locals and tourism (i'm new to this blogging thing...)
I am very intrigued about tourism changing a location, especially when MacCannell discusses some residents trying to send negative messages about their locales to fend off tourists. My grandfather has a house on Long Beach Island in southern New Jersey that my great-grandparents built. While my family lives there every summer and has for generations, we still fall into a “tourist” sub-category—not quite local, not quite “shoobie.” For a few summers, I worked in the oldest restaurant on the island, right on the bay with huge windows, and dealt with a wide range of customers—those who loved it because it was very nostalgic, others who detested it. Many of the customers who loved the restaurant disliked the way that tourism had changed the island—the relaxing, gritty island they loved had become cosmopolitan, over-priced, and crowded. There is also a threat that the island’s only super market may be closed due to a raise in taxes and will be paved and replaced by rental properties. While this change may not affect people spending a week on LBI, the thought of dealing with rental traffic on and off the island to get groceries is about as appealing as riding the subway from Queens to Brooklyn late on a Saturday night. Consumerism and capitalism have had such impacts on the Jersey Shore, I almost wonder if the change in demographics will not eventually leave the now over-constructed island a ghost town—if prices in realty drop and it is no longer an economically sound investment, what happens to the locale?
A friend from Ivory Coast once told me that the war started soon after the government built the basilica in Abidjan. The government’s goal had been to increase tourism, but in addition to much civil strife, what people saw were excessive funds spent to placate visitors while citizens were starving. While she said things were much more complicated, the unrest started around the same time as a government investment in tourism. When a mock-Eiffel Tower and a new residence for the President were completed in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, I heard citizen’s expressing similar outrage and predicting similar public unrest to be in the country’s future.
I had never thought about tourism in relationship to Marx, but I’m pretty curious about it now.
The other thing I thought about with MacCannell was the “marker” tourists give certain sites. I was in Nuremberg with a couple friends and was much more excited about Albrecht Durer’s house because I had done a report on him in grade school. I brought my own background to the site and it became extraordinary, much more so than the plaque in front could have accomplished on its own. There was also a scary, scary distorted rabbit sculpture in front of it which created a memory, which I am including just for entertainment value…