Tourist Productions 2007

Dean MacCarrell employs, as one of my professors would have called it, a “bread and butter” methodological approach to examining tourism as a meaningful structure of signs in modern society. Although his writing style makes connections seem too logical, or perhaps too bland, he does make perspicacious assertions about tourism’s role in social life – which resonate in a very basic way to today. The Tourist illuminates the ways in which tourism as an activity of leisure and the production of experience is integral to fashionings of [differentiating] selfhood and modernity.

But what of this character, “the tourist”?

Quoting Lévi-Strauss’ musings, “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe…”, MacCarrell provided a poignant commentary – and problematic – that connects to our own positions as scholars in this milieu. It provokes me to question the disconcerting similarities between ethnography and tourism. Are there ways to travel to other places and “see” others in a manner that does not carry a political valence? Wherever we go, along come our own cultural baggage and systems of belief. How do we reconcile this?

It seems to me that MacCannell’s work illuminates the ways in which ethnography is an activity – a duty – of a particular sector of the leisure class. He notes in the “Epilogue” that in addition to his work’s central theme of “we are all tourists,” there is a counterbalance: “we are all tour guides.” Perhaps it is the ethnographer that cannot escape taking on both of these roles at the same time: a tourist of a community who aspires to be the tour guide.

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On a different note:

MacCarrell applies Walter Benjamin’s notion of “aura” to his analysis of the design (consecration?) of a tourist attraction, which creates touristic ritual based on “the relationship between the original object and its socially constructed importance.” (48) I believe it is also the aura surrounding particular attractions and experiences that connotes the performative – an experiential dialogue between tourist and tourist site/performer. Aura enchants art just as it enchants productions of culture. This is an element which I would like to explore farther.

Besides this, my most general interest for a project lies within the circuits of meaning-making inherent in tourist productions, specifically meanings that imbue notions of self and other, and personal or community histories. For example: a “real authentic African tribesmen” in a mock-cultural village outside of a big city in Africa, in which the life practices (contemporary or out-dated) from a specific group of people are put on display for another’s consumption. These productions heavily contribute to constructions of “traditional Africans” – as MacCarrell would term, a “social structural differentiation” that reifies the tourist’s own position as a modern being. Yet, it would seem to me that for a community which has members participating in this type of tourist production, their own notions of tradition, authenticity, and otherness will also be shaped significantly through their staged interactions and enactments. These performers are players in a market that has created a demand for these constructed performances – namely, cultural productions which guarantee exposure to an exciting and exotically authentic African experience. The market, which often claims to function in the name of economic development for these communities, has fashioned a multifaceted exchange of meanings, epistemologies, and notions that stems in many directions. I would like for my project to investigate the ways in which these phenomena interact, affect, and shape historical and cultural memory – for all participants of the tourist production.