From Pilgrimage to Package Tour

Travel and Tourism in the Third World

David L. Gladstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415950633
• eBook ISBN: 9781136078743
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

When people in First World countries think of tourists in the vast expanses of the Third World today, they typically think of pampered westerners, filling up the luxury hotels and imposing their Orientalist gazes on the teeming masses. As David Gladstone shows us in this fascinating and provocative book, such preconceptions are wrong. Coupling incisive and colorful ethnographic accounts of tourism in India and Mexico with sharp analysis, Gladstone demonstrates the amazing complexity of this industry, which now comprises close to ten percent of the world economy. As he also shows, the vast majority of tourists in the Third World are indigenous people with few resources-often making pilgrimages to religious shrines.
From Pilgrimage to Package Tour is a fresh and entirely original account that stands tourism studies on its head and proves that this industry is far more complicated than it initially appears.

CHAPTER 1

An Overview of Tourism in the 2000s

The value of goods and services consumed by tourists and tourism-related Thrms exceeds U.S.$1.2 trillion annually and accounts for nearly four percent of gross world product (GWP), making travel and tourism one of the largest industries in the world in terms of value-added (World Travel and Tourism Council 1999, 2002). It is also among the world's largest export industries: In 2001, international travelers spent more than U.S.$465 billion on lodging, food and beverages, entertainment, transportation, and souvenirs—an amount exceeding total world exports of food (U.S.$437 billion), raw materials (U.S.$110 billion), iron and steel (U.S.$130 billion) and nearly equal to world exports of automobiles (U.S.$565 billion), fossil fuels (U.S.$616 billion), and chemicals (U.S.$595 billion) (World Trade Organization 2002; World Tourism Organization 2002a). In addition, the travel and tourism industry is a major source of employment worldwide; 71.9 million people work in tourism-related Thrms and another 126.7 million people are employed indirectly by firms supplying the travel and tourism industry with good, services, capital equipment, and infrastructure (World Travel and Tourism Council 2002).

Fueled by declining transport costs and globalization of both business and cultural activities, tourism has grown rapidly, relative to other industries. Between 1950 and 1996, international tourist arrivals and expenditures registered 7 and 12 percent average annual growth, respectively (World Tourism Organization 1997). International arrivals grew even faster during the 1990s, from 457.3 million in 1990 to 687.3 million in 2000, an average annual increase of over 7 percent (World Tourism Organization 2002a). When domestic tourists—who outnumber international tourists ten to one in the high-income countries and one thousand to one in many of the low-income countries—are taken into consideration, it is clear that tourism is an immense global phenomenon, easily exceeding 10 billion tourist arrivals per year (table 1.1).

The economic and demographic magnitude of tourism is important and its effects on the places where it occurs are equally significant. Cities, coastlines, and entire regions have been altered beyond recognition by the growth of the leisure industry. Miami Beach, Atlantic City, and Las Vegas, perhaps America's quintessential resort cities, owe their very existence to the tourism phenomenon (Gladstone 1998). Likewise, the Spanish Costas, Greek isles, many Caribbean and South Pacific microstates, Australia's Gold Coast, Brazil's Nordeste, Mexico's two coastlines, and scores of other places on every continent have become resort landscapes of hotels, marinas, time-share developments, and retail strips catering almost exclusively to tourists (figure 1.1). Tourism is also one of the major industries fueling urban growth in the 2000s. Convention centers, hotels, festival marketplaces, sports stadiums, historic preservation, and other developments are now part of many cities' urban revitalization efforts (Judd and Fainstein 1999).

