclaimed, inexpensive, cultural tours within the United States. Cultural tours stimulate hope and redevelopment: your benefit concerts and local presence helps attract media, additional support and perhaps most of all -- uplifts the spirit and the soul in ways where mere food, clothing, and shelter fall short.
Many of you know FAF‘s mission (www.faf.org); some of you have traveled with FAF to the region before:
- excellent concerts
- large and receptive audiences
- opportunity for cultural and social interaction
- service opportunities
and all with an ethnic mix of Southern, Native American, Creole, and even Vietnamese: everything that always made New Orleans such a special destination.
Please write for more details and past tour leader recommendations. FAF has confirmed that the local hotels will be able to house participants by January and the communities are eager for the support that your concerts will provide. Join us in Louisiana in 2006: FAF WANTS YOU TO TRAVEL TO HOUMA FOR YOUR CULTURAL OR CONCERT TOUR IN 2006. CONTACT FAF TODAY, Before You decide on just another tour ...
Friendship Ambassadors Foundation
http://www.faf.org
(Go To: Group Tours and fill out the Tour Request Form)
friendlyam@faf.org
1-800-526-2908. Outside USA: 001-914-925-0080; -0019 fax
Friendship Ambassadors Foundation is a 501(c)3 tax exempt nonprofit organization with global affiliations. FAF is affiliated with the United Nations, Department of Public Information, the United Nations Association, ACDA, IATA, National Band Association
“FAF, we really need your help!”
- Reverend Kirby Verrett, Houma
community leader, September 7, 2005
"Friendship Ambassadors Foundation ... its mission is so important, and ... you are accomplishing remarkable things. Best wishes to you and everyone at the foundation!" - Former President William Jefferson Clinton
“God love you for the love you give through the joy you spread.” - Mother Teresa
“What you are doing couldn’t be closer to my heart. Godspeed!” - Leonard Bernstein
“It’s been a joyful pleasure for me to encourage and financially support this work . . . I predict continuing success for this vital program!” - Eleanor Roosevelt
Posted by BKG at 12:12 PM