Tourism

An Introduction

Adrian Franklin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761967613, 9780761967606
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Formation pour adultes

`Argued with a real verve, it makes a plea to rethink the role of tourism in modernity seeing it not as a fleeting and marginal element, but as something enduring, emblematic and constitutive of contemporary society. Tourism is seen as a key element of modern life, not an escape from it? - Mike Crang, Department of Geography, University of Durham

Tourism is a rapidly growing area of student enrolment. Lecturers and students who have waited patiently for an up-to-date, lucid and indispensable teaching and research text, need wait no more. This book is a matchless guide to understanding the theory, practice, development and effects of tourism.

Tourism: An Introduction:

- equips students with a critical perspective of the central processes of tourism and the relationship between tourism and culture

- places tourism at the heart of modern life rather than as a peripheral feature added on after work

- illuminates the relationship between tourism and nation formation, citizenship, consumerism and globalization

- reveals the ritual, performative and embodied dimensions of tourist experience

This book offers readers a major synthesis of modern thought on tourism. It breaks the mould of approaching tourism as a self-contained, compartment of contemporary life and treats it as a major and exciting cultural phenomenon. This is a landmark work in the study of tourism.

Adrian Franklin is the editor of the acclaimed journal Tourist Studies (SAGE Publications).

1

Introduction

Not surprisingly, then, tourism in Boston does not stand far apart from the city’s other commercial, cultural and recreational activities; to a great extent then it is absorbed into the daily life of the city.

Ehrlich and Dreier (1999: 157)

I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among these, a sore throat that I had developed during the flight, a worry at not having informed a colleague that I would be away, a pressure across both temples and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

De Botton (2002: 17–20)

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser.

John Ruskin, quoted in De Botton (2002: 222)

SUMMARY

• Tourism: Key questions for the twenty-first century
• Tourism as an ordering of globalisation
• Sensing tourism
• Tourism and everyday life
• Tourism and rituals of transformation
• Tourism and ‘fast time’
• Structure of the book

Tourism: Key questions for the twenty-first century

This book is an up to date guide to understanding the theory, practice, development and effects of tourism. It considers general theories of tourism to be inadequate on their own and goes on to develop a new approach that recognises tourism as a complex set of social and cultural phenomena. This approach requires a variety of theoretical perspectives, a theoretical pluralism, that can make sense of its various connections and engagements within the constantly changing social and cultural milieux of modernity. Unlike some approaches this book does not view tourism as merely based on the pleasurability of the unusual and the different. Instead, tourism is viewed also as a serious individual engagement with the changing (and fluid) conditions of modernity with implications for nation formation and citizenship, the rise of consumerism, cosmopolitanism, the natural world and globalisation. The book argues that tourism is therefore a central component of modern social identity formation and engagement, rather than something shallow and insignificant that takes place on the social margin. It identifies the transformative and redemptive components of tourism and in so doing places more emphasis on its ritual, performative and embodied dimensions. Here tourism can be understood as spaces and times of self-making – rather special types of space and time that allow latitudes, freedoms and experimentation. As such it opposes more standardised accounts based on the tourist gaze and the central significance of authenticity where both the tourist and the objects of their gaze stand apart. My approach emphasises the interaction and effects of people and these objects. It is argued that tourism cannot be separated from the cultural, political and economic conditions in which it has developed and changed, and critically, the book argues that tourism is no longer something that happens away from the everday lifeworld. Rather tourism is infused into the everyday and has become one of the ways in which our lives are ordered and one of the ways in which consumers orientate themselves, or take a stance to a globalised world.