Tourism development is not confined to the First World and the glitzy Third World resorts that Bob Shacochis (1989) refers to collectively as “Gringolandia.” The wealthy countries of Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region account for the largest share of world tourism expenditures but they do not account for the largest share of tourists, especially if we adopt the World Tourism

Table 1.1
Arrival of Overnight Visitors from Abroad, 1950–2000

Year	Total (thousands)	Index 1950 = 100	Receipts (U.S. $ millions)	Index 1950 = 100
1950	25,282	100	2,100	100
1960	69,320	274	6,867	327
1965	112,863	446	11,604	553
1970	165,787	656	17,900	852
1975	222,290	879	40,702	1,938
1980	285,328	1,129	105,313	5,015
1985	326,697	1,292	117,879	5,613
1990	457,647	1,810	268,310	12,777
1995	563,605	2,229	401,475	19,118
2000	687,300	2,719	473,400	22,543

Source: World Tourism Organization (1998a; 2005a; 2005b).

Figure 1.1 Cancún, Mexico

Organization (WTO) definition of a domestic tourist as “any person residing in a country who travels to a place within this same country” (World Tourism Organization 2002b). In India alone, pilgrimage centers such as Vrindavan, Haridwar, and Pushkar attract millions of visitors annually, and the 2001 Kumbha Mela festival held at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and legendary Saraswati Rivers in the city of Allahabad—the largest gathering of human beings in history—drew upward of 60 million visitors. In Mexico, the world's eighth most popular international tourist destination, domestic tourists make over 94 million business or leisure journeys each year, nearly five times the number of international arrivals reported in 2001 (Secretaría de Turismo 1996; World Tourism Organization 2002c). If we classify such travelers as tourists, the effects of tourism are as pronounced in the Third World as they are in the First, perhaps even more so.

Who Is a Tourist?

The United Nations-affiliated WTO defines an international tourist as “any person who travels to a country other than that in which s/he has his/her usual residence but outside his/her usual environment for a period not exceeding twelve months and whose main purpose of visit is other than the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the country visited” (World Tourism Organization 1998, 263). The WTO's definition is easily expanded to include domestic tourists, defined as any resident of a country traveling to a place within the same country for more than twenty-four hours and less than one year and within which they do not receive work-related remuneration (World Tourism Organization 2002a). As geographer and tourism researcher Douglas Pearce (1995) points out, the difference between domestic and international tourism is not one of distances traveled; Europeans making international journeys rarely travel further than the average domestic journey made by Americans on their vacations (1,335 kilometers).

The WTO also distinguishes between excursionists (day-trippers) and overnight tourists, defining an international same-day visitor as “a visitor who does not spend the night in a collective or private accommodation in the country visited” (World Tourism Organization 1998b, 263). International excursionists include cruise ship passengers and ship employees who return to the ship each night to sleep on board as well as overland travelers visiting a country for fewer than twenty-four hours. As with the WTO's definition of an international tourist, its definition of an excursionist is readily adapted to domestic tourism; domestic excursionists are residents of a country visiting a place other than their own for less than twenty-four hours and for reasons unrelated to employment in that place. Although most tourism statistics exclude same-day visitors, excursionists represent an important market for many international and domestic travel destinations. For instance, most tourists visiting Atlantic City and Manhattan are day-trippers, and a large percentage of Mexico's international tourist traffic takes the form of cross-border, day-long journeys (Port Authority 1994; Secretaría de Turismo 1996). There are approximately three times as many international excursionists as international tourists worldwide but in countries as otherwise diverse as Switzerland, Kuwait, and Slovenia, excursionists outnumber overnight tourists more than ten to one.

Tourist Typologies

Although travel and tourism involves very large flows of people both within and between countries, not all tourists share the same motivations for travel. The stereotype of the camera-toting American, European, or Japanese tourist in Bermuda shorts and a loud shirt is undoubtedly accurate with respect to a great many pleasure travelers from the wealthy countries, but a large number of people also travel on business or to visit family and friends. Even so, the distinction between business and leisure travelers is not hard and fast: Business travelers often combine a business trip with one or more days of pleasure travel, and both business and pleasure travelers stay with family and friends at their destinations. Confounding attempts to typologize tourists are the scores of pilgrims and other religious travelers who do not travel for business reasons and have little in common with most Western holidaymakers.

