Performing Cultural Tourism

Communities, Tourists and Creative Practices

Susan Carson, Mark Pennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138041424
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351703895
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

While experiential staging is well documented in tourism studies, not enough has been written about the diverse types of experiences and expectations that visitors bring to the tourist space and how communities respond to, or indeed challenge, these expectations. This book brings together new ideas about cultural experiences and how communities, creative producers, and visitors can productively engage with competing interests and notions of experience and authenticity in the tourist environment.

Part I considers the experiences of communities in meeting the needs of cultural tourists in an international context. Part II analyses the relationships between individualcultural tourists, the community, and digital technology. Finally, Part III responds to new methodologies in relation to interactions between government and regional policy and community development.

Focusing on the way in which communities and visitors 'perform' new forms of cultural tourism, Performing Cultural Tourism is aimed at undergraduate students, researchers, academics, and a diverse range of professionals at both private and government levels that are seeking to develop policies and business plans that recognize and respond to new interests in contemporary tourism.

Part I

Cooperation, exchange negotiation

The shared needs of Indigenous communities and cultural tourists

1 ‘Temporary belonging’

Indigenous cultural tourism and community art centres

Sally Butler

Introduction

Indigenous art centres located in remote communities in Australia are increasingly engaging in cultural tourism initiatives to diversify their income streams and advance the community’s economic and cultural sustainability (Jones, Booth and Acker, 2016; Australian Government, 2016). This art centre momentum goes against the grain of a perceived lack of interest in Indigenous cultural tourism more generally. Early research into Indigenous cultural tourism in Australia found that attractions based on Indigenous culture ranked low relative to other activities (Ryan and Huyton, 2002). Surveys reflected that Indigenous cultural tourism appealed to a minority socio-demographic band of tourists. Furthermore, initiatives that promote Australian Indigenous culture as a tourism product “question their effectiveness in generating desired returns to Aboriginal communities” (Ryan and Huyton, p. 631). The data suggests a key problem pertains to tourist perceptions that they “see little of what is a developing Aboriginal cultural revival” (Ryan and Huyton, p. 631). ‘Showcase’ cultural tourism is clearly not the future, but more participatory models of community-embedded cultural tourism appear to have the potential to counter this problem.

A great deal of current scholarship surrounds debates regarding the benefits of Indigenous communities engaging in the tourism enterprise (Bunten, 2008; Butler and Hinch, 2007; Jones, Booth and Acker, 2016; Ryan and Aicken, 2005; Zeppel, 2001). Even more scholarship engages with questions over what constitutes an authentic tourist experience (Gmeich, 2004; MacLeod, 2006; Skinner and Theodossopoulos, 2011). Cultural tourism sits firmly at the intersection of these debates because it involves relationships between people and places; different perspectives of history and traditions; and appreciating the complexities of different lifestyles (Smith and Robinson, 2006). This chapter does not specifically address the tortured territory of defining an authentic tourism experience, nor does it attempt to weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of immersive cultural tourism for Indigenous communities. Instead it speculates on the idea of a tourism experience of ‘temporary belonging’ to provide some insight into the encounter between communities and visitors in the context of participatory indigenous cultural tourism. It takes an ‘in-between’ approach to a cross-cultural sense of community belonging in the context of tourism.

I have adapted this concept of ‘temporary belonging’ regarding communities from ongoing tourism discourse pertaining to tourists’ emotional attachment to place (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Coleman and Crang, 2002b; Chambers, 2010). Indigenous communities represent a special case study of place in the tourism context because their very being is intrinsically related to place. Indigenous communities are people of a specific locality – they are the people of places (Butler and Hinch, 2007). The very word ‘Indigenous’ means belonging to a place. So there is an apparent corollary between tourists’ emotional attachment to place and their emotional attachment to Indigenous communities. I want to explore this somewhat elusive emotional link through a tourism experience of what I call ‘temporary belonging’.

The temporary aspect of this concept concerns the fact that people act differently in different contexts. They perform certain roles depending on the kind of event or activity they are participating in. We act respectfully at funerals, attentively at lectures, and are socially responsive at parties. The nature of the event in no small way determines how we act. This is crucial to tourism studies, of course, where the nature of the tourism event determines the tourism experience (Coleman and Crang, 2002b). The place of the tourism event is not a static element but a performer in its own right. Coleman and Crang’s edited volume Tourism: Between place and performance is particularly relevant here in terms of how it approaches concepts of place in tourism as an interstitial dualistic ‘performance’ of tourism. Places and visitors perform tourism in this context, and this text particularly engages with ideas that defeat the oft-lamented dichotomy of place ‘as either authentically experienced by locals or simulated and staged for visiting consumers’ (Coleman and Crang, 2002a, p. 4). People and place are conflated within the terms ‘local’ and ‘visitor’, and thus place becomes animated through the activities that occur between the people of its spaces. The book attempts to hover around this local belonging and the tourism experience, and it offers a reference point, or mindset, for the situation of temporary belonging.

