Tourism and Violence

Hazel Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780815378037
• eBook ISBN: 9781317009603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Exploring the connection between tourism and violence, this book draws on a range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, and tourism studies. Ideas and concepts of violence have long been explored in the social sciences literature but in relation to tourism studies specifically the concept has rarely been problematised. Drawing on a range of case studies this book demonstrates the relationship between tourism and violence both in its overt physical form and in the social structures and symbolic landscapes that underpin touristic activity. Tourism and Violence offers a timely intervention in this field by bringing together, for the first time, work by scholars who, in their different ways, are engaging with the concept of violence within touristic settings and practices. This unique book paves the way for future research that will probe further the intersections between violence and tourism.

1 Introduction

Hazel Andrews

DOI: 10.4324/9781315550763-1

In a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled ‘Itchy Feet’ (1997) the broadcaster and travel writer Rory MacLean was considering the place of postcards in our travels. Drawing on a range of voices MacLean invited listeners to hear spoken the words that people write on their postcards. Most of these were drawn from the post Second World War tourism boom and contained the sort of information we might expect to find on a communication about a holiday – the weather, the accommodation, activities etc. – on the back of a picturesque image of the vacation location. However, towards the end of the programme a very different kind of image is presented with the following details of a postcard sent to Le Havre, France in 1906 read out:

‘Canton – Torturing Prisoners’ – several Chinese males at full stretch with legs dangling just above the ground. This was a slow method of strangulation. The message is very simple, it says ‘A thousand best wishes’.

This is both a disturbing image and message that has haunted and puzzled me since I first heard it. Some years later I read Leon F. Litwack’s (2004) From ‘Hellhounds’ which describes and explores the brutality of racist murders in the southern United States between 1882 and 1968. During this period approximately 4,742 black people died at the hands of lynch mobs. The victims were frequently put to a long, slow agonising death – by hanging or burning – on the basis of false allegations of crime and often by lynch mobs. The abuse did not end with death as this was often followed by ‘the dismemberment and distribution of severed bodily parts as favors and souvenirs to participants and the crowd’ (2004: 125). As if the use of the word ‘souvenirs’ is not enough to set in motion the idea of a touristic edge to the appalling events Litwack discusses he further notes that these atrocities were often associated with a ‘carnival-like atmosphere’ (2004: 124) in which on-lookers frequently recorded the activities by way of photography. In addition these photos found their way to becoming postcards and trade cards used to ‘commemorate the event’ (ibid.). This circulation and mobility of human suffering was also not restricted to the image but, as Litwack (2004: 125) notes, people travelled to witness the executions, responding to their prior advertisement in newspapers and taking advantage of the

special ‘excursion’ trains [which] transported spectators to the scene, [and] employers sometimes released their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children for the event, and entire families attended, the children hoisted on their parents’ shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying festivities.

The horror of these two examples – from Canton and the United States – demonstrate how closely tourism and violence are intertwined and for how long the activity so often associated with pleasure and leisure has been enmeshed with the violently macabre.

Of course we can go much further back in history to find examples of the connection between travel and violence. For instance the Colosseum in Rome was a focal point to which people journeyed to witness the violent and bloody conflicts of gladiatorial combats; but yet the coupling of violence and tourism is rarely starkly stated. By which I mean the violent underpinnings and violence of tourism are infrequently expressed with the use of the words violent or violence. There are of course exceptions, for example the works of Kristin Lozanski (2007); Darlene McNaughton (2006) and Erika Robb (2009). All three prove instructive in understanding how violence and tourism are interwoven. For example, by examining the relations between independent western female travellers and local Indian men as they emerge in the sexual harassment of the former by the latter and the often violent retaliation – both physical and verbal – Lozanski argues that this particular type of touristic encounter allows for the deconstruction of the gendered and racialised interaction which demonstrates ‘the racist, misogynist and colonial discourses within which independent travel is embedded’ (2007: 296). McNaughton’s work considers a different type of interaction hewn under the development of tourism. Writing again in the context of India she points to the violence that many of the migrant workers responsible for the facilitation of tourism services in the area are subject to from the local indigenous and wealthier population who consider the seasonal workers as outsiders: ‘they are often heavily marginalized … while they act as hosts to international tourists, many local residents see them not as guests or as hosts but as uninvited interlopers’ (2006: 659). Robb’s work in Brazil considers ‘dark tourism’, its basis in historical violence and how it is manifest also in ‘violence that is current and live’ (2009: 57). She notes (ibid.)

Even as I write this, a group of tourists are riding motorcycles up through the narrow alleys and paths beneath my window, thrilled at the sight of Uzi submachine guns cradled in the arms of the teenage drug traffickers. Although organized tour companies in the favela maintain that the tours are about social justice and claim to be raising tourists’ awareness of poverty, racism, and class discrimination, it is hard to determine whether tourists truly engage with these goals or whether they are attracted by the titillating potential for danger, personal injury, or even death.

These three examples show the rich seam the context of tourism is to mine for understanding violence in contemporary times; as McNaughton attests ‘there is violence in tourism as a modern expression of capitalism, with its associated flows of people and capital’ (2006: 660). However, mostly the connection is not made explicit finding a home in the euphemism of dark tourism or in the guise of crime and of course acts of terrorism. As such the discussions of violence in connection with tourism have mainly centred around the following themes: 1. Political stability and the often associated terrorism (e.g.: Sonmez 1998, Bhattarai et al. 2005); 2. Ideas of safety and security (e.g.: George 2003); and 3. Links with crime (e.g.: Brunt et al. 2000). There has been considerable focus on ‘dark tourism’ relating to those sites premised on acts of violence in connection with war, death and suffering (e.g. Lennon and Foley 2000, Stone and Sharpley 2008, Strange and Kempa 2003). It is not the intention to dismiss these important areas of enquiry. Indeed they make their presence known in this collection (see, for example, Chapter 6 and Chapter 10) but rather to make more explicit the place of violence within tourism and in so doing not to confine it to areas of certain touristic products, practices and occurrences but to bring to the fore the problem of the violence of the everyday which seeps into all areas of life – including that of the pleasure seeker – and often goes unnoticed. The not noticing serves to enforce and make violent, usually with impunity, social relations that go far beyond the reach of that which is normally described as taking place within the context of tourism.

I have already referred to the work of Lozanski, Robb, and McNaughton to illustrate the place of violence in tourism but would like to further the point by considering a few more examples. An obvious area of consideration is that of the connection between tourism and war, and Adam Weaver (2011) reminds us that some of the foundations that allow modern tourism practices are rooted in the modus operandi of war. Indeed ‘technologies that have had a profound impact upon the conduct of war have, equally importantly, contributed to the speed and accessibility of civilian air transport’ (2011: 677). By way of example Weaver cites the Boeing 747, once a military transporter, now a commercial airliner, and further contends that some pleasure-based activities are made safe as a result of military technologies. Vicuña Gonzalez (2013) argues that the national security interests of the United States have been well served by tourism and militarisation in the Philippines and Hawai’i. They have worked together to inform for example tourist itineraries which help to further the American strategic and economic interests in the Pacific. As noted earlier where violence has been discussed in the study of tourism it is often connected with human conflict and political instability. We might also note that this often comes to the fore in discussions of terrorism. An insightful paper by Raoul Bianchi draws attention to the structural power relations that cause violence to be done to those at tourism destinations in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. It is worth quoting an example at length (2006: 71):

Following the attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa killing 17 Kenyans and three Israelis, and the simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner on 28th November, 2002, the British government warned against all non-essential travel to Kenya. Subsequently, on 15th May, 2003, British Airways was urged to suspend all flights to the country. These were only re-instated on 4th September, 2003, over two months after the UK Foreign Office had lifted the advice against all non-essential travel (Tourism Concern, 2003). According to Kenya’s Tourism Minister, the Kenyan tourism industry lost Sh.1bn within days of the travel warnings being issued and BA’s suspension of flights, not to mention the loss of wages incurred by the local workforce due to the inability of hotels to pay their staffs’ wages (Daily Nation, 21st May, 2003). The US and UK governments made the lifting of terror related travel warnings subject to the Kenyan government implementing numerous anti-terror and security measures, further increasing the financial burden on a country already suffering considerable financial losses as a result of the travel bans (eTurboNews, 20th June, 2003). Not only did ordinary Kenyan citizens suffer as a result of the collapse of their tourism industry, but it is they, rather than foreigners or tourists, who have borne the brunt of the terrorist bombings, not to mention politically motivated violence in recent years.

The effect that ‘large-scale’ acts of violence have on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people and their interpersonal relations is also evident in Bowman’s (1989) discussion of sexual relations between Palestinian men and foreign women tourists in Jerusalem. Writing before the 1987 intifada Bowman contends that encountering feelings of subordination in dealings with more economically and socially ‘superior’ tourists some market vendors had developed ‘an aggressive sexuality focussed on the women of the tourist population … [and their] use of sexuality [was] a means of expressing and challenging economic and political inequities’ (1989: 77). According to Bowman through the ‘conquering’ of the western female tourists the merchants can express their power in the face of the ‘structural inequalities built into the relation of tourist and tourist merchant by economic inequality and the hostility of the Israeli-run tourist industry’ (1989: 87).

