Being and Dwelling through Tourism

An anthropological perspective

Catherine Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317175476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

Much of the existing literature seeks to make sense of tourism based on singular approaches such as visuality, identity, mobility, performance and globalised consumption. What is missing, however, is an overarching framework within which these valuable approaches can be located. This book offers one such framework using the concept of dwelling taken from Heidegger and Ingold as the starting point from which to consider the interrelatedness of being, dwelling and tourism.

The anthropological focus at the core of the book is infused with multidisciplinary perspectives that draw on a variety of subjects including philosophy, material cultural studies and cultural geography. The main themes include sensuous, material, architectural and earthly dwelling and each chapter features a discussion of the unifying theoretical framework for each theme, followed by an illustrative focus on specific aspects of tourism.

This theoretically substantive book will be of interest to anyone involved with tourism research from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, leisure studies and tourist studies.

1 Being and dwelling

Introduction

Much of the literature about tourism seeks to explore and make sense of tourism by adopting approaches that focus on particularities such as visuality, identity, mobility, myth making, tourism as a type of performance, as a networked ordering of modernity, or as a form of globalised consumption or worldmaking. Although such approaches are extremely insightful and important in relation to how we think about, create and experience the world through the activity of tourism, what is missing is a unifying framing within which they can be located. My purpose here is to set out one such framing, a framing woven out of the theoretical threads of anthropology. Threads that above all else seek a wider, more holistic understanding of how the activity of tourism enables us individually and collectively to recognise, to know and to feel that we are human, even though this may well be an unconscious recognition; in effect to shed light on the experience of being human.

In saying this I am not advocating a Grand Theory of everything, as this is neither desirable nor achievable; tourism, as a human experience, is far too complex and multi-faceted to be tied down in such a way. It is too nuanced and intricately woven in with the doing and being of life with thinking and feeling. Furthermore, there are different perspectives on how to approach and how to frame tourism depending upon the questions to be asked and the disciplinary and or ideological allegiance of the individual asking the questions; as Lowenthal once remarked ‘every generation finds new facts and invents new concepts to deal with them’ (1961: 245). A good example of Lowenthal’s point here is the use of performance as a paradigm and a metaphor for exploring and analysing human culture, relationships and behaviour (see Goffman 1969; Turner 1974, 1982). The word and the concept of performance have been adopted by many academics (myself included) as a useful approach for exploring aspects of social life and behaviour. Indeed, the concept of performance has almost become something of a foundation metaphor for describing what tourists do and how tourism works (Edensor 1998; Haldrup and Larsen 2010; Rickley-Boyd et al. 2014). This is despite Saldaña’s (2006: 1092) poetic denunciation of the way in which performance has been ‘overused and abused’ by many academic communities. However, my view is that uncovering the complex nuances of everyday life requires a wide angled lens in order to frame the questions to be asked and performance as both paradigm and metaphor is one such lens.

I am continually fascinated by the many and varied philosophical and theoretical positions seeking to explore and to understand the contexts and the consequences of tourism on people, place and nature and the role of tourism in terms of being human (see Selwyn 1996; Franklin 2004; Sheller and Urry 2004; Hollinshead 2007; Ren 2011). The framework I am proposing is contextualised from within an anthropological perspective that views tourism as a significant human activity capable of providing insights into the experience of being human. Or more precisely, experience in the plural, as there is no singular experience but a myriad of experiences from the individual to the collective. Whilst I am not claiming that anthropology is the only discipline interested in meaning making through tourism, I am arguing that anthropology has a unique contribution to make to the study of tourism. This is because anthropologists are interested in people first and foremost, an interest encapsulated in the overarching aim to uncover what being human means and how we make ourselves human (Csordas 1994). Key to understanding the diversity of human experience is to focus on how people live their lives and on the differences and similarities between people, including differing notions of what a ‘good life’ might mean (Eriksen 2004). Tourism is for many – although by no means all people – a taken-for-granted activity capable of fleshing out what a ‘good life’ might look and feel like. As the writer Alain de Botton rather succinctly puts it:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival.

