Tourism Paradoxes

Contradictions, Controversies and Challenges

Erdinç Çakmak, Hazel Tucker, Keith Hollinshead, Dr. Hazel Tucker, Prof. Keith Hollinshead

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781845418113
• eBook ISBN: 9781845418144
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

At a time when COVID-19 is transforming the tourism industry, this book presents a collection of some of the many contemporary contradictions and inconsistencies apparent in tourism contexts and tourism studies. Increasingly, tourism is regarded as an agent of social and cultural change, in ways which inevitably throw up new and inescapable paradoxes. The chapters draw attention to paradoxes (such as Anglo-Western-centrism/Non-Western imperatives, continued colonisation/decolonisation, political apparatus/people's empowerment, global standards/local dynamics) and their prominence in the tourism field as well as in other disciplines. The volume offers a reconsideration of what may be needed, conceptually and methodologically, in order to equip researchers and practitioners in tourism and related social science fields to better interpret and manage the future of tourism.

1 Introduction: Tourism Paradoxes – Contradictions, Controversies and Challenges

Erdinç Çakmak, Hazel Tucker and Keith Hollinshead

Paradox: But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow

Søren Kierkegaard (Philosophical Fragment)

The idea for this book first came about when the editors met in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a conference on tourism paradoxes. The location was fitting due to Chiang Mai – which literally means new city despite it being established more than seven centuries ago – being full of tourism paradoxes. Now attracting both international tourists and migrants, the provincial capital city of Northern Thailand became a popular center for international backpacker tourists during the 1970s. These ‘alternative’ youth tourists, as Erik Cohen (1989) called them, were said to be seeking adventurous and unique experiences of ‘authentic’ primitive life in the hill tribe villages surrounding Chiang Mai. In the words of Dean MacCannell (1989: 2), this ‘“modern” thirst for authenticity met by a “primitive” capacity to produce dramatic representations of pseudo authenticity’ gave rise to a new tourism-related set of living arrangements which was simultaneously, and we could add paradoxically, post-traditional and post-modern. Since then, with a tourism sector that has relatively low entry barriers and offers low/semi-skilled jobs, Chiang Mai has become the second largest city in the country, with migrants coming from surrounding rural areas as well as neighboring countries such as Myanmar and Laos. This tourism and associated economic growth has brought its challenges, however, since the formal economy and infrastructure in Chiang Mai lack the necessary capacity to absorb these newcomers, and a significant informal tourism sector has hence developed. These developments and challenges have led in turn, as is the case in many other tourism destinations around the world, to many new forms of contradictory and paradoxical tourism practices and effects.

In relation to the ever-changing tourist markets, a significant trend in recent years has been a rapid increase in Chinese tourists visiting Chiang Mai following the popularity of a Chinese 2012 road movie, Lost in Thailand (see Budde et al., 2013), which was filmed in Chiang Mai. This new influx has brought yet further unexpected challenges and conflicts, both within Chiang Mai’s tourism and hospitality sector and in relation to the broader resident ‘host population’ of the city. In 2015, a discussion forum and exhibition entitled ‘My Chiang Mai’ was organized by the Thailand Creative and Design Centre (TCDC), aimed at helping the city’s residents ‘adapt and cope’ as they found themselves increasingly ‘playing host to this new and unfamiliar group of visitors’ (TCDC, 2015). The exhibition presented the question: ‘Where can a balance be found between the conflicting interests of those who live here, those who do business with tourists and those who come here as visitors? Can Chiang Mai be both a great place to live and a great place to visit?’ (TCDC, 2015). The exhibition had displays intended to help Chiang Mai residents better understand this new tourist group, which rapidly became the main tourist ‘market’ visiting the city. Recognizing that many around the world are ‘hankering’ to attract Chinese tourists, the exhibition also alluded to a rapid rise in tensions between Chiang Mai residents and Chinese tourists, and especially to ‘locals’ complaints about Chinese tourists’ lack of manners’ (TCDC, 2015). Interestingly, the exhibition’s displays were written in both Thai and English, raising the question as to whether it was expected that the exhibition might also be visited by Western tourists, and perhaps the ever-increasing number of Western residents, in order to also address tensions and lack of understanding between Chiang Mai’s ‘traditional’ visitor group and its new visitors. It seems paradoxical that Thai residents and Western tourists in Chiang Mai have become more attuned to each other than either party feels in its relation to the ‘new’ Chinese tourists. However, if a paradox is something ‘seemingly absurd or contradictory which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true’ (Soanes & Stevenson, 2006), then many of the Chiang Mai tourism happenings in recent years appear paradoxical indeed. Chiang Mai thus appropriately illustrates the main theme of this book.

