Tourism as process

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Tourism

as Process

University University

Bennetta Jules-Rosette of California at San Diego, USA

of Illinois

Edward M. at Urbana-Champaign,

Bruner USA

This report addresses the major themes of the International Tourism Between Tradition and Modernity conference at which over 50 communications on tourism were presented by a group of international scholars. Papers presented at this conference (Nice, France, November, 1992) were of a high quality, and the themes underlined new theoretical innovations and methodological discoveries. Nine major foci of the presentations are isolated here: the dialectic of the touristic experience; double flow and migration (or the travel loop); tourism as an embodied and gendered experience; the problem of patrimony and heritage in tourism; mass tourism and touristic enclaves; tourist arts and crafts; touristic space as a political issue; the mutable definition of the tourist; and the challenge of tourism for social science theories. One of the major characteristics of the modern and postmodern worlds is double migration. People from the periphery and the Third World are traveling to find work and a better life in the Western power centers: Pakistanis to London, Algerians to Paris, and Hispanics and Asians to Los Angeles. Concomitantly, people from industrialized nations are traveling as tourists to the periphery. These double migrations raise fundamental questions about what it means to be English, French, or American -exemplified by the rise of multiculturalism in the United States. These movements reflect mobility and nomadism. Essentially, social science concepts and the existing ways of conceptualizing tourism have not kept up with how the world is changing. The intensity, effects, and consequences of double migration have not yet been closely examined by sociology and anthropology. Evidence of the increasing number of migrants and tourists is more than an indication of simple movement. Many social science concepts utilized in tourism research are very much embedded in structural-functionalism, in an older empiricism, and to some extent in static structuralism. The notion of fixed boundaries, static cultures, and constant subjectivities must be altered to be more processual, fluid, and reflexive and to incorporate the contemporary movements of people. The touristic encