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PART I:
TOURISM IN THAILAND
Thailand, or Siam as it was called until the 1940s, has never been colonized by a foreign power, while all of its South-East Asian neighbors have undergone European imperialism (or more recently ideological domination by Communism—which originated in Europe) at one time or another. True, it has suffered periodic invasions on the part of the Burmese and the Khmers and was briefly occupied by the Japanese in WWII, but the kingdom was never externally controlled long enough to dampen the Thais’ serious individualism. I say serious because the Thais are so often depicted as fun-loving, happy-go-lucky folk (which they often are), but this quality is something they have worked hard to preserve.
This is not to say that Thailand has not experienced any western influence. Like other Asian countries it has both suffered and benefited from contact with foreign cultures. But the ever-changing spirit of Thai culture has remained dominant, even in modern city life. The end result is that Thailand has much to interest the traveler: historic culture, lively arts, exotic islands, nightlife, a tradition of friendliness and hospitality to strangers, and one of the world’s most exciting cuisines.
Cummings, Thailand, 1990: 7
Everyone knows something about Thailand. The country is known to many as the home of a wonderful cuisine, great package tours, child prostitution, fabulous silk, fake Rolex Watches and magnificent temples. We learn about the country through tourist advertising, business and educational exchanges, films and news reports; these fragments reinforce the country’s seductive appeal. For Thailand does not permit distancing but rather sucks us into a sensual world of exotic sights, sounds, tastes and smells.
Van Esterick, Materializing Thailand, 2002: 3
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Chapter 1
Tourism, Travelers, and Thailand
Tourism is now considered to be the largest industry in the world, having supplanted the oil industry a number of years ago. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that by 2010 tourism and travel will be an 8 trillion dollar a year industry employing approximately 330 million people. In 1998 global tourism was a 3.6-trillion-dollar-a-year industry, employing more than 230 million people; so projections for the growth of the tourism industry are very optimistic. There are approximately 6 billion people in the world; so an industry that employs 230 million people is employing 1 out of every 24 people, but, in actuality, tourism employs a higher percentage of those who are of working age.
It is, then, an important factor in the development of modern consumer cultures, ones in which leisure activities like tourism are becoming increasingly important. Tourism is a way of combining things like air travel, hotel stays, restaurant dining, museum visits, and other cultural activities all in one package. The term “package tour” is, then, very accurate. Tourism, Baudrillard suggests, must be seen as part of the postmodern imperative of continual consumption in order to live to the fullest and to have an exciting narrative thrust to one’s life.
There is some disagreement among scholars about how to define tourism and whether it is possible to differentiate it from travel. I discuss these matters before offering some more detailed statistics on the tourism industry.
DEFINITIONS OF TOURISM
I start with the definition offered by the World Tourism Organization (2002a):
It comprises the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited.
The root of the term “tourist” is the Greek word tornos, which is a simple tool that was used for making a circle. So there is, built into the term tourism, the notion that a tour involves traveling in a circle, of leaving from a particular place and returning there at the end of one’s travel. In the travel industry, tours are understood to be, generally speaking, a group form of travel in which the route is specific, there is a certain amount of regimentation involved, and eventually the tourists return to where they started.
In his book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class Dean MacCannell defines the tourist in the following manner:
“Tourist” is used to mean two things in this book. It designates actual tourists: sightseers, mainly middle-class, who are at this moment deployed through the entire world in search of experience. I want the book to serve as a sociological study of this group. But I should make it known that, from the beginning, I intended something more. The tourist is an actual person, or real people are actually tourists. At the same time, “the tourist” is one of the best models for modern-man-in-general. I am equally interested in “the tourist” in this second, metasociological sense of the term. Our first apprehension of modern civilization, it seems to me, emerges in the mind of the tourist. (1976: 1)
MacCannell sees tourists as models for modern man. His definition suggests that to be a human being, or, at least, a modern man (and woman) nowadays, is to be a tourist. Tourism, then, becomes modern man’s and woman’s primary occupation and preoccupation, their most important means of self-definition.
Michel de Certeau, in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, has suggested that all novels involve travel, as characters move from one place to another. He writes:
Narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes. By means of a whole panoply of codes, ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, they regulate changes in space (or moves from one place to another) made by stories in the form of places put in linear of interlaced series: from here (Paris) one goes there (Montargis) … Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice. (1984:115)
What he writes about narratives, such as short stories and novels, it sounds, curiously, very much like a package tour.
If that is the case, and all stories involve travel, its opposite suggests that travel is a form of novelization or memoir-ization of our lives. If we think of our lives as narratives, much of the excitement we experience comes from our travels and adventures, and our everyday lives become a kind of rather monotonous, eventless, uninteresting filler between our travels. That may be one reason why tourism and travel become so important in many people’s lives.
The Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, offers the following insights into tourism (slightly edited for readability):
Tourism can be defined as the act of travel for the purpose of recreation, and the provision of services for this act. A “tourist” is someone who travels at least fifty miles from home, as defined by the World Tourism Organization, a United Nations body. A more comprehensive definition would be that tourism is a service industry, comprising a number of tangible and intangible components. The tangible elements include transportation systems—air, rail, road, water and now, space; hospitality services—accommodation, foods and beverages, tours, souvenirs; and related services such as banking, insurance and safety & security. The intangible elements include: rest and relaxation, culture, escape, adventure, new and different experiences. (www.w...
