Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development

On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

Rodanthi Tzanelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429754951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond recognition in neoliberal markets; thus flattening out human experience, destroying natural habitats in the name of development, and putting the future of whole ecosystems at risk.

Without disregarding such developmental risks Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development explores how, en route to any beneficial or eco-destructive development, film tourist industries co-produce atmospheres of place and culture with tourists/film fans, local activists, and nation-states. Drawing on international examples of cinematically-induced tourism and tourismophobic activism, Tzanelli demonstrates how the allegedly unilateral industry-driven 'design' of location stands at a crossroads between political structures, systems of capitalist development, and resurgent localised agency.

With an interdisciplinary methodological and epistemological portfolio connected to the new mobilities paradigm, this volume will appeal to scholars, students, and practitioners interested in tourism, migration, and urban studies in sociology, anthropology, geography, and international relations.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The long (28 April–1 May 2018) 2018 bank holiday weekend promised to be difficult for Venice. The beautiful World Heritage city was set to be swamped by tourist hordes once more, setting off the alarms of sustainability even louder. In response, Mayor Luigi Brugnaro proceeded to sign a decree for the implementation of ‘urgent measures’ concerning public safety, security and livability in the city. These involved the diversion of tourist flows heading to popular markers, such as Rialto or San Marco, and the blocking of car drivers arriving from the Italian mainland from using the one bridge that spans the lagoon, Ponte Della Libertà (Squires 25 April 2018). The arrival of some 120,000 visitors that weekend threatened to sink the city in the rising sea levels faster than climate change, so metal tornelli (turnstiles) were also set to regulate human and automobile traffic (Brunton 1 May 2018). Who would want to live in this chaos? The new ‘Veniceland’s’ permanent population has experienced a dramatic dip from 190,000 at the end of the Second World War to below 55,000 souls today. Back in September 2016, the young activist group ‘Generation 90’ raised concerns about the effects excessive tourism has on localities in La Serenissima (as the city is known), which is anything but serene for those who have to live with global consumers on their doorsteps. The creative style of the protest caught the attention of international reporters, who saw for the first time angry locals pushing trolleys (a hint at the city’s progressive tourist ‘McDonaldization’ – Ritzer 2006), while shouting in the Venetian dialect slogans such as ‘“Ocio ae gambe che go el careo” – “Watch your legs, I’m coming through with a trolley” [and] “R-Esistiamo” – meaning both “We exist” and “We resist”’ (Squires 12 September 2016). Almost simultaneously elsewhere in Europe, in Greece and Croatia, the articulation of similar concerns called for similar measures, painting the darkest momentum in the history of tourism, in which no way forward is clear and all good futures seem impossible.

To add some academic script here, forget for a while Agamben’s (1998) ‘state of exception’: these days Europe’s beautiful cities live in a perpetual ‘state of invasion’; in them, ‘poor migrants’ have been replaced by ‘poor locals’. The term ‘state of invasion’, which alerts us to the cost of consumer-driven impacts on living social habitats and lifeworlds signals the Europeanisation of a postcolonial phenomenon par excellence from a Marxist perspective (see for example Ash and Turner’s (1975) thesis on tourists as colonising ‘golden hordes’). Significantly, it originates precisely in the twenty-first century Venetian experience of providing hospitality: commonly known as Bollino Nero or ‘code black’, the word is used today by Italians to describe motorway gridlocks (Brunton 1 May 2018). Worryingly, similar ‘code blacks’, which were also issued outside Europe, prompted the convention of over 60 tourism ministers and private-sector leaders in November 2017 to discuss ‘the issue’ at a summit co-organised by the United Nations Overtourism (UNO). In 2016 Fodor’s had already published the first ‘No Go’ list reflecting concerns that tourism was destroying the world’s earthly paradises, whereas in 2017 the Galápagos Islands, the crystal-clear Boracay island shores in the Philippines and many parts of Thailand posed severe restrictions and penalties on tourist flows in an attempt by governments to combat overcrowding, littering and uncivil behaviour (Pannett 22 May 2018).

