Affective Tourism

Dark routes in conflict

Dorina Maria Buda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138083905
• eBook ISBN: 9781317587156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book brings together, explores and expands socio-spatial affect, emotion and psychoanalytic drives in tourism for the first time. Affect is to be found in visceral intensities and resonances that circulate around and shape encounters between and amongst tourists, local tourism representatives and places. When affect manifests, it can 'take shapes' in the form of emotions such as fun, joy, fear, anger and the like. When it remains a visceral force of latent bodily responses, affect overlaps with drives as expounded in psychoanalysis. The aim of the title, therefore, is to explore how and in what ways affects, emotions and drives are felt and performed in tourism encounters in places of socio-political turmoil such as Jordan, Palestine/Israel, with a detour to Iraq.

Affective Tourism is highly innovative as it offers a new way of theorising tourism encounters bringing together, critically examining and expanding three areas of scholarship: affective and emotional geographies, psychoanalytic geographies and dark tourism. It has relevance for tourism industries in places in the proximity of ongoing conflicts as it provides in-depth analyses of the interconnections between tourism, danger and conflict. Such understandings can lead to more socio-culturally and politically-sustainable approaches to planning, development and management of tourism.

This ground breaking book will be of valuable reading for students and researchers from a number of fields such as tourism studies, geography, anthropology, sociology and Middle Eastern studies.

I Packing and setting forth

1 Packing light, feeling down

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742786-1

This book introduces and critically examines affective tourism – the ways in which affects, emotions and feelings are accessed, felt, experienced and performed in encounters between touring bodies and places. Theories of affect, emotion, psychoanalysis and tourism are brought together to explore dark tourism routes in places of socio-political turmoil such as Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. The intention is to interject two novel concepts in tourism studies: socio-spatial affect and psychoanalytic drives. Affect is to be found in visceral intensities that circulate around and shape encounters between tourists, local tourism representatives and places. Affect can manifest in resonances of emotions such as fun, joy, fear, anger and the like. When it remains a visceral force of latent bodily responses, affect overlaps with drives as they are expounded in psychoanalysis.

Engaging in affective tourism provides opportunities for psychoanalytic drives, especially the death drive, to be accessed in places of ongoing socio-political turmoil. The psychoanalytical concept of the death drive refers to a constant force, a nuance of affect, at the junction between life and death, which is not understood in a biological sense of physical demise of the body, nor in opposition to life. Affective encounters in conflict and danger-zones, the scope of this book, can be more critically explored and understood through the lens of the death drive. As an in-depth ethnographic account, this book traces experiences of tourists and local tourism industry representatives in Jordan and Palestine/Israel. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and written and photographic diaries, this book offers a multi- and interdisciplinary investigation of affect, emotion and the death drive in the spatial and socio-cultural context of tourism.

With this region of Jordan and Palestine/Israel in focus, and to illustrate the potential of affective tourism, I address the following questions: how are places in (the proximity of) conflict affectively experienced and performed in tourism? What emotions and senses circulate amongst and between tourists and local tourism industry representatives in such places? How do politics of affect and emotion shape tourism encounters in places of conflict?

To address these questions, I have three objectives. First, I critically examine affective and emotional geographies – that which is sensed, felt and performed in places of ongoing socio-political conflict. Feeling fear, shock, anger and engaging haptically with these places provide a disruption of some dominant dichotomies in tourism studies such as peace/war, safety/danger, fun/fear and life/death. Second, I argue that by travelling to such dangerous places, some tourists reflect on, negotiate and purge their own family memories and embedded traumas, a process explained using the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. Third, I unravel connections between tourism, danger and ongoing socio-political turmoil so as to exemplify tourists’ affective performances in conflict places. Theorisations of tourism in such places of ongoing socio-political turmoil and conflict –danger-zone tourism – are situated within the sub-field of dark tourism.

This book advances the call for an affective and emotional turn in tourism studies as it explores dark-tourism performances in dangerous places. I define this type of tourism as danger-zone tourism and employ Adams's explanation of the term being ‘tourism to tumultuous locations, places that are not necessarily the sites of declared wars but are nevertheless sites of on-going political instability, sites where there is at least an imagined potential of violent eruptions’ (Adams, 2001, p. 268, emphasis in original). Tourism in areas of danger and conflict has received scant attention. This book goes some way towards filling this gap. My intention is not only to show that danger-zone tourism exists as practice, but also to discuss some danger-zone tourists’ embodied, emotional, affective and sensuous experiences in areas of ongoing conflict.

I draw on works in geography,¹ cultural studies,² and sociology³ to explore affects, emotions, feelings and senses generated by and in a ‘danger-zone’. Such an examination offers new ways of understanding affective and emotional performances in danger-zone tourism. I employ Sigmund Freud's (trans. 1938, trans. 1984) and Jacques Lacan's (trans. 1977a, trans. 1977b) psychoanalytic theories of the death drive to show how danger-zone subjectivities disrupt some prevailing binaries in tourism studies such as safety/danger, peace/war, fun/fear and even life/death.

Throughout this book, the phrase ‘areas (in the proximity) of an ongoing conflict’ will be used so as to express the difference between Jordan, which is in the proximity of the conflict, and Palestine/Israel, which is at the heart of the conflict. Using this strategy, I do not intend to set up a binary – in/near the conflict – but to point out that what is considered to be ‘in’ and what is considered to be ‘near’ the conflict is never clearly separate. On the one hand, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, which I wish to acknowledge by treating Jordan in the proximity of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and not directly involved in the conflict. On the other hand, Jordan has a considerable population of Palestinian descent; thus the conflict does not merely happen in the neighbouring area, but has emotional and political implications for most Jordanians. This book is a story of some tourists, local tourism industry representatives, and myself in danger-zones of conflict. Having lived for approximately six months in Jordan and Palestine/Israel in 2009 and 2010, I was exposed to some tourists’ experiences of these places, but also to daily life in the proximity of conflict, to some locals’ daily habits, joys, and struggles.