While, to date, the field of tourism studies has covered much disciplinary, thematic and methodological ground and forged significant conceptual and practical benchmarks, tourism at both the local and global level was said recently to have entered something of a ‘new era’, in relation to changing tourist markets as well as to global digital technology and social media trends. It was especially the already alluded to rapid rise in the Asian tourism markets that Winter (2009) referred to as signifying this ‘new era’ and which placed tourism scholarship at a philosophical and ethical crossroads. Indeed, the global tourism landscape has changed significantly during the last two decades, with Asia shifting from being predominantly a destination for Western tourists to becoming a key tourist-generating region. According to the UNWTO, in 2017 one out of four tourist trips originated in Asia and the Pacific (UNWTO, 2018), with China ranked number one in the world in terms of international tourism expenditure ($US257.7 billion). Also, as already alluded to, this changing landscape gave rise to new tensions and controversies, increasing use of terms such as ‘overtourism’ and seemingly paradoxical ideas around ‘demarketing’ and ‘degrowth’.

Now, at the time of putting the final touches to this volume, the world is facing yet another new era, this time as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, ‘overtourism’ has become ‘undertourism’, and a great many countries around the world are plunged into thinking about recovery and resilience. This book’s focus on tourism’s paradoxical complexities thus seems even more topical. Thankfully, while the tensions, contradictions and controversies inherent in tourism only seem to increase in prevalence, there has simultaneously been an increased maturity and sophistication in many realms of tourism production and consumption, as well as an increased reflective awareness of the representational ‘powers’ of, and ability to deploy, tourism to make, de-make and remake places and peoples. By identifying these kinds of incongruent and paradoxical tourism contexts, as well as approaches in tourism studies, this book thus aims to prompt a reconsideration of what may be needed, conceptually and methodologically, in order to equip tourism studies and related social science fields to work with, and to interpret, tourism’s ongoing dynamics. Indeed, as quoted in the philosophical fragment above, one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought.

Centering on the notion of tourism paradoxes has thus invited the authors of this book’s chapters to highlight and relish the contradictions and inconsistencies apparent in tourism contexts and tourism studies. While the chapters were all written prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s chapters emphasize the ever-dynamic, ever-present and open nature of tourism’s inconsistencies. Overall, the book thus reflects, and aims to further, the growing understanding of a need for tourism studies to focus more on these messier and inconsistent matters of ‘becoming’ in tourism (see Chapter 9 for discussion on ‘becoming’). Other recent works that have similarly embraced the messy and paradoxical aspects of tourism include: Travels in Paradox, Tourism Encounters and Controversies, Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests, and The Practice of Sustainable Tourism: Resolving the Paradox. Some of these, particularly the latter in this list (Hughes et al., 2015), express a sense of trouble and challenge from tourism’s ‘seemingly absurd or contradictory’ elements (Soanes & Stevenson, 2006), and therefore set out to try to find resolutions to the paradoxes that are especially inherent to, and pervasive within, concepts such as ‘sustainable tourism’. Tourism Encounters and Controversies: Ontological Politics of Tourism Development (Jóhannesson et al., 2016), in contrast, examines the material and social ontological politics of tourism development in order to embrace the ways in which tourism is always relational, unstable and messy. Other books are more ‘playful’ with the paradoxical ideas inherent in tourism. For example, Travels in Paradox (Minca & Oakes, 2006) plays with the dynamic and fluid nature of places to argue that the paradoxes of travel are also the paradoxes of place, including the place of ‘home’. Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (Veijola et al., 2014) is also somewhat playful in suggesting that as well as catering to the paying and orderly client, tourism must also welcome its inherent disorderly, disruptive and we could say paradoxical, elements.