This book is a guide to understanding tourism, particularly as different writers have tried to understand it and to keep track of it as a changing cultural and commercial form in modern life. But tourism is now far too blended into everyday life and the global flows of people and things to be treated as a detachable phenomenon. So, unlike many other tourism texts, this book will also identify how tourism configures with everyday social relations and cultures. I will tackle two broad questions. First, how can we understand tourism in social and cultural terms; what precisely are people doing and how do they come to be doing it? Students and some scholars too tend to view tourism as rather self-evident, so obvious that it requires little in the way of explanation. But it does not take much to make the same people see it as a puzzle. Why, for example, do so many people find old objects so fascinating? A modern toilet block could not be sold as a tourist attraction; it needs to acquire the patina of time, but why? A communal Roman latrine, on the other hand, is a fascinating object to behold and will sell postcards by the thousand. In fact, sometimes what is offered to tourists does not ‘work’. I once went to the Big Pit Mining Museum in South Wales, a mining heritage site in which the high point appeared to be switching our lights off some 300 feet underground to experience total darkness. Some of the young, affluent French students in the tour party, ostensibly in the UK to learn English, were seriously unable to come to terms with what was happening to them. They were not seeing the point of it; and I was struggling too. Equally, tourism is often something of a paradox. Tourism is commonly portrayed as an escape from work and essentially about pleasure but so many forms and experiences of tourism seem to involve, on the face of it, the opposite. Why is it that some people will spend their two precious weeks of summer enduring such difficult and uncomfortable conditions as ‘camping’ or ‘back packing’, for example? For those fourteen days they are prepared to sleep on hard floors, in cramped conditions, living on sub-basic foods, at the mercy of biting insects, tropical diseases and other risks; working very hard, and covering long distances, carrying heavy loads through unpredictable weather conditions. One sees those holiday cyclists, heavily loaded down on steep inclines, toiling through torrential rain and traffic; it is possible to ask oneself what on earth they are doing and why? But even at the most luxurious end of the market, for those travelling by air to faraway luxury resort hotels, the amount of stress and work involved can be quite staggering. Getting to, through and between airports is one of life’s greater challenges; not in any way enjoyable but fraught with all manner of hazards and worries. Aircraft conditions are perilous as the excellent book Jetlag: How to Beat It (David O’Connell, 1997) makes perfectly plain. Economy class cabins have little humidity and very little oxygen and can expose passengers to quite profound mixtures of germs gathered from every corner of the earth. Low oxygen and low humidity combine to make people tetchy and bad tempered. Low humidity and inactivity has been associated recently with the new travel anxiety, deep vein thrombosis (Brown et al., 2001: 18). As Zygmunt Bauman sums it up, ‘[t]here are many hardships one needs to suffer for the sake of tourist’s freedoms: the impossibility of slowing down, uncertainty wrapping every choice, risks attached to every decision…’ (Bauman, 1998b: 98). Why tourism continues to grow despite all of this is a secondary aspect of this first question. The answers to these simple questions are surprisingly complex, and in order to gain an adequate understanding we will have to embark on a major exploration of the culture of travel and tourism as well as a consideration of attempts to answer them. What we certainly cannot do is to imagine that a definition of tourism will get this question out of the way, smoothing the path for the more routine description of the workings of the tourist industry. There are many existing books that do precisely this and their strategy does not need to be reproduced again. This point was made even stronger in a recent essay I wrote with Mike Crang, where we outlined what we took to be ‘the trouble with tourism and travel theory’ and we made it the launching pad and rationale for our new tourism journal, Tourist Studies:

… tourist studies has been dominated by policy-led and industry-sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalise industry-led priorities and perspectives, leaving the research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market. (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 5)

That essay and now this book make a break with this trend and offer a way of understanding tourism as a cultural activity, and not merely a commercial exercise.

The second question to be addressed in this book concerns the place of tourism in contemporary life. It seems to me that we cannot continue to think of tourism merely as an industry, separable from all other industries and separable from our everyday lives. As Franklin and Crang argue:

Tourism is no longer a specialist consumer product or mode of consumption: tourism has broken away from its beginnings as a relatively minor and ephemeral ritual of modern national life to become a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organised. Recent books on leisure by Chris Rojek (1995) and the holiday by Fred Inglis (2000) both place tourism as a central part of understanding social (dis-)organisation but also show how it can no longer be bounded off as a discrete activity, contained tidily at specific locations and occurring during set aside periods. As we see it, tourism is now such a significant dimension to global social life that it can no longer be conceived of as merely what happens at self-styled tourist sites and encounters involving tourists away from home. The new agenda for tourism studies needs therefore to reflect this growing significance. Nor should ‘tourist researchers feel a need to legitimate their seemingly frivolous topic by pointing out its economic and social importance’ but instead we might ‘view vacationing as a cultural laboratory where people have been able to experiment with new aspects of identities, their social relations or their interactions with nature and also to use the important cultural skills of daydreaming and mind-travelling. Here is an arena in which fantasy has become an important social practice’ (Löfgren, 1999: 6–7).

It is easy to understand why so many tourism texts make this error since in the popular imagination tourism is by definition what takes place away from the everyday. Surely tourism is separated from normal life by the long distances people often travel in order to be tourists. Surely tourist places themselves are separated from workaday places not only by their remoteness but also in their possession of those special ‘touristic’ qualities that everyday places lack. However, it turns out that most places are more like Boston, the subject of the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, and in Boston, tourism is ‘to a great extent … absorbed into the daily life of the city’. What does this mean?