(2002: 9)

Anthropology is particularly appropriate because of the discipline’s overarching aim to explore and better understanding the experience of being human in all its fascinating diversity. Within this broad aim social anthropology concerns itself with the social and cultural world of the individual, of societies, groups and communities. This concern manifests itself in the study of culture in its broadest unbounded sense, taking in what is general and specific, tangible and intangible about the lifeworld of others. The concept of lifeworld (lebenswelt) originates with the German philosopher Husserl (1970[1936]) and refers to a world that is familiar, a world that is lived-in and experienced by the individual on a daily basis and from which knowledge, meaning and understanding emerge through involvement with both human and nonhuman others. In effect it is the experience of Being Alive (Ingold 2011a) in relation to such as objects, technological systems, animals, nature, the weather and so forth (Buttimer 1976; Seamon 1979; 2000). Nature is significant here as it provides the enveloping context within which life is lived through experience, as Dewey argues:

experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature – stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object – the human organism – they are how things are experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth.

(1958: 4a, original emphasis)

Involvement with others thus encompasses all that humans do across the broad spectrum of the lifeworld from hunting for food, weaving cloth and growing crops to driving a car, building a house and going on holiday. As the anthropologist Michael Jackson states ‘meaning emerges not from isolated contemplation of the world but from active engagement in it’ (2007: xi). Through active engagement the Cartesian-inspired dualism that separates subject and object, mind and body is dissolved in the coming together of doing and thinking, feeling and sensing as expressions of human existence. In effect to be embedded in the world, what Heidegger described as being-in-the-world. In highlighting the significance of experience I am aligning myself with an approach closely associated with Jackson, that of phenomenological anthropology. Here everyday life provides the key to thinking about and understanding the human condition, ‘thought is always tied to mundane interests, material matters, cultural preoccupations and everyday situations’ as such anthropology should focus on ‘how thought may be anchored in rather than abstracted from human lifeworlds’ (Jackson 2009: 236).

I am interested in what might emerge as a result of thinking in relation to tourism since tourism is for many people part of everyday life whether this is in terms of working in tourism or dreaming about tourism. It is worth noting at this point that references to everyday life or for that matter to the lifeworld should not ignore the fact that there are a myriad of different everyday lives and lifeworlds, many of which are experienced as a cold, hungry fight for survival. The everyday life of a miner for example is very different to that of the mine owner; the farm worker to that of the farm owner and so on, such that like culture everyday life ‘must be situated, placed in a context – historically, economically, politically’ (Keesing 1987: 162).

Among the most significant aspects of the lifeworld of interest to anthropologists are those relating to the where, how and under what conditions people live out their lives. For example the spaces and places in which people live, the social relationships and beliefs by which they live and the political, economic and environmental conditions within and against which they live, including the systems adopted for maintaining order and social cohesion. These conditioning constituents inform, transform, maintain or disrupt human social activity and thereby frame the ways in which individuals engage with and in the world around them. This engagement in the world has been studied from a variety of different yet frequently interweaving perspectives. Perspectives that have become established themes within the pantheon of anthropological theory such as work, play, faith, customs, kinship and cosmology. However, these themes are not exhaustive as the scope of anthropological enquiry necessarily reaches far and wide in its uncovering of what it means to be human. So, alongside the established themes the richness and depth of the human experience is also revealed in theorising linked to aspects such as ‘Power, Change … Oppression … Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige’ (Geertz 1973: 21); through aesthetics, the senses, language and technology, and as a consequence of acknowledging contested experiences of the world (Asad 1973; Herzfeld 2001).

The effect of tourism on culture is what first brought tourism to the attention of anthropologists (Nunez 1963; Boissevain 1977; Crick 1994). An early focus on tourism as an agent of cultural change predominantly in relation to the effect of Western cultures on the lives of non-Western peoples has evolved into what is now a substantial body of knowledge about tourism from a variety of perspectives (see, Graburn 1976; Selwyn 1996; Nadel-Klein 2003; Tucker 2003; Nyíri 2006; Kolas 2008; Andrews 2011; Picard 2011; Huberman 2012). Anthropologically, tourism is one of the ways in which people access physically and through imaginative reverie the social and cultural particularities of other people, places and times. It is also a means by which the tourist can access and experience identity as demonstrated by some fascinating studies of what being a tourist means (Harrison 2003; Andrews 2009; 2011).

