The tourism of the everyday: everyday in Rio's favelas
Currently in Rio de Janeiro doing research on community museums and tourism in the favelas, I find it impossible not to link the articles I read to my experiences here, though not in any exhaustive detail. First, let us look at Franklin and Crang´s article, which pinpoints key discourses within the field of tourism studies and make an overall argument, which my own work has come to realize and support: there is a need for deeper and broader theoretical studies in the area of tourism in order to keep adding to the understandings of this complex social phenomenon by the developments of social and cultural theory and other related areas of study and methodological approaches. My research on community cultural centers in a few countries and in particular those places where the cultural centers become tourist destinations has led me to conclude that tourism brings forward an intriguing dynamic in the local context of memory, identity, and heritage preservation.
The community cultural centers/museums in some of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro – Rocinha, Mare, and Providencia – since the early 90s have gradually become (or tried to become) tourist attraction. Generally, the cultural centers opened by NGOs or the government were not created with the idea of becoming in any way related to tourism; rather, they were a system of institutions that aimed to bring down the high arts to the people who can’t afford them and eliminate the inequalities of access to cultural events. In Mare and Providencia, however, the cultural centers are different, since the communities created local memory museums specifically to attract tourists. The presence of the outsiders has certainly added to the community dialectics at multiple levels, understood through the interviews and observations I conducted. The major contribution of tourism to the community life, expressed in most of the interviews I took, was related to higher levels of self-esteem of the dwellers by the fact that people not simply from the outside of the favela, which in itself has traditionally been a place shunned by the outsiders, but people from other countries consider it worthwhile to visit a place known only for its violence. They locals hope to show the outsiders faces of the favela that they would never otherwise hear about – faces with smiles, telling stories, singing.
The “tourism of the everyday” (8) as Frank and Crang refer to it is what has been building base in the favelas, where there is a constant flow of tourists at the community socio-cultural hubs that have now become a stage for cultural performances and exchanges of ideas, customs, and emotions between people who would have never been in contact were it not for tourism. Indeed, I observed the pertinence of Frank and Crang’s analyses that the flows of tourists “may profoundly alter the social texture” (9), as the presence of tourists in the familiar community spaces previously reserved to communal sociability now deconstructed the function of this social space and opened it up to other forms of interaction and discourse.
Tourism forges new social exchanges in the bodies of both economic exchange – when tourists buy crafts from the artisans, who on their part responded to the demand for souvenirs in the favelas of Mare and Rocinha – and socio-cultural exchange of human energy, tourist appreciation of the local traditions and creativity, which in the words of many of the locals I interviewed has boosted their own self-esteem through the recognition of their amateur talent and their appreciation of their local traditions. Certainly, not all dwellers feel this way, many are apathetic and many say they feel as if tourists were there only to see their poverty and misery; yet, the museums and the tourist flows have undoubtedly brought in new life into the community: and all debate can be productive.
Frank and Crang offer an insightful perspective on the dynamics of the tourism of the everyday and specifically the fact that the flow of tourists in a place leaves “the distinction between the everyday and holiday entirely blurred” (8). I would extend their ideas on the “extraordinary everyday” to Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the everyday, where he believes the everyday in itself should disappear as a concept (a concept carrying the charge of repetitive routinization) in order to appreciate every “everyday” as a festival – those festivals that in the past constituted the “style” of life, and now degenerated into culture where the constant dream is the escape from the everyday into the artificially created realm of holiday.
Interestingly enough, with tourism the dichotomy between everyday and holiday does start to shift – though in a process completely unforeseen by Lefebvre – by generating new spellings for the day-to-day.
And in addition to new spellings, is tourism also casting new spells on the everyday? Cohen’s article reveals an interesting interpretation of the “center” of the visited culture that tourists in many cases strive to find and sense: “movement away from the spiritual, cultural, or even religious centre of one’s world, into its periphery, towards the centres of other cultures and societies (182-183). The five types of tourism Cohen delineates - recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental, existential – are important guidelines to consider in the analysis of tourist experiences, but are in no way categories that cannot be further elaborated. On the contrary, categories can mix and form new hybrids of tourism, they can extinguish or get enriched, considering the most important element in tourism, which is the fact that we are dealing with human phenomenology – the most volatile thing of all.
I take Cohen’s notions on the search of the “centre” of a culture and connect it to the final and extremely important point that Frank and Crang make related to the diminishing aesthetic components of tourism. They try to deconstruct the domination of the notion of tourism’s visualism and present cases of theory and practice that turn “the passivity of visual tourism into kinaesthetic sense and flow (see Thrift 1999)” (13). This is a key phenomenon to keep in mind because it reveals the precise active process through which tourists are enacting that search of the “centre.” The interactive elements in the tourist experience and the experience of the locals often produce instances of intriguing trans-cultural “social effervescences,” as Durkheim would have probably called them, when the visual evolves into speech and action. The “kinaestheticism” of tourism is in constant movement…