A Romanian woman abroad

I have moved around a lot in my life, and my body hates it. It loves the rituals of everyday life, and hates the thought of disruption. . . . This is not a tale of woe, nor even very unusual, but the experience does provide me with ample evidence of a strange little strain of shame: the body's feeling of being out-of-place in the everyday. It is a shame born of the body's desire to fit in, just as it knows that it cannot. ‘You’re not from here’: the slip of tongue, the flash of ignorance faced with an entirely different arrangement of the everyday. It is no big deal, compared to the experiences of others violently uprooted. It is just a little shaming from within fed by the desire to be unnoticed, to be at home in the everyday of someone else's culture.

(Probyn, 2004a, p. 328)

I empathise with Elspeth Probyn's emotions. I have also moved around a lot in my life. Over the past twelve years, I have lived in eight countries. I have a bittersweet feeling being a foreigner in somebody else's country. I love it and I hate it. I love the ‘new-ness’ that each country brings into my everyday life, but I hate most of the emotions and feelings that come with every new environment. Like Probyn I feel shame, but also fear, and at times frustration. Probyn's shame refers to her body originating from the colonial centre, hence she feels shame as she represents the colonial power even when she is against it. For Probyn, shame is a way of navigating everyday life in a complex postcolonial country.

My shame has nothing much in connection to the post/colonial. Romania, my country of origin, has never been a colonising country, and it was also not colonised in the way Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, or parts in the Middle East were and some still are colonised. Romania is a country that bears the signs of invasions from the Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and two world wars. The country was a satellite of the Soviet Union, but never part of it.

Here I want to introduce and locate myself and answer the question I ask myself and I am frequently asked by others: what was I, a Romanian woman, doing in the ‘Middle East’ while studying in Aotearoa New Zealand? Unravelling some of my emotions and thoughts does not always prove to be easy. ‘How did you end up in New Zealand? Why did you choose New Zealand?’ In a way New Zealand chose me. I echo here similar feelings shared by Frohlick (2013), that, however trite it may seem, sometimes field sites do choose us.

I knew I did not want to research anything related to my home country Romania and this particular point generates my feeling of shame. I am ashamed because of my decision not to research a topic related to Romania, thus I feel I am not ‘a good Romanian’. Perhaps, I should have turned my attention to topics connected to social justice that could have societal relevance for Romania. But I did not want to, and this unwillingness brings me shame. I feel intense emotions in relation to anything that has happened in Romania after the 1989 revolution when the Communist Party was overthrown. I feel too passionately and strongly about my country and feared I would not be able to manage this passion and these emotions. This is partly why I opted not to research a Romanian social and cultural aspect.

Why do I feel shame in connection to this? I understand shame, as Probyn describes it in the introductory quote, to be ‘the body's feeling of being out-of-place in the everyday’. I felt out-of-place in and because of the four locations connected to this book – New Zealand, Jordan and Palestine/Israel, and Romania. The shame that I felt in New Zealand was akin to the shame that reconceptualises the everyday. Having lived, worked and studied in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand from 2008 to 2012 when this book project started, I felt shame because of my own disinterest and ignorance at some of the aspects that represent a ‘typical’ New Zealand ‘everyday’.

In the Netherlands, where I currently reside, I am still ashamed because of my accent. In Probyn's case, it is ‘the slip of the tongue’ that betrays her being from somewhere else. In the United States, where I lived for 18 months prior to relocating to New Zealand, native English-speaking friends and colleagues would tell me that I have a ‘strong’ and ‘harsh’-sounding Romanian accent. I speak English fluently but with the occasional grammar and vocabulary mistakes. This I feel as a stigma, both in my ‘casual everyday’ but also in my ‘academic everyday’, in which my every ‘slip of the tongue’ is sanctioned.

Being a young, female researcher in Jordan and Palestine made me confront shame differently than in the United States and New Zealand. I remember that in July 2010, the second time when I travelled from New Zealand for my fieldwork in Jordan and Palestine/Israel, I experienced somatic spasms. The way Probyn writes about her body hating disruptions of the everyday, loving the rituals of the daily routine and having entered somatic spasms when she immigrated to Australia resonate with the ways I feel my body reacts as it is moving around a lot, and especially when I reached my ‘field site’.

In the Middle East, I was a single, eastern European woman trying to collect information while unaccompanied in public. My ‘eastern-ness’ represented an aspect from which I could negotiate similarities. During the 1970s and 1980s, Romanian universities hosted many Arab students; this was a point of commonality upon which I tried to capitalise, so as to diminish my out-of-place-ness. In some instances, being a single woman from eastern Europe meant to some locals that I was available for more than collecting data for my project, thus sexual innuendos were made with which I was not comfortable at all and which exacerbated my shame. I wanted to run away, to hide, but I could not. There was nowhere to hide. These innuendos made me feel ashamed.

These feelings of shame, followed by desires to be invisible and disappear contradict my desire to tell stories of the everyday I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Packing and setting forth
• PART II Arrival: encounters with affect, emotion and darkness in tourism
• PART III Destinations: affective routes in ‘Middle Eastern’ tourism
• PART IV Re-tour
• Bibliography
• Index