It is no surprise, therefore, that anthropologists are interested in tourism and tourists, in destinations and resident communities. However, the ‘other’ in tourism is not necessarily far away since diversity and difference, the exotic and the extraordinary can be found next door to where people live, in the next street or the next town, such that anthropologists are as fascinated by the near as they are by the elsewhere (Augé 2008). Or as Clifford maintains ‘ “[c]ultural” difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness’; the exotic, the different and the unexpected are nearby; they can be encountered in the adjoining neighbourhood (1988: 14). Notions of the exotic are of course relational as Dennis O’Rourke’s 1987 film Cannibal Tours clearly demonstrates the Western tourists appear exotic, strange and at times incomprehensible to the people of Papua New Guinea.

Difference that is near is characterised by the same sort of signifying practices associated with the elsewhere; it is reflected in where and how people choose to live, in the food they buy and how they choose to eat it, in the clothes they wear and the ways in which they use and adorn their bodies. It is reflected in the choices people make about whether and how to engage in tourism about what travel and travelling mean within the totality of the lives people lead. In Western culture if we take aside travel associated with daily need such as shopping for food and clothes, going to work, collecting children from school, then non obligatory travel has long been associated with personal growth, relaxation and an expansion of self-awareness – whether this is in terms of spiritual development, or for reasons of intellectual, political or aesthetic advancement as with the eighteenth-century Grand Tour of an educated, wealthy European elite.

Of course non-Western cultures also travel for pleasure and it is important to remember that tourism is not a modern invention as people travelled in ancient and medieval times, and from within the Near and the Far East (Casson 1994; Guichard-Anguis and Moon 2008), but there are differences in the philosophical understanding of the role and purpose of travel between Western and non-Western peoples. Such differences reflect alternative approaches to the nature of existence and to the relationship between the self, the state, the ancestors and the natural world (Nyíri 2006; Morphy 1995). Tourism and travelling not only mean different things to different people, they are also understood differently depending upon the context and the perspective within which they take place. Early motivations for travel rooted in trade, migration and religious pilgrimage have evolved in different ways such that today a Christian worldview has for the most part interpreted tourism and travelling in relation to the playful pursuit of pleasure. Whereas an Islamic worldview interprets travel as a search for spiritual knowledge through pilgrimage and therefore distances itself from the type of behaviour associated with the indulgence and hedonism of international mass tourism (Aziz 2001; Din 1989) Although these generalisations belie the fact that international tourism does not have to be incompatible with Islam (Okhovat 2010; Sanad et al. 2010; Henderson 2010), both are illustrative of different understandings about how the world is constructed and how individuals should behave, what anthropologists refer to as cosmology.

Cosmology and tourism

Cosmology is a significant concept in anthropology because as Mary Douglas (1996) points out, it serves to justify and explain behaviour, which in turn reveals something about the basis upon which a society operates. As Wagner states:

In every “culture”, every community or communicating human enterprise, the range of conventional contexts is centered around a generalized image of man and human relationships, and it articulates that image. These contexts define and create meaning for human existence and human sociality by providing a collective relational base, one that can be actualized explicitly or implicitly through an infinite variety of possible expressions. They include such things as language, social “ideology”, what is called cosmology.

(1981: 40, original emphasis)

To talk about a cosmology is then to talk about the basic belief system or worldview of a particular group or society, how people live, how they think about, imagine and understand their place in the world, how power is exercised, the relationship between the social order, between production and consumption and so forth. Cosmology is not only a scientific term for the universe or cosmos beyond the boundary of the earth’s dominion, it is also a religious and hence cultural term that speaks of the knowledge, ideas and beliefs a people have about how they came to be in the world, how the world is and should be organised and about the existence or otherwise of ‘life’ beyond the veil of death. Despite the clear synergies with religion and stories of creation that seek to explain human existence, I prefer to think in terms of faith as the means by which ideas about the sacred, spirituality and the supernatural are located within culture. Faith is less culturally specific than religion, although both are inherently cosmological.

