Language and Tourism in Postcolonial Settings

Angelika Mietzner, Anne Storch, Angelika Mietzner, Anne Storch

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781845416775
• eBook ISBN: 9781845416805
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on perspectives from and on the global south, providing fresh data and analyses on languages in African, Caribbean, Middle-Eastern and Asian tourism contexts. It provides a critical perspective on tourism in postcolonial and neocolonial settings, explored through in-depth case studies. The volume offers a multifaceted view on how language commodifies, and is commodified in, tourism settings and considers language practices and discourse as a way of constructing identities, boundaries and places. It also reflects on academic practice and economic dynamics in a field that is characterised by social inequalities and injustice, and tourism as the world's largest industry enacting dynamic communicative, social and cultural transformations. The book will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of tourism studies, linguistics, literature, cultural history and anthropology, as well as researchers and professionals in these fields.

1 Linguistic Entanglements, Emblematic Codes and Representation in Tourism: Introduction

Angelika Mietzner and Anne Storch

We begin with a banal example. In this image (Figure 1.1), a group of souvenirs are placed on the sand of Diani Beach in Kenya. These objects form part of a larger supply of carvings that are found in a dozen or so souvenir stalls in front of a hotel that caters to international, though mostly German, package tourists.

What is offered to these tourists are carvings of animals that they might have seen and taken pictures of during a safari to a national park that usually takes place prior to the beach holiday. There are also masks, bowls and candleholders that will help to create memories of the ‘real Africa’ one has been to: exotic, mysterious and traditional. Upon asking the souvenir vendors – men well in their fifties with decades of experience in the business – who designs these objects and who accounts for the entire assortment at sale here, the men replied that almost all the designs came from Europe or were at least decided upon there. Traders in the Netherlands and in Germany, they said, would select certain objects out of an entire catalogue of souvenirs at offer, and have them carved and painted in Kenya. The beach is just a small part of the business; Christmas markets, one-world emporiums and interior decoration shops are more profitable and reliable, the men claimed. Creativity is controlled by those who own these businesses: fair-trade and pro-poor organisations and arts and crafts dealers in Europe.

We (two linguists with a specialisation in African linguistics and professional experiences that almost always relate to postcolonial and neocolonial spaces) asked the men about the story behind the midsized figures that are in the centre of the picture: three black statues with red paint on their hands, bellies and buttocks, and with exaggerated heads turned to the beholder. Wide-eyed stares fixate us, and we look at a mouth that contains white, bared teeth. The entire figure looks like the caricature of the cannibal, the ultimate Other. The vendors explained that these sculptures were part of an entire set that represents ‘characteristic Africans’: Maasai, Somali, Makonde and Ghanaians. The figures in question are Ghanaians, we are told. ‘There are no cannibals here,’ a vendor concluded.

Figure 1.1 Figures on a beach (photo A. Storch)

This is a sentence that sounds familiar after having been to the beach even for just a couple of days, where we worked on a project that deals with the acquisition and use of heteroglossic repertoires there. This beach is not only a business area for souvenir vendors, but also of people who offer anything from a necklace to sex. A visit to the beach and a swim in the warm waters entails haggling it seems, though not so much over the price of a certain object or service, but rather over the beach itself: in order to go there, does one have to buy or may one turn down what is offered? The following dialogue is one among many similar ones that were recorded at Diani Beach in September 2017; a beach vendor, or beach boy, approaches a tourist, a woman from Germany who stays in the same hotel we are staying in, by greeting her in a form of Swahili that is largely reserved for tourism communication (Nassenstein, 2016 & this volume). The woman, who has explained that she finds it difficult to relate to the many dealers at the beach, replies only reluctantly, perhaps trying to fulfil a minimum of politeness, but moves on without returning the offered greeting gesture. The vendor tries to attract more attention by suggesting that they have already met, but he receives just another refusal, a faint waving and a nod of her head. At the end of the encounter, the beach vendor seems to suggest that there is no need to be so reluctant, or even afraid, this is a safe space, no cannibals here:

Vendor Jambo!

‘Hi!’

<offers high five>

Tourist Äh jambo!

‘Mh, hi!’

<moves on>

Vendor Aber hallo, ich hab dich schön gesehn!

‘Wow, hello, I have already/nicely seen you!’

Tourist Jaja...

‘Well, well.’

<hostile / refusing gesture>

Vendor Wir sind hier keine Kannibalen, wir beißen nicht. Wir fressen dich nicht.

‘We are no cannibals over here, we won’t bite. We won’t eat you.’

This dialogue might seem simple, but it is, at a closer look, complex and rather deep. Together with the objects that are produced in a nearby community but by order of international players and intended to serve as a portrayal of Africa, this communicative event illustrates what the language of tourism might be: first of all, and most obviously, perhaps, there is a presence of several languages, namely Swahili and German, as well as English. Swahili seems appropriate only in its form as a tourist code, in a much too brief greeting, which, however, at the same time is commodified language, printed on cups, towels and t-shirts (Figure 1.2). German is spoken at the beach as well, and it seems to be equally commodified: as a working tool it is indispensable to those selling to tourists in Diani, who use it in highly efficient ways, playing with stereotypes, idiomatic language and irony. Yet, language remains curiously constrained by its context.