Or so it may seem. Anthropologists have long held that pleasure travel serves the same functions in industrial societies that pilgrimage serves in more traditional cultures (Graburn 1989; Turner 1973; Turner and Turner 1978). Leisure travel, like pilgrimage, is often liminal (it allows us to relinquish our ordinary social roles and expectations), it is socially and culturally sanctioned, and it often serves as a marker of social status. As anthropologist Nelson Graburn (1989, 28) notes, “For traditional societies the rewards of pilgrimages were accumulated grace and moral leadership in the home community [but] the rewards of modern tourism are phrased in terms of values we now hold up for worship: mental and physical health, social status, and diverse, exotic experiences.”

Notwithstanding the parallels anthropologists have drawn between religious pilgrims and leisure tourists, most tourist typologies apply only to tourists from high-income countries and neglect the majority of travelers in the Third World. For example, Erik Cohen, a sociologist who has written extensively on tourism, classifies a tourist's experience on the basis of how travel relates to that person's “life-center,” or orientation toward the values of Western industrial society. For most people in the First World, travel is recreational and usually undertaken for purposes of enjoyment or pleasure. The weekend trip to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, a week spent cruising around the Caribbean, and other experiences typical of Western tourists are, for Cohen, much akin to watching television or going to the theater. Such activities are consciously intended to “re-create” a person fully committed to the values of his or her own society, or life-center; thus, “recreational tourism is a movement away from the center, which serves eventually to reinforce the adherence to the center” (Cohen 1979, 185). A New York City investment banker returning from a two-week vacation in the Caribbean may very well exclaim that she feels like a new person, ready to rededicate herself to her career and her family with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose.

For smaller numbers of Western tourists alienated from the norms and values of their own societies, travel “becomes purely diversionary—a mere escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of routine, everyday existence, into the for-getfulness of a vacation, which may heal the body and soothe the spirit, but does not ‘recreate’—i.e., it does not re-establish adherence to a meaningful centre, but only makes alienation endurable” (Cohen 1979, 185–186). Diversionary tourists travel not to re-center their lives in a taken-for-granted and existentially acceptable social and cultural reality but rather out of a sense of ennui and boredom.

An even smaller number of travelers, whom Cohen divides into experiential, experimental, and existential categories, differ markedly from mainstream leisure travelers and diversionary tourists. Experiential tourists are alienated from the norms of Western industrial society but look for meaning in the lives of others, seeking out what they take to be authentic places in cultures other than their own. Experimental tourists are similar, but

While the traveler in the “experiential” mode derives enjoyment and reassurance from the fact that others live authentically, while he [sic] remains “disinherited” and content merely to observe the life of others, the traveler in the experimental mode engages in that authentic life, but refuses to commit himself to it; rather, he samples and compares the different alternatives, hoping eventually to discover one which will suit his particular needs and desires. (Cohen 1979, 189)

Cohen, who began writing about tourism in the 1970s during the heyday of the “hippie trail” from London to Kathmandu, points to drifter tourists, or young budget travelers from the West, as the largest contingent of experimental travelers.

Finally, existential tourists are people “fully committed to an ‘elective’ spiritual center, one external to the mainstream of [their] native society and culture” (Cohen 1979, 190). Examples of existential tourists are “the person who encounters in his visit to an Israeli kibbutz a full realization of his quest for human communion; the seeker who achieved enlightenment in an Indian asrama; the traveller who finds in the life of a remote Pacific atoll the fulfilment o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 An Overview of Tourism in the 2000s
• 2 Conceptualizing Travel and Tourism in Third World Countries
• 3 The International Formal Sector: Megaresorts and National Tourism Planning in Mexico
• 4 The International Informal Sector: Drifter Tourists in India and Mexico
• 5 The Domestic Formal Sector: New Holidays for the New Middle Classes
• 6 The Domestic Informal Sector: Migrants, Pilgrims, and Other Poor Travelers
• 7 An Alternative to the Alternative? Informality and Sustainable Tourism in the Third World
• Notes
• List of Acronyms
• References
• Index