The present volume similarly embraces tourism’s untidy paradoxes and, embedded within sociological and anthropological scholarship, focuses on some tourism paradoxes, controversies and inconsistencies that have dynamic cultural relationships at their center. The chapters are aimed at highlighting the point that many aspects of the relationship between tourism and culture, tourism and social change, tourism and globalization/ glocalization, and tourism and (post)modernity, encompass complex contradictory, and often incongruent, approaches and processes. The overall purpose of the book is therefore to enhance scholarship in this field by encouraging those studying and researching tourism studies to critically engage with the leading salient complexities of tourism and thereby to further embrace and work both with and within some key paradoxical themes, or areas, in relation to tourism and tourism studies. These paradoxical areas include: North Atlantic centrism vis-à-vis non-Western imperatives; established political apparatus vis-à-vis peoples’ empowerment; continued colonization vis-à-vis post-colonization and decolonization; fixed/singular identities vis-à-vis liquid/plural aspirations; and globally standardized vis-à-vis locally dynamicized. These are key themes, which are identified and drawn upon throughout the remainder of the book and they will now, each in turn, be outlined in more detail.

Anglo-Western Centrism vis-à-vis non-Western Imperatives

This first paradoxical theme refers to the point that, despite significant changes in the global tourism landscape as mentioned above, tourism theory continues to remain largely rooted in the ‘Western tourist gaze’ (Chang, 2015; Cohen & Cohen, 2015; Tucker & Zhang, 2016; Winter, 2009; Zhang, 2018). With Asia having become a major, if not the major, tourist-generating region, and China now ranking first in the world in terms of international tourism expenditure, many scholars are now wondering whether the Anglo-Western centrism in tourism knowledge means that the field is, in fact, ill-equipped to respond to increased Asian mobilities. Anglo-Western centrism in tourism studies is prompted both in the fact that the ‘tourist’ that research has mainly focused on is still very often conceived as coming from the Western, industrialized countries (Huang et al., 2014; Keen & Tucker, 2012; Winter, 2009), and in the fact that the producers of tourism knowledge are largely Western scholars. The paradox is, consequently, that despite the changing global tourism landscape, we are still seeing the uncritical application of Anglo-Western theory to explain non-Western tourism phenomena, which in turn leads to ‘misguided claims of universality’ (Winter, 2009: 23). Hence, there are increasing calls to ‘re-center’, or in other words to do something to ‘Asianize’ and indigenize, the tourism field (see, for example, Chambers & Buzinde, 2015; Chang, 2015). These calls look to the incorporation of ‘non-Western’ knowledge and theory as the answer, arguing, as Pritchard and Morgan (2007) put it, that ‘we must act to decentre the tourism academy and respond to the challenges and critiques being articulated by indigenous scholars so that we may begin to create knowledge centred on indigenous epistemologies and ontologies’ (Pritchard & Morgan, 2007: 22).

However, such attempts to ‘re-centre’ and to indigenize or ‘Asianize’ the field may become paradoxical in themselves, in that they can often function to further entrench the prevalent binaries and ways of thinking which separate ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, even though the above-mentioned ‘new era’ of tourism itself serves to subvert this binary. In response to this paradox, Cohen and Cohen (2015) suggest using a mobilities paradigm to study the emerging markets in order to be more ‘attentive to differences within and between countries in the emerging regions, as well as to similarities between some of these and Western ones’ (Cohen & Cohen, 2015: 2). Indeed, Zhang (2018) similarly addresses this paradox in her asking: ‘are we really so different from one another? Are Chinese tourists really so different from other tourists?’ (Zhang, 2018: 132). Tucker and Zhang (2016) also problematize the idea of encouraging ‘alternative discourses’, suggesting that such practices run the risk of further entrenching dualisms which, ultimately, may hinder the ability of the tourism field ‘to proceed to more open and pluralistic dialogues’ (Tucker & Zhang, 2016: 252). These are paradoxical matters indeed and they are picked up again in many of the chapters in this book.

