Chia-fen on MacCannell
As Levi-Strauss puts “culture” as the opposition of “nature,” Dean MacCannell defines the “tourist” as the contrary phase of the “modern worker.” The idea of tourism is generated from the working condition of the modern society, since the work has alienated the middle class people from “the real world,” and deprived them of the totality and authenticity of this real world, though “totality” and “authenticity” might be just modern myth. The tourist-worker opposition is not an opposition of two human figures, but schizophrenia within one single person.
In Lone Twin’s Nine Years, Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters condensed their nine years’ traveling in different cities and countries in ninety minutes. In each ten minutes, lines as such by Whelan repeated again and again:
"Who said it’s right? I work here from day after day after day after day, and I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I felt like this (a shoulder gesture of sadness.) I shouldn’t be here. I should be there. I should be a singer. I should be a dancer. […] [I should be there] where the real world happens."
Some tourists go traveling for weeks or months, and some, like Whelan and Winters, for years. But their fate is all the same: there is a time to return; their nostalgia memory of “home” or the lack of more money calls them back. The tourists are in a liminal state, since they are alienated and displaced. They don’t belong to the place they were born and brought up, where they work day after day to earn a living. They don’t belong to anywhere else in the world either, where they are named and derided as “tourists.” Their differentiated consciousness belongs to nowhere. And most of them end up in working day after day after day after day after the journey.
But the story of the tourist may not be that pathetic all the time. Enlightenment may occur to the tourists if we take the journey as a ritual. According to Arnold van Gennep, the idea of “rite of passage” has three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Tourism in some way embodies such a process: the tourist leaves home, bumps into some “touristic shame” (MacCannell 10) or bewilderment of the other culture, and returned home with a whole new realization of his own society and the world. The tourism is a ritual definitely in this way. On one hand, it helps people to release their disgust of themselves as just boring and lifeless working machines. On the other, the tourism may be just a placebo — in the end, people surrendered themselves to the horrible working conditions again.
The tourism thus creates a vicious circle: the workers earn money to travel away from their daily work, then they run out of money in the journey, and finally they come back to work again to earn that money. Isn’t that ridiculous and funny?