The idea of performance helps observers appreciate that tourism is a particular context of the social condition where, as previously mentioned, people ‘act’ in a certain way. This does not mean that they are necessarily behaving in a false or inauthentic manner, so much as responding to the conditions offered by place-based tourism encounters. I would argue that the temporary nature of our fundamental understanding of what cultural tourism is – a temporary inhabitation, or a temporary time-travel – is a significant, if subliminal, psychological aspect of tourists’ encounters with host communities. Arguably the most successful cultural tourism experiences involve a sense that one belongs to a host community, no matter how temporary. ‘Between’ is a key term for Tourism: Between place and performance because the volume advances a dualistic model where ‘cultures and belonging work in terms of a/not-a, inside and outside categories’ (Coleman and Crang, 2002a, p. 5). This refusal to categorize ‘performers’ as either inside or outside helps in understanding a concept of performed, or temporary, belonging. In this chapter I am simply reconfiguring this performed oscillation between being inside and outside place to that of indigenous communities, and arguing that it engenders a tourism experience of ‘temporary belonging’.

Temporary belonging is perhaps intrinsic to the concept of tourism itself, but it assumes greater significance in an age of global translocation (Smith and Robinson, 2006; Burns and Novelli, 2006; Zakin, 2015; Burns and Novelli, 2008). Diaspora, displacement, and dislocation in contemporary global lifestyles tend to diminish a sense of belonging to a community, or of being involved in a community. Even if we ourselves remain within one community today, these communities tend to change and move around us. We do not experience community belonging in similar ways to the more static global environment of the past. Within this mindset the participatory cultural tourism experience potentially offers a sense of community belonging that may be lacking at home. This (latent) desire to belong flowers within the temporary inside/outside conditions of the participatory cultural tourism experience.

Different kinds of tourism undoubtedly impact the condition of temporary belonging. It is important to emphasize that the precise nature of the relationship between host communities and visitors is crucial in determining the tourism experience. In this chapter I focus specifically on the growing trend of Indigenous community art centres that offer participatory cultural tourism initiatives. This aspect of the tourism industry is distinct to Indigenous cultural tourism that operates guided cultural tours of traditional homelands or culturally significant locations (Bunten, 2004; Aboriginal South Australia, 2016; Urban Indigenous, 2016). Whilst the latter are obviously participatory in terms of involving tourists in walks and various cultural activities, they are rarely embedded in communities for a period of time beyond one to three days. The point of my argument is not to ascribe value to different degrees of the immersive experience. Rather I aim to use the example of participatory art and cultural tourism to examine how this effect of ‘temporary belonging’ helps in new thinking about the future of cultural tourism. The tourism concept of temporary belonging also provides alternative models to the previously mentioned ‘authenticity’ debates surrounding cultural tourism.

The art centres discussed in this chapter offer more extended participatory cultural experiences than other attempts to temporarily involve visitors in community life. Before explaining the concept of Australian Indigenous art centres and how they initiate participatory cultural tourism, we should undertake a more detailed consideration of what temporary belonging might mean in spaces shared by visitors and Australian Indigenous communities.

Temporary belonging in Indigenous cultural tourism

The condition of temporary belonging obviously refers to the tourist perspective as opposed to that of the host communities, however the concept of place, and belonging to a place as a stage for the performance of the tourism encounter, intrinsically involves both perspectives. The ways in which these cross-cultural perspectives of place interact, in Australia and elsewhere, is very complex and difficult to articulate (McKenna, 2002). Coleman and Crang argue that within relationships between hosts and visitors:

These multiple registers and framings may suggest we need to think not simply of semiosis but also the poetics of how these are strung together in the practices of visitors and performers – where neither side monopolises the right to define legitimate performances (Coleman and Crang, 2002a, p.15).

Coleman and Crang’s appeal to a poetics of place in the tourism encounter reminds us that we are engaging with emotional, psychological, and thus elusive concepts that often resist empirical understanding. We are instead dealing with human sensibilities and sensitivities involving imagination, inspiration, motivation, reorientation, renewal, and pleasure. The authors argue that because the tourism experience place is as much about the local people as it is about the natural environment, it is perhaps best thought of through a poetics rather than rational approach. Rational approaches to emotional attachments often seem to dehydrate life’s luscious textures, so to speak.