Continued Colonization vis-à-vis post-Colonization and Decolonization

Related to the above theme, the next paradoxical theme worth introducing here is that of tourism’s inherent continuing colonization vis-à-vis increasing calls for decolonization of the field as well as attempts to highlight what might be considered ‘post-colonial’ sub-versions of tourism’s colonizing tendencies. Indeed, a key paradox here is that contemporary tourism practice and much tourism scholarship echo and thus perpetuate colonial discourse, whilst at the same time, ‘post-colonial agents’ may use tourism in order to counter the narrative accounts of ‘colonizing agents’. The notion of global tourism as neo-colonialism has been widely discussed, for example, by Edensor (1998), Jaakson (2004) and Tucker and Akama (2009), and it is argued that in the context of contemporary international tourism, and tourism scholarship itself, the economic structures, cultural representations and exploitative relationships that were previously based in colonialism are far from over (Kothari, 2015). Hence, the recent calls, as referred to above, to de-colonize the tourism field (Chambers & Buzinde, 2015).

Concurrently, however, it is important to recognize colonialism’s own areas of ambivalence and internal contradiction, as well as to consider the role that tourism can play in contesting and reconstructing the legacies of colonialism. The paradox is that, whilst ‘culture’ has often become essentialized for tourism in accordance with colonial narratives, tourism may at times be used to counter, or subvert, the colonial narrative (Hollinshead, 2004). Hence, a state of paradoxical ambivalence often prevails in relation to how the cultural legacies of colonialism play out in tourism, and just as it is crucial to recognize the continued colonization, it is equally important to recognize localized forms of challenge and resistance manifested through tourism’s many subversive cultural assertions (Park, 2016). Indeed, tourism, and ‘heritage tourism’ in particular, has often been used by post-independence states to assert a new decolonized identity by contesting and readdressing situations of social, cultural and political domination that had arisen through colonialism. Paradoxically, governments of post-independence states may even use heritage tourism to appropriate the language of the colonizer in order to ‘write back’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989), and thereby ‘to respond to and “de-scribe” the discourses of the coloniser’ (Marschall, 2004: 102). The matters of continued colonization vis-à-vis post-colonization and decolonization in tourism are referenced in multiple chapters of this book, particularly Chapters 3, 8 and 9.

Established Political Apparatus vis-à-vis Peoples’ Empowerment

The third paradox in tourism studies addressed in this volume is that the political apparatus does not always run parallel to the civil apparatus (Gramsci, 1971). While for Foucault (1995), ‘power is everywhere’ and power relations are embedded in the social structure, Gramsci argues that power is operated through the mutual interactions of economy, culture and politics within the realm of a hegemonic discourse (Daldal, 2014; Jones, 2006). In Gramsci’s term, power is mainly exerted by the dominant groups, by working on the popular mentality via the institutions of civil society and establishing a hegemony using the political apparatus. However, this political apparatus is not always fortified by a civil consensus on the level of cultural power that consists of people’s ideas, world-views, value systems, art, and education. Hence, authorities determining norms and ideologies, which reinforce the policy platforms in the tourism field, allow dominant groups to act and regulate the social, economic and environmental world about them (Hall, 1996).

A vast proportion of research in tourism and hospitality studies focuses on the normalization, governance in and of tourism, and participation and contestation in decisio...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Erik Cohen
• 1 Introduction: Tourism Paradoxes – Contradictions, Controversies and Challenges
• 2 The Paradox of Modernity: Power, Identity and Tourism in Rural Cyprus
• 3 Go West! Overcoming the Paradoxes of Kinh Tourism in the Vietnamese Mountains: A Postcolonial Geography
• 4 The ‘Logical Paradox’ of Preservation via Change: The Touristic Potential of Malaysia’s Catholic Mission Schools
• 5 Empowering Package Tour Travellers by Disempowering Tourism Operators? Assessing the Effectiveness of the Tourism Law of China
• 6 Cross-cultural Encounter: Sustaining Racial Prejudice or Prompting Reflection?
• 7 Contemporary Polemics of Chinese Outbound Tourism to Europe: Paradoxes, Inconsistencies and Contradictions
• 8 International Tourism Academia: A Paradoxical Challenge
• 9 The Call for ‘Dynamic Genesis’ (after Deleuze) in Tourism Studies
• 10 Afterword: Reflections on Paradoxes in Understanding, Culture, Mobility, and Tourism