‘Code Black’ – a nomination of (auto) mobility control, which is also a state of immobility desired by particular groups affected by excessive tourism – acted as inspiration in my work on the ways cinematic or film (induced) tourism blocks or enables all sorts of movement in different biospheres (human and natural) and mechanospheres (the machines of the internet, filmmaking and mechanically-enabled systems of tourism-making). Stepping back again, into the field of a local vision sketched by reporters, I can add more questions: how ‘real’ is this catastrophic world-picture, and, in any case, who ‘films’ it, for whom, and with what intentions? We do not deal with ‘vision’ here, but the visualisation of a multisensory and affective experience of blocking and being blocked. As is the case with all products destined to enter the cycle of production-consumption, experiences of ‘overtourism’ (excessive touristification) and ‘tourismophobia’ (fear of tourism/tourists) are in fact immanent to the atmospheric design of global markets, because they belong to the ways local character absorbs or rejects the shocks of tourist globalisation.

Consequently, it is rather simplistic to decide that the press, the host city, or even I, as the book-writer alone, hold ‘authorship rights’ in this high drama. Many different actors and agents, activist, market and state, among others, may contribute to the realisation of this or that ‘reality’. At the same time, some would argue that currently, a ‘master reality’ overdetermines all these productive perspectives, which has to do with systemic capitalist failures and the unchecked advance of neoliberalism (Ocio ae gambe che go el careo! R-Esistiamo – to ‘McDonaldisation’, one may add). Similar to Venice has been Spain, the by now acclaimed birthplace of terms such as ‘tourism monoculture’ and ‘tourismophobia’, which are recycled by native mass media to both communicate social discontent with the pressures linked to tourism growth and to discredit social movements and civil society groups involved in its contestation (Milano 2017). Be this as it may, barriers (bollinos) between human groups have to be articulated before they become established in territories, minds and hearts. Instead of chasing up solutions to such nightmares, I concentrate on what is ‘written out’ of such dystopian scenarios: all actors or agents contribute to productions of realities; some of them, though pretty dark in heart, action and intention, can create dystopias pointing to a source of light at the other end of the tunnel; before dismissing either producers or consumers, hosts or guests, for not living up to some version of right-wing, centrist or left-wing ideological expectation, we must study the drivers, contexts and histories of their being in the world with others. Bloch once said that humanity beholds a ‘happy abyss’, which encloses all sorts of ‘overlooked gains’, as the human longing for alternative futures is enclosed in different interpretations for ‘a happy or lovable trembling at the edge of the abyss’ (Daly 2013: 173). As wanderers on earth, humans are bound to both encounter or create blocks, and devise solutions to remove them. On the latter, let us try to think of ourselves as part of a world larger than us, in which nature groans under the pressures we exert upon it, then retaliates unpredictably and uncontrollably, as it surely does these days. Just to complicate things for hard-core environmentalists, let us also remember that nature’s needs may also clash with some urgent human needs – a real challenge to nature-first proponents of ‘sustainable solutions’.

The selection of cases of tourismophobia and overtourism this book covers are specifically connected to films featuring locations, which become popular tourist destinations precisely because of their debut in such phantasmagoric markets. On closer inspection, such development offers interesting multisensory ‘glimpses’ into other contemporaneous non-cinematic instances of touristification – a point reinforced by my opening example. Chapter 2 is dedicated primarily to in-depth definitions of all the main concepts used in the title. It opens with a concrete example of cinematically-induced tourist development, which is used to practically organise the book’s analytical and theoretical position: first, the study is situated within existing scholarly debates on mobilities design and mobilities justice; both subjects are used in the development of an argument on the nature of well-being in contexts of hospitality. This involves the coexistence of individual and collective tourist pursuits as a form of pilgrimage to filmed sites, but also the constitutive importance of cross-cultural encounters in the collective flourishing of communities hosting cinematic tourists. Thereafter, the chapter defines the temporal (the twenty-first century) and spatial (variations of urban and rural areas, and the international spread of case studies) parameters within which the study moves, to highlight that cinematic tourism is a by-product of global mobilities in technologies, humans, ideas, expertise, but also risks. Following this statement, the chapter outlines the challenges posited by cinematically-inspired development, including heritage conservation, environmental preservation, overtourism and tourismophobia. It considers all these as highly politicised, discursive fields in which conceptions of environmental pollution, heritage guardianship, identity and belonging are produced.

Within this debate, the chapter defines ‘cinematic tourism’ as more-than a bundle of businesses or allegedly ‘empty’ popular-cultural activities: as a form of pilgrimage to foreign and home lands, which is both directed towards heritage and creates forms of heritage anew. To do this, I replace established Western scholarly definitions of the term with the Japanese notion of ‘contents tourism’. Tracing its origins in an Eastern theosophy (the ancient I Ching Book of Changes) that transcends particular religious canons and embraces holism, contents tourism is developed in the study into a way of experiencing (giving and accepting) hospitality in foreign lands, a way of perceiving one’s natural, social and cultural environment, and being in it with animate and inanimate others. This ‘relational ontology’, which is inspired by ecofeminism, postsecular feminist scholarship and sociologies of hope, allows pilgrims and scholars to view technologies, including those of tourist connectivities, as prerequisites for humanity and its home’s (earth’s) flourishing.

