Coach Fellas

Heritage and Tourism in Ireland

Kelli Ann Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781598744071
• eBook ISBN: 9781315432236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Coach Fellas are known to almost all tourists who traverse the Irish countryside. Ostensibly bus drivers, they are also the tour guides who provide the crucial component in the branding of "people, place, and pace" upon which Irish heritage tourism depends. Kelli Costa's ethnography of these highly trained and informed working class men highlights a previously ignored component of the tourism industry. She also demonstrates their importance in providing a visitor-specific vision of heritage that contrasts with the realities of contemporary economic development.

19CHAPTER 1

Tourism: A Consideration of the Literature

THE TOURIST

Thorstein Veblen referred to them as the “leisure society” (1899). “They” were the people during the Victorian era who could afford to engage in forms of travel for leisure (often under the veil of education or health) and other such nonnecessary, non-utilitarian forms of pleasure. Since that time, the tourism demographic has changed, the nature of travel has changed, and the ways in which tourists and travel are understood have changed. Once the venue of the idle rich, travel and tourism are now widely available; whether in local or domestic destinations or in far-flung areas of the world, nearly everyone in the developed world will go on holiday, take a vacation, or see the sights at least once in a lifetime—if not several times a year.

As a social category, “the tourist” has often been vilified in a wide range of literature. Many people who travel do not wish to be identified as tourists and will not self-identify as a tourist when asked to describe their status. People who travel often differentiate between “travelers”—who are understood as socially sophisticated and who travel for the cultural value of it—“trippers”—who may travel for a variety of sentimental or emotional reasons or for adventure—and “tourists”—who are understood as somewhat vulgar, uncomfortable, and superficial (Gmelch 2004; Lury 1997). Tourists do not engage with local people; rather, they are served by them. Trippers seek out an “authentic” cultural experience; 20travelers “know” the culture. These contrived categories of identification can serve as bounded entities through which the world of the touristic experience is understood.

But do these categories truly encompass the entirety of the culture known as tourists? Many tourists suggest that they evolved from one suggested category to another over the course of a holiday; some suggest that they devolved, falling from a cultural sophisticate to a kitschy, souvenir-collecting, poorly groomed outsider. However, the taxonomy of the tourist extends beyond these simple classifications. Along with why people travel, where people travel and the reasons they choose to travel to that particular place must also be understood—how they choose to see the places they travel to; when they choose to travel (high season, low season, shoulder seasons); the emotional, nostalgic reasons for the trip, if there are any; whom they travel with; how long they remain in a place; how, and in what contexts, they interact with others; and how they comprehend the culture and the landscape around them. Is the experience itself a reason to travel and observe?

THE SEARCH FOR THE AUTHENTIC: THE TOURIST—IN THEORY

As suggested by MacCannell (1999 [1976]) and others (for example, Bruner [1994]; Corkern [2004]; McManus [1997]), what tourists seek when traveling often is authenticity, the authentic, or an “authentic experience.” For something to be authentic, it must conform to fact; be worthy of trust, reliance, or belief; have a verifiable origin or authorship; and not be copied or counterfeit (American Heritage Dictionary 2000). Authenticity infers the quality of being authentic, trustworthy, or genuine, but it also suggests something that is honestly felt or experienced, that is free from hypocrisy and dishonesty (ibid.). As such, an authentic experience is something that is felt and that has an emotional context. A tourist’s authentic experience may simply be something a tourist would not normally experience in daily life, something he or she may not see at home, whether 21or not what the person is seeing or experiencing is genuinely “authentic” or not. In many cases, tourists are perfectly happy with simulated experiences of once-authentic occurrences (such as the simulated winter solstice sunbeam at Newgrange referred to in Chapter 3).

Davydd J. Greenwood, in his widely read “Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as Cultural Commoditization” (1977, 1989, 2004), suggested that tourists, in their quest for the authentic (“local color” in his words), and the tourist industry, by capitalizing on this quest, have made “peoples’ cultures extensions of the modern mass media” (2004: 164). Over the course of 27 years and numerous republications and revisions of the article (only three of the many are listed here), Greenwood has persisted in his view that tourists and tourism are essentially at fault for the changing (sometimes destruction) of “culture,” which exists only in places other than those the tourists come from. He uses the term ethnic tourism to differentiate between the observer and the observed, Valene Smith’s “hosts and guests” (ibid.: 158). In Greenwood’s study, a Basque ritual commemoration, the Alarde (a reenactment of “Hondarribia’s victory over the French in the siege of A.D. 1638” (ibid.: 160) is described as a form of inaccessible sacred history to outsiders that was co-opted by the Ministry of Information and Tourism to draw tourism revenue to the area (ibid.: 161). Upon its cooptation, the once powerful and inclusive ritual was discarded by the locals. This “collapse of cultural meanings” is seen as a violation of sorts by Greenwood, both of the people and of the ritual. He suggests that the invitation of tourists to the ritual and the ritual’s subsequent commodification destroyed the ritual’s “authenticity and its power” for the Basques of the Hondarribia (ibid.: 164). Although in 2004, he does reflect on his transparent anger in the original script of 1977 and apologizes, after a fashion, to the discipline of anthropology for being “professionally self-serving” (ibid.: 167), Greenwood remains convinced that tourists seeking authenticity, promised by the tourism industry, are in effect exploiting defenseless people. The tourist as capitalist predator.

22Nelson Graburn referred to the tourist experience as a “sacred journey” (1989: 24) and then as “secular ritual” (2004: 23) in opposition to the profane work-a-day world tourists leave behind. He even went so far as to compare souvenir collecting and other evidence of journeys (photos, postcards, rocks, and sea shells) to the “Holy Grail”—that mythic sought-after goal of the ultimate journey (1989: 33). Graburn suggests that the greater the authenticity of the item (he breaks down souvenir-collecting tourists into experiential categories such as environmental, hunter-gatherer, ethnic), the nearer to a religious experience tourists have; tourists return home with an item of nearly sacred proportions, evidence of their special status, their participation in a cultural pilgrimage (1989). Like many scholars, Graburn identifies a tourism performed by a (relatively) wealthy elite from the developed West that is visited on an unprepared underclass somewhere else. Dennison Nash, in the same volume as Graburn above, compares the tourist to a “conqueror” and tourism to a form of imperialism (1989: 38). These types of binary arguments are prevalent in most tourism literature—tourists are bad, the cultures they visit are good; tourism is inherently destructive, negative, and without conscience and is placed in opposition to the innocence and positive existence of the cultures it invades. Tourism is modernity without check; tourists (and the somewhat awkwardly labeled “post-tourists”) are uncaring, egocentric, and culturally insensitive. The tourist experience is undertaken always at the expense of “the Other.” The tourist as parasite.

Perhaps the most cited scholar in tourism literature is Dean MacCannell, author of the classic text The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1999 [1976]). MacCannell begins by suggesting that the word tourist has two meanings within the context of his book: the actual person(s)—“sightseers, mainly middle-class, who are at this moment deployed throughout the entire world in search of experience”—and the metasociological term that represents “modern-man-in-general” (ibid.: 1). Though MacCannell challenges the propensity to see tourism as somehow uncouth (calling it “the rhetoric of moral superiority” [ibid.: 9]), throughout The Tourist he uses tourists and tourism as whipping posts 23for the eroding away of cultural values—they are among those responsible for the “dumbing-down” of society. In MacCannell’s estimation, the search for the authentic experience is paramount in the tourist world and the tourist’s mind. MacCannell famously concludes, however, that tourists have little regard for the genuine in that they are, as a class, unsophisticated. What “the tourist” may understand as authentic or as an authentic experience is masked behind or within a series of “stages” such as those one might find in live theatre. The farther one peers backstage, the less magical and mystical the production becomes. Much the way Toto uncovered the man behind the curtain, evaporating the looming godlike presence in the Wizard of Oz, a tourist who is privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations of the tourist product may be ultimately disappointed, or, as MacCannell suggests, the backstage may also not “trick, shock, or anger them, and [tourists] do not express any feelings of having been made less pure by their discoveries” (ibid.: 105). MacCannell’s writings on tourism have consistently suggested that “modern humanity has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for authenticity, to see if we can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others” (ibid.: 57). Therefore, the authentic experience is obtainable only “out there,” somewhere other than “here.” The tourist as pilgrim.

Edward M. Bruner has dissected the experience of authenticity by tourists in a number of offerings—of particular importance to this discussion in “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism” (1994), “Tourism in the Balinese Borderzone” (2004), and “The Maasai and the Lion King: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Globalization in African Tourism” (2001). In his critique of postmodernism, Bruner explains his views on authenticity and tourists (or, more precisely, visitors to living museums such as Lincoln’s New Salem) and asks that we see beyond the binary arguments of authentic/inauthentic or original/copy (1994: 397). Bruner introduces four cultural dimensions of authenticity based on “verisimilitude, genuineness, originality, and authority” (ibid.: 401). He argues that along with these multiple, shaded meanings, the reasons behind 24a museum or cultural excursion must also be weighed: Are visitors there primarily to be educated? Are they “consuming nostalgia” (ibid.: 411)? Are they “buying the idea of progress” (ibid.)? Are they somehow commemorating traditional society and social values, sorting out the origins of a national ideology or fetishising a mythic past?