A cosmological system is, therefore, concerned with the maintenance of order through the setting of boundaries as to what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in any given situation. The basic principles and values of a particular worldview define the rules that govern behaviour in terms of social relationships, gender divisions, economics and so forth. In addition, a society’s understanding of and relationship with nature, animals, the physical and material environment as well as attitudes towards death and the notion of time all coalesce to form an overall cosmological system. Cosmology is then a way of situating the self in the whole; a way of being, thinking and doing that makes life meaningful for individuals on their journey between birth and death, including how the time before birth may be understood (Lytton 1989; Weiner 2001; Hornborg 2006).

A cosmology is made manifest in the practices and social arrangements enacted by a society as Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 6) argue in relation to Western ways of being ‘many of the concepts on which we rely to describe modern life – statistical models, rational choice and game theory … case studies and biographical narratives … are our own rationalizing cosmology posing as science, our culture posing as historical causality’. It is clear from this that questions about cosmology cannot be confined to indigenous tribal societies; they are just as pertinent for the contemporary world and for societies driven by technological innovation (Abramson and Holbraad 2014). The continuing relevance of cosmology should not be taken to imply that cosmologies are inherently stable. As Douglas reminds us, a cosmology is not fixed in stone; it is more a set of categories that are as it were ‘in use’:

It is not a hard carapace which the tortoise has to carry for ever, but something very flexible and easily disjointed. Spare parts can be fitted and adjustments made without much trouble. Occasionally a major overhaul is necessary to bring obsolete sets of views into focus with new times and new company … most of the time adjustments are made so smoothly that one is hardly aware of the shifts of angle until they have developed an obvious disharmony between past and present.

(1996: 158)

Although cosmologies can and do change, the means by which they change may not always be as straightforward or as smooth as Douglas suggests. For example Malkki (1995) provides an unsettling ethnography of the opposing narratives laying claim to the historical background that led to the 1972 massacre of Hutus by the Tutsi in Burundi. Arguing that the differing versions of history are not just a struggle over what happened but also a struggle over opposing cosmologies.

Despite this example, the concept of cosmology is useful for exploring the meaning-making potential of tourism because tourism provides the meeting grounds for particular worldviews. Through tourism different beliefs and values come into contact with each other within the context of what I have referred to elsewhere as ‘tourist society’ (Palmer 2009). In this society social relationships are made, remade, celebrated, tested and broken in relation to the values influencing what is considered to be acceptable ways of behaving. So is it possible, therefore, to talk of there being a cosmology of tourism? I think it is and my view here is inspired by Miller’s (1998a) anthropological essay on the significance of shopping for understanding the values that influence and sustain social relationships. Miller’s specific intention is to establish the cosmological foundations of routine shopping through an analysis of shopping practices on one street in North London. By drawing upon the analogy between shopping and the rituals associated with ancient sacrifice, Miller reveals the fundamental values inherent in a cosmology of shopping, values such as devotional love, the aesthetics of thrift and self-sacrifice. Although Miller’s ethnography is highly circumscribed in relation to the confines of his study, it does illustrate how social order and social relationships can be maintained, reinforced and/or subtly transformed by a particular cosmology.

Transformation through travel whether in terms of the self or in relation to others is well documented in the literature (Cone 1995; Noy 2004; Devereux and Carnegie 2006; Smith and Kelly 2006; Østergaard and Christensen 2010; Picard and Robinson 2012), and the link between cos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Being and dwelling
• 2 Sensuous dwelling
• 3 Material dwelling
• 4 Architectural dwelling
• 5 Earthly dwelling
• 6 Being, dwelling and thinking
• Bibliography
• Index