In the case of Boston, as in a great many other places globally, the everyday world is increasingly indistinguishable from the touristic world. Most places are now on some tourist trail or another, or at least, not far from one. In addition, most of the things we like to do in our usual leisure time double up as touristic activities and are shared spaces. This is as much true for hanging out in fashionable cafés as it is for local art exhibitions and museums or local theme parks, shopping malls, food halls, beaches, sporting activities and local nature features. In fact, many leisure investments made ostensibly for tourists and tourism rely on the fact that local people will visit them too, and as the global population becomes increasingly settled in larger cities, so the metropolitan populations around each investment become ever more significant. Another way of looking at this is that an increasing number of ‘things to do’ in each of our localities began life with a view to attract and entertain visitors. The major cities and resort areas of the world are now in competition with each other for tourists, the convention and conference trade, and even to attract other companies to invest or relocate in their city. As a consequence much of our everyday lives are spent doing what tourists do, alongside tourists, and in what we might call a touristic manner.

This last point brings me to another: that increasingly, the manner of the tourist has become a metaphor for the way we lead our everyday lives in a consumer society. So rather than being an exceptional or occasional state of being in modern societies, or even as some have said, an escape from it, the manner of the tourist has come to determine a generalised stance to the world around us. In a globalised world, our stance as consumers of it is modelled and predicated on the tourist.

To begin with, this tourism of everyday life might be seen rather like the expansion of flanerie (Tester, 1994): no longer confined to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the emergent modern capital cities, most people are now alerted to, and routinely excited by, the flows of global cultural materials all around them in a range of locations and settings. We casually take in these flows, never fully in possession of their extent or their temporality, never expecting them to be complete or finalised as a knowable cultural landscape around us. The repertoires for this appreciation and taste are drawn from travel and tourism, but, owing perhaps to the greater speed and extent of the circulation of peoples, cultures and artefacts, we find the distinction between the everyday and holiday entirely blurred. The relationship between transnational culture and tourism of the everyday is a dimension of tourist studies that will surely prove to be significant. (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 8)

Tourism as an ordering of globalisation

If we cast our minds back in time, we would be able to find, at various times and places, examples of people whose lives were more or less locked into the singular affairs of their village, small town, or even district, neighbourhood or suburb. Everything there was stamped by the familiar, the known and the personally interconnected. People and things from elsewhere were outsiders, foreign, derogatory terms that conjure up the opposites of belonging: fear, loathing, misunderstanding or even hatred. Although we must be careful not to cast such places as stationary and fixed, because very often their inhabitants were involved in a degree of travel (see Clifford (1992) for an excellent essay on the mobility of cultures typically modelled as sedentary by anthropology), nonetheless, we can say that there were times when travel beyond the safe confines of a known locality (or range(s)) and culture(s) was certainly not romantic and longed for, but, if anything, feared as Other; it was the unknown and the dangerous, and boundaries were observed separating the home world from that of the traveller. Although there was certainly curiosity about the world beyond the everyday, it was not a generalised interest about the world, a routine thirst for things new, exotic and startling. That thirst developed slowly in modernising nation states, and one of its vehicles for development was tourism. Tourism, provided a pleasurable introduction to a world beyond the locality, and the basis of that relevance was the beginnings of a globalising world, starting first with nation formation and the establishment of universal discourses that began to link localities rather than separate them, and then the routinisation of international trade that did very much the same on a wider scale. Increasingly, the relevance of these wider scales of social transaction – and especially the success of western overarching and universal themes – meant that travel, and the knowledge and experience that come from travel, became an important source of cultural capital. As this speed of transaction and innovation increased, it produced the dizzy pace of change and novelty associated with modernity, and maintaining an interest and curiosity for the new became passionate and addictive; defining what it is to live in a consumer society. In short, tourism required less and less effort to travel in order to obtain the same degree of sensation and difference that formerly only travel could provide. Instead the world moved in reverse, back to the homelands of western tourists in the form of commodities, cultures, musics, foods, styles, and peoples. In a city like London, much bigger and older than Boston, we can say that this process has reached its most advanced stage. In a way, the entire world flows into London at a remarkable rate, transforming it and changing it as it goes. Virginia Woolf was entranced by these flows in the 1920s, and she saw them as natural with an enchanting and bewildering beauty and poetics – much in the manner of a tourist. Baudelaire saw them too and used the word flanerie, a touristic word, to describe the pleasure of strolling around in a large city, or sitting in cafés, taking in all the excitement and change. Today London is no different except that the flows are greater, the piles of commodities are higher and come from an even wider catchment and, critically, a larger proportion of the population can afford them. From London, any capital of Europe is within easy reach and return flights are currently as little as fifty pounds, the price of a few rounds of drinks in a pub, or the price of five taxi rides between Padding-ton and Victoria railway stations. But the domain of superlatives belongs, properly, to journalists, and in this matter I defer to one o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: Questions and Scope
• Part Two: Objects and Rituals
• Part Three: The Embodied Tourist
• References
• Index