Bruner takes these constructivist notions further when he serves as a tour director in Bali for a group of knowledgeable, educated adults. Here Bruner finds himself crossing over and back through many discrete identities of professor, tour guide, tourist, insider, and authority figure as he leads his group to witness Balinese and Javanese cultural performance: dance, gamelan music, costumes, cuisine (2004). He exposes the “romantic characterizations” that tourists have when they are among Indonesian cultures (and I would argue Irish and other cultures as well); these characterizations, often used in advertisements and brochures, and a variety of other media, not only suppress the “true conditions” of life among the visited but usually also “depict a culture that never existed” (ibid.: 220). Bruner also introduces the term borderzones, which in effect are the liminal spaces of the visited rather than those of the visitor, which have been widely discussed in recent tourism literature (ibid.). These liminal borderzones are areas of engagement where the visited leave their normal lives to interact with tourists—in the case of the Balinese, to dance, sell souvenirs, expose the public areas of their culture. These are the spaces in which culture is produced for consumption by an “other”; the consumption may not be in the form of market exchange, with which the West would be most familiar; it may simply be that area of life where outsiders are “allowed” to move freely through.

Among Bruner’s most evocative discussions regarding his Balinese experiences is his comparison of First and Third World peoples: “in First World cities the Other is a social problem; in Third World places the Other is an object of desire” (ibid.: 222). Many Western visitors to Bali want to be close to this exotic Other in their liminal borderzone—they, too, occupy liminal space and 25are suspended in a place of new experiences, new faces, new feelings. Beyond the borderzone, the desire recedes, becomes a source of visual and cultural pollution or disgust, a symbol of backwardness rather than exoticism (ibid.). Bruner includes a familiar term—the suspension of belief—in his discussion but suggests that a tourist’s willingness to suspend belief is what makes a cultural performance both gratifying and believable for the viewer. In the end, he reminds us that tourism has not only helped shape Balinese culture (and others), but it has also been absorbed by it. Cultures that occupy the tourist zone can live their lives as tourist objects; in Bali, this has been true since the 1930s, when Bali was popularized by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s ethnographies.

Among the Maasai, Bruner investigated three different cultural exhibitions, all highly constructed for the tourist gaze (2001). One reflected the colonial relationships between the Maasai and the English; one was a modern dance performance directed toward urban, middle-class Maasai promoted by the national government; and one was based on the film Out of Africa and took place in a safari camp near a game reserve. Here he introduced the notion of the “questioning gaze” of the tourist, wherein the tourist may cast doubt on the authenticity of what is being presented. Even though tourists generally have a manufactured “Hollywood” version of a culture in mind, Bruner suggests that they are willing to question the presentation of a culture that does not meet with the preconceived notion that they carry with them. He found that tourists were generally more comfortable with cultural performances that did not attempt to disguise the Maasai as participants in a premodern world but rather as fully modern humans with strong traditional links to a tribal past. Bruner’s willingness to accord tourists with this degree of interpretive agency, to imbue them with active roles in their own explorations of the Other, is rare in tourism research (and may not be true in all cases of the touristic experience). The tourist as intellectual.

No discussion of tourist theory would be complete without mention of the influence of John Urry’s “tourist gaze” (1990). 26The tourist gaze relates to the visual consumption of places and peoples that are not familiar. It is a highly anticipated sensory function, one that allows tourists to look at scenery and people with fresh eyes, to observe with great interest, and to satisfy their curiosity about the Other. Yet, Urry contends, this anticipation of new visual stimuli is “socially organized and systematized” by many (called “experts”) in the tourism industry who “help to construct and develop our gaze as tourists” (2002: 1). We (tourists) measure the quality of our tourist gaze against what we keep in our everyday field of vision; it is the opposite of what we normally see—it is a new and unnecessary pleasure. The tourist gaze has evolved since the days of the Grand Tour and Thomas Cooke—the scenic is more than a pleasurable view; it is a signposted area that defines the place as worthy of the tourist gaze. The gaze may include the less pleasurable as well; red-light districts, Killing Fields, slums, and assassination points may be part of the postmodern tourist gaze. No matter what the subject, it is out of the ordinary, and it takes on a special significance to those who view it. Urry suggests that “different countries, or different places within a country, come to specialize in providing particular kinds of objects to be gazed upon” (ibid.: 45). In Ireland, each province, region, county, and city has become associated with a particular “brand” of gaze-ability, and many tourists are attracted to specific areas because of the unique branding that is their advertised foci (such as Dublin’s cityscapes, pubs, and cosmopolitan atmosphere). The tourist as voyeur.