Figure 1.2 Jambo on a cup (photo A. Storch)

At the beach, we heard the remark on the cannibals many times, usually as an expression of contempt over reluctant buyers. The beach, as a prototypical tourism site, does not offer much space for encounters that are not shaped by its commodification. Its sections are partitioned by different players – hotel management, tourists, fishermen, beach boys, among others – and interactions and conversations run along scripted lines.

It is interesting that the figure of the cannibal is reproduced by the hybrid players at the beach in these scripted, ever-recurring dialogues that happen at the beach and the tourism spots surrounding it. Kannibale in this environment may be part of a mimetic interpretation of ironic comments by Germans, as a way of speaking back: ‘we know what you think of us.’ But it also has a deeper layer: colonial imagery of the monstrous Other produced and continues to produce mistranslations of narratives on historical experiences (such as Europeans and Africans suspecting each other of cannibalism during earlier colonial encounters; cf. Behrend, 2013), and the frequent emergence of the cannibal in beach discourse not only hints at such colonial continuities, but also at the dynamics which are inherent in them. After all, the discursive violation of the cannibalism taboo (suggesting the addressee might consider the speaker a cannibal) elicits strong emotions: anger, irritation and contempt, which ultimately attract the attention needed in order for some business to be done in an utterly competitive environment of which many different players claim ownership (Andrews, 2014). Therefore, even though the cannibal is an offensive discursive turn, making all too obvious that this is, ultimately, a spoilt paradise, it can be played with in profitable ways, as a technique that helps to create an affective vendor–buyer relationships. While greetings need to be quick (but sound impolite to our ears trained in Kiswahili sanifu – Standard Swahili of the classroom) in order to get immediate hold of a potential client, access rituals need to be emotionally bonding. The discursively disturbing cannibal therefore bears multiple meanings: this is a comment on a shared violent past, a play with being othered, an unpleasant comment on a presumably failed interaction (nothing sold...), but it is also part of a communication that will be carried on, later, during the following days. And here, the cannibal phrase turns into an access ritual – disturbing yet grasping attention and creating conscience.

The tourists we met in the all-inclusive hotel that was one of the foci of our research projects, and their comments that we read in the guest books and online fora dedicated to Diani Beach almost unequivocally expressed their disdain about the communicative interactions they had at the beach. What easily takes on the form of the ‘quick’ (Phipps, 2007) is as often turbulent language practice that leaves us with contradictory feelings – confused and angry and yet trying to make sense of the encounter.

***

This volume is dedicated to a deeper understanding of the relationships between researchers, tourist sites and their different players, language and performance in postcolonial and neocolonial spaces. Who are we there, and as whom are we constructed by those who are there with us? Turning the gaze to tourist sites of the ‘global south’ reveals not only that colonial continuities shape limitations in engaging with one another, but also that the politics of current global mobilities are very much the politics of movements that resemble, in their directedness and economies, movements in the era of colonialism. This might seem a statement that contradicts current perspectives on migration as most saliently being a movement of people from the ‘global south’ to the ‘global north’, as refugees and as ‘global poor’. However, the seemingly more commonplace mobilities from the north into about every part of the globe involve considerably larger numbers of people and result in foreign presences of unrivalled extent, worldwide: tourism is not only among the world’s largest industries, but it also forms part of mobilities that outnumber those that are so much in focus now – those of refugees and ‘southern’ migrants. This blurred perspective is as much rooted in our colonial history as are the directions in which these mobilities take place. As Esther Lezra (2014) writes, a collective way of thinking, dominated by European colonial paradigms still results in projections of white guilt onto black monstrosity, which makes it rather easy, we suspect, to portray the presences of ‘the southern poor’ in the ‘global north’ as menacing or, a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Linguistic Entanglements, Emblematic Codes and Representation in Tourism: Introduction
• 2 Transformations of the ‘Tourist Gaze’: Landscaping and the Linguist behind the Lens
• 3 Backpacking Performances: An Empirical Contribution
• 4 ‘We Have Our Own Africans’: Public Displays of Zār in Iran
• 5 Cameras as Barriers of Understanding: Reflections on a Philanthropic Journey to Kenya
• 6 Heritage Tourism and the Freak Show: A Study on Names, Horror, Race and Gender
• 7 Postcolonial Performativity in the Philippine Heritage Tourism Industry
• 8 The Hakuna Matata Swahili: Linguistic Souvenirs from the Kenyan Coast
• Afterword: Between Silence and Noise: Towards an Entangled Sociolinguistics of Tourism
• Bookend: cape ghost
• Index