The last example I want to draw attention to is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s work on the global trafficking of human organs. Scheper-Hughes has written extensively on this subject. Cross-border medical based tourism is now a well-established ‘niche’ in the practice of tourism where people move across national boundaries to undertake plastic surgery, fertility treatment (for examples see Connell 2006, De Arellano 2007, Jones and Keith 2006) and in some cases routine operations (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1770348.st). Scheper-Hughes (2011) draws our attention to the illegally organised transplant tourism in which the people and body parts are trafficked from the poorer echelons of global society to and for those with greater economic capital. The outcome of such activities often result in poor outcomes for both the donor and the recipient, the former encouraged to sell a body part on the promise of great financial reward and the latter travelling in the hope of achieving a prolonged and better quality of life. Such suffering that Scheper-Hughes describes is all neatly wrapped in the language of tourism by those who benefit the most from such exploitation: the traffickers or brokers and surgeons. Indeed the ‘“transplant tour” packages [include]: travel to an undisclosed foreign and exotic setting; five-star hotel accommodation’ (2011: 56). By examining this aspect of tourism the violence that is uncovered can be used to make comment on the social world we inhabit, as Scheper-Hughes contends: ‘transplant tourism casts light on the dark underbelly of neoliberal globalization, on the rapacious demands it creates and the predatory claims it makes on the bodies of the “bio-disposable”’ (2011: 85).

The foregoing discussion has highlighted the commingling of violence with tourism showing the deep and long standing connections between the two. Violence is manifest in many aspects of touristic practices and encounters which includes: violence between individuals, violence as an attraction, the interconnections of violence and tourism with structural inequalities which can impact not only on the political economy of whole destinations but also personal relations and health or the practicalities of touristic activity in the form of technological developments. Having established the intimacy of violence and tourism I now wish to explore briefly how we can understand more closely what violence in fact is.

It is not my intention to explore the category of violence in great detail as this has been well rehearsed elsewhere (see for example Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, Das et al. 2000, Arendt 1970) and each chapter in this book in its own way defines what violence is. What is important to emphasise is that violence is manifest in many different forms and that these are not necessarily physical. Das et al. (2000) have highlighted the various levels at which violence is produced and ‘consumed’, relating it to how the inner world experience of the individual is connected to sets of social power relations often involving global flows of images, capital and people. There is also a recognition that there is a need to examine violence ‘as a cultural expression or as a performance’ (Whitehead 2004:1). As such violence as an object of study cannot be understood as occurring in only large scale events and at times of conflict but also forms part of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ social world (Bourdieu 1991, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Rather than a physical demonstration of violence the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ aspects of violence often appear in a symbolic form. Such expressions of violence occur at all levels of the social world. As Bourdieu (1991) outlined in his discussion of various forms of symbolic domination in which fields of power relations between social actors are established, the acts and practices of everyday life are underwritten by ‘silent and insidious’ (1991: 51) acts of violence.

As already noted the field of tourism provides a fertile ground for furthering understandings of violence both in its physical and symbolic senses because due to its very nature it involves the global flows that Das et al. (2000) refer to, and it is also a major item in western consumer consumption practices. Further, to reiterate the violence of tourism as ‘violence’ (that is stated as violence) has not been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Violence of Non Places
• 3 Desire for Danger, Aversion to Harm: Violence in Travel to ‘Other’ Places
• 4 The Enchantment of Violence: Tales from the Balearics
• 5 Dealing with the Myths: Injurious Speech and Negative Interpellation in the Construction of Tourism Places
• 6 Re-inventing Battlefield Tourism ‘In Times of Peace’: Connecting Tourism and the Remembrance of Violence
• 7 Tourism, Sight Prevention, and Cultural Shutdown: Symbolic Violence in Fragmented Landscapes
• 8 A Wail of Horror: Empathic ‘Atrocity’ Tourism in Palestine
• 9 Violence, Tourism, Crime and the Subjective: Opening New Lines of Research
• 10 New Approaches in the Research on Terrorist Attacks Affecting Tourism Demand
• 11 ‘What Makes Violence in Backpacker Tourism Possible?’ A Critical Realist Study of Tourism and the Governance of Security
• 12 Quest for Life: From Pilgrimage to Medical Tourism to Transplant Trafficking
• 13 Afterword: The Experience of ‘Matter Out of Place’
• Index