DISCUSSION

The tourist as capitalist predator, parasite, pilgrim, intellectual, and voyeur—there are inherent problems with each of these theoretical characterizations, and some have more than others. I begin where I ended, with Urry’s tourist gaze. The main difficulty with the tourist gaze is that Urry reduces the participation of tourists to a single sensory involvement. Tourists experience the places and peoples they visit in much more complex and profound ways; at the very least, they taste the food, smell the 27air, hear the voices, they touch the fabric of the culture in ways that may defy description. They engage with one another and often with the visited culture in ways they may never have done before—they may become more or less inhibited, they may fall in love (or out of love), they may be frozen with fear by the mere thought of engaging with the Other. Their time in this out-of-the-ordinary place filled with strangers may be a life-changing experience—it may not, but it could and has happened. Urry’s gaze is oversimplified and is closely aligned with the negative stereotype of tourists as passive participants hopelessly mired in their own cultural milieu. Tourists are more than voyeurs when they travel, and their memories of peoples and places are more than snapshots of a moment in time.

Bruner gives the greatest latitude to his tourists—they are individuals with the full range of human emotions, quirks, and capabilities. Bruner’s tourists have agency and intelligence (and this may be why “his” tourists seem so alien; everyone else’s tourists have a litany of repulsive traits that we have all come to despise!). As a constructivist, he understands culture as a product of its own micro-evolutions—that culture(s) moves, bends, adapts, and shifts by necessity and sometimes by compulsion. He awards tourist culture this same opportunity. In Bruner’s tourist world, both tourists and hosts understand the difference between real life and performance, although for the performance to be enjoyed, it is the tourist’s responsibility to “let go,” to suspend belief, to absorb what is presented, and perhaps to believe. This is the authentic experience—that moment of intense engagement with the performance, whether the performance is a Balinese dance or a guided tour through a Neolithic passage tomb. Not all host-guest relationships are performance-based though, and not all tourists seek out an authentic experience—sometimes they just lie on a beach, have as little to do as possible with the locals, and return home with a sunburn and a new Speedo. Tourists also interpret their experiences differently. For example, on a fine spring day at Stonehenge in 2002, I witnessed a variety of tourists’ reactions to the site. A few visitors were overcome with emotion and literally wept as they walked around the stones; 28some were so busy snapping photos of the stones, their friends and families in front of the stones, and themselves with friends and family in front of the stones that the site simply became a colorful backdrop; others were unimpressed with the stones, bored and disinterested—for them, the site was simply part of the orthodoxy of musts; they had been, seen, gotten the T-shirt, fridge magnet, and the ticket stub. This multiplicity of reactions and interpretations of experience is the wild card in all tourism development.

Perhaps the most challenging to critique is MacCannell—if only because of his presence as the father of modern anthropological studies of tourism. The authentic experience, the pursuit of authenticity, is understood as the primary goal of the middle-class tourist. MacCannell’s neo-Marxist view of tourism essentializes the activity as one of economic and power relationships, with the tourist object being reduced to what is available in a plethora of manufactured presentations and performances. His front- and backstages (the façade and the real world) have been analyzed by any number of scholars, and these analyses are not revisited here. Suffice it to say that the frontstages are sanitized spaces, created for the market, while the backstages are grubby, real-life storerooms full of personal and cultural secrets—these are authentic. According to MacCannell, it is the endless search for these areas of authenticity that drives the tourist class forward and sustains them while they are away from home. Convincing though MacCannell’s arguments can be, again there is no room for the tourist who does not seek the authentic. In The Tourist, MacCannell challenges Daniel Boorstin’s contention that “tourists want superficial, contrived experiences” (1999: 104), suggesting that in his studies, literally none of his tourists would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Tourism: A Consideration of the Literature
• Chapter 2: Heritage Tourism and Discourse in Ireland
• Chapter 3: Heritage and Archaeology in Ireland
• Chapter 4: Representing Ireland’s Heritage
• Chapter 5: Participants in Irish Tourism
• Chapter 6: Tourists in Ireland
• Chapter 7: The Coach Fellas
• Chapter 8: Components of Irish Coach Tourism
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Epilogue/Postscript
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index