Rational understanding is also challenged by temporary belonging’s obvious paradox: belonging suggests a permanence that is in sharp contrast to the temporary. Belonging itself is also an over-determined concept because it inevitably involves political issues and debates related to sovereignty, citizenship, nationalism and identity (Read, 2000). This is particularly the case with regards to Indigenous populations around the world who have been disenfranchised and disadvantaged by the political, social, and historical circumstances of colonization (Read, 2000). But belonging is also a universal human condition deriving from a sense of connection between various groups of human beings, and between people and place. Belonging is such a complex and multidimensional concept that it potentially overwhelms any effort to contextualize it. This is felt keenly in Peter Read’s book titled Belonging – Australians, place and aboriginal ownership. The book’s concluding statement in the Introduction addresses the impossibility of defining different Australians’ sense of belonging: “In truth, I have no idea how this book will end. I confess to being a little apprehensive” (Read, 2000, p. 5). Read resorts repeatedly to cultural expression – a poetics of belonging so to speak – to work through concepts of belonging: art, poetry, film, and literature. He observes that Aboriginal art has profoundly changed the way that many Australians understand their sense of belonging:

Bernard Smith observed that, a hundred years ago, ‘To paint Australia you had to be Australian … Unless you were born with “Australian” eyes you could not hope to “see” the Australian landscape’. In the last quarter-century many of us have substituted ‘Aboriginal’ for (Anglo-Celtic) Australian (Read, 2000, p. 4).

This mindset of course returns us to the authentic/ inauthentic dichotomy articulated in Tourism: Between place and performance, but it also demonstrates the pivotal role played by Aboriginal art as expressing a significant consciousness of belonging, and how art and other forms of cultural expression can prime visitors to a mindset of belonging, or to participate in a mindset of temporary belonging.

Following Coleman and Crang’s appeal for a poetics of place in the tourism experience we might consider the poetics of temporary belonging in the tourism experience as expressed through cultural expression, rather than other types of theoretical discourse. We are looking for a psychological or emotional in-between-ness here that registers a global sense of alienation and an Indigenous community sense of belonging. Instead of ontological theory as such, let us consider two poems as a method of taking the measure of the in-between of temporary belonging. We begin with the characterization of the visitor as part of iconic alienated modernity (now globalism) in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (2016, 1925). ‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem that is universally recognized as an iconic expression of alienated modernity. Its imagery construes post-Industrial life in terms of an isolated human experience that is rendered lifeless through disconnection from the land and each other. The “dead land”, “cactus land”, dwindle under the “twinkle of a fading star” (stanza 111). Humanity walks alone and “Forms prayers to broken stone” (stanza 111). Globalization’s hyper-modern diasporic mobility further reduces the sense of belonging and is arguably the psychology that makes tourists flee towards temporary belonging. The so-called authentic tourism experience is perhaps nothing more than a sense of connectedness, even if the connection is inherently on borrowed time. Eliot’s is an extreme condemnation of post-Industrial life, but the sense of not belonging continues to resonate within advancing global mobilities.

Against the grain of this place of not belonging, we have a growing volume of indigenous poetry that grounds itself not only in belonging, but with an ontological identification with place. Twenty-first century indigenous poetry, in particular, attends to its global contexts by attempting to articulate how this belonging to place can be partially (and temporarily) shared with those who care to listen and learn. The Australian Aboriginal poet, Nola Gregory, creates the tenor of this shared belonging in a recent poem created for the 2016 National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Observance (called NAIDOC). In this poem we can sense the tenor of ‘temporary belonging’ that is potentially afforded to participatory cultural tourism initiatives:

‘Songlines’

Come with us on a journey

Through land and sea and time

Follow down our dreaming tracks

Listen carefully, look for signs.

You will feel them in your spirit

As they weave into your soul

Songlines, our Ancestral story

Are alive and strong and bold.

They created for us the rivers

The trees and all their girth

Spreading out our storylines

As they walked upon the earth.

They are for us a legacy

Our connection to our land

They are seen through our existence

As we walk upon ochre and sand.

So listen very carefully now

As you walk upon our land

Let it seep into your spirit

As we take you by the hand.

We’ll lead you to our dreaming

And sing you songs of old

As through dance and art recorded

Our Ancestral story is told.

For 60,000 years it’s been

Our heart, our spirit, our song

Something for us to be proud of

It’s our existence, its where we belong.

We follow in the footsteps

Of our Ancestral beings

We follow along our Songlines

And our journey to our Dreaming

Gregory, 2016, www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/arts/songlines.

‘Songlines’ was written by Ms Nola Gregory a Yamaji woman who lives in Geraldton, Western Australia, with her partner Grant Briggs and daughter Rashaan Briggs.

Shared cultural encounters as in the subject of this poem are the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Methodologies of touristic exchange: an introduction
• PART I: Cooperation, exchange negotiation: the shared needs of Indigenous communities and cultural tourists
• PART II: The cultural tourist, social media and self-exploration
• PART III: Cultural precincts, events and managing tourist and community expectations
• Conclusion
• Index