Following this clarification, it is stressed that contents tourism allows us to trace the ways contemporary tourist industries and localities create the atmosphere of the tourist destination. Atmospheres, one of the main themes of the book, refer to the ways place is constructed in multi-sensory ways and experienced by those who inhabit/visit it, so it has both natural, material, phenomenal and cultural dimensions. Localities also participate in the creation of atmospheres with their hospitable or inhospitable behaviour, but also their native ways of knowing and acting. On this, emphasis is placed in the pre-cognitive, affective and emotional stages of creativity in lay and postindustrial atmospheric production – another emphasis in the study. To address the organisational and lay aspects of atmosphere-making, I place choreographer Rudolf Laban’s notion of choreosophía or communal enactment (chorós) of wisdom (sophía) alongside organised industrial choreología, the rational reworking (lógos) of lay wisdom in industrial design. Running against elitist contempt about emotion and affect as irrational, irrelevant or just auxiliary to sustainable professional cultural production, I view contents tourism as an ancient and yet modern form of mobility standing at an intersection of emotion and reason, to which business design adds little in terms of experience. My version of contents tourism, which connects the past to futures of development, allows scholars to uncover a profound symmetry (rather than homology) between design creativity in organisational cultures of consumption and communal enactments of protest against them.

Chapter 3 is a detailed methodological chapter, which also outlines the scholarly foundations involved in researching and organising the cases in this book. It begins by stressing how scholarly ‘worldmaking’ reflects the worldmaking of tourism experts as a collection of practices that tourism is, can be, or does to this world. In this respect, it also signposts the notion of contents tourism as both a powerful interpretative tool in scholarly research and an unconscious activity that needs to be brought into discourse (become conscious): authors produce the worlds they study, in interaction with their informants that assume different mediated forms in texts, technologies, images, and, above all, feelings. This way of knowing is not identical to the epistemological framework propagated by scholars such as Hollinshead (2007), as it points to a persistent intertwining of the emergence of knowledge (episteme) and ontology (what I call ‘epistemontology’). Subsequently, the argument that atmospheric creativity has a strong pre-cognitive, affective ‘life’ is applied to all case studies. This is achieved with the help of non-representational theory (NRT), which attends to the significance of emotions, actor-network theory (ANT), which stresses that technological texts (e.g. interviews, recordings of events) connect humans, machines and nature in interpretations of concrete events, and complex adaptive systems theory (CAS), which stresses the ways human agency has become entangled in complex systems involving technologies, natural and landscape ecologies. Such ANT entanglements of things, animals, environments and technologies place human beings in a ‘cultural economy’ that exceeds the rationale of monetarisation (e.g. giving and taking money from tourists), because it involves conceptions of being hospitable with (caring for) one’s cultural and natural habitats.

The notion of ‘care’ is expanded on methodologically and epistemologically: postindustrial tourist development, tourist guests and host communities have their own ways of caring for destinations (we call them sustainability, heritage guardianship and so forth), but scholars also have a way of caring for all of them. The notion of ‘atmospheric attunement’ is developed to also account for the scholar’s multisensory apprehension of the studied social and natural fields and their inhabitants. At the same time, it is noted that attunement is important for the industrial and lay production of atmospheres: all subjects have particular ways of experiencing the world, which are accounted for in this chapter. This experiential methodological tool is coupled with the rational CAS model of analysis, which involves the production of digital mapping, a more detached way of understanding the studied subject through particular case studies. This involves the mapping of important areas for communities in touristified areas, and the matching of such ‘spots’ with activist mobilities against cinematic tourist development (activist concentration spots). Rather than considering this mapping as a Foucaultian tool of ‘sorting’ and ‘disciplining’, I posit it as a Derridian and Arendtian gateway into different affective worlds.

Subsequently, the chapter announces the uses of the I Ching theosophy of movement (which is similar to Laban’s choreosophía) as the most ancient surviving variation of epistemontology and methodology. I Ching’s perfect matching with my modern investigative social scientific tools (ANT, CAS, and NRT) also validates my adoption of the genealogy of contents tourism as an alternative framework for investigating contemporary cinematic tourism and activism. The chapter concludes with a matching exposition of Laban’s and I Ching’s approaches, which I use to create ways of investigating atmospheres in touristified locations (‘field-worlds’). I argue that atmospheres are constantly (re)constituted with the help of scenarios of movement for tourists and locals (their ‘scriptural basis’ – as in a movie script), their (infra)structures and materialities (their ‘architectonics’ – how the destination is constructed or staged), and their invisible perimeters, boundaries and borders, within which all subjects move (the ‘kinesphere’, and its ethnographic extensions, the ‘kinesfield’). This tripartite distribution of field-world mobilities matches data visualisation (digital mapping) at an experiential level.

Chapter 4 extends the innovative use of I Ching theosophy as a technology of interpretation of material and emotional movement (e-motions) to a methodical presentation of case studies (the design of particular atmospheres in particular film-induced tourism contexts). It sets aside classifications of film-induced or cinematic tourism in terms of consumption behaviours and, following Nick Couldry’s work, adopts the notion of religious and non-religious (popular cultural or ‘popcultural’) pilgrimage as a supra-category of technological mobility enclosing different motivations, affects and practices. Couldry’s thesis is modified however, because the chapter proceeds to note that, in addition to any individual motivations, cinematic pilgrims share an objective and purpose: not visitations to filmed sites as purposeless consumption, but the spatialisation of moods we associate with healing. More specifically, generic notions of consumer disorientation, which may guide influential theses, such as Bauman’s work on tourism and vagabondage, are modified by theory and example.

Theoretically, the chapter adopts I Ching expositions of atmospheric production as a way of understanding different popular-cultural pathways to healing. Different occasions of cinematic tourism development, often intertwined with heritage visitation, are attuned with I Ching’s ancient teaching about ways of being in the world with others, which promote a holistic improvement of the human soul, mind and body, in harmony with the animate and inanimate environment (‘ecoaesthetics’). This ecoaesthetics inspires a series of interpretative ‘signs’ in my research (‘hexagrams’ and ‘trigrams’), which allow me to present different pilgrimages into local and cinematic atmospheres. I use light, darkness, and various blends of both, as well as earth, water, and fire, as my primary hexagrams to explain how atmospheres are designed. My primary trigrams are script, architectonics, and kinesphere (see Chapter 3 summary above). Various combinations between my social-scientific hexagrams and trigrams construct a theoretical basis for tourism mobility that does not conform to business classifications of movement, but uses their design in its organisation. Using the logic of business design problematises practices of touristification, in preparation for the shocks of the following chapter.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to the ways localities, nation-states, or international activist networks, collaborating with either of them, respond to cinematic touristification in critical or violent ways. Whereas it commences with a detailed analysis of postcolonial and decolonial literature on domination, which addresses the exclusion of native knowledge from both the management of tourist mobilities and the technological conservation of the environment, it notes the limitations of both as too anthropocentric and politically partial to address the actual costs of capitalist development, which in the context of the Anthropocene and climate change, point to globally mobile risks. In tandem, it proposes that the notion of ‘technological hubris’, often attributed to world centres of development and their experts, should also be applied to proponents of local wisdom and their global networks (for example, activist cultures). All in all, the chapter scrutinises native and global–local enactments of protest in particular ecosystemic and cultural contexts.

The argument put forth is that, because most of these protests or mere expressions of discontent do not conform to traditional scholarly takes on social movements, to study them, one needs to devise a new classification of ‘responses’ to touristification. Three types of response are identified, which allow me to analyse a series of cases: ‘epistemic misalignment’ is rarely openly violent, but is regulated by a combative-adaptive response to development, which usually occurs in postcolonial contexts; ‘hostipitality’ can be more hostile and widespread, as it often focuses on ethnonational belonging and ritual expulsion of tourists as strangers; ‘postindustrial disobedience’ promotes labour disputes in cinematic tourist contexts into its focus, when they are usually manifestations of identity battles. Drawing on Laban’s ‘choreutics’ again, the chapter suggests that we consider these responses in terms of (lay) design and atmospheres. Using the same tools employed in the previous chapter to explore postindustrial productions of cinematic tourism (e.g. I Chi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On touring the world: an epistemontological frame
• 3 Attuning and aligning: synaesthesia and the making of worlds
• 4 Mobile design: a purposeful pilgrimage into cinematic tourist sites
• 5 The ‘hubris of the zero point’: three responses
• 6 Crafting the impossible, meddling with the anthropocenic puzzle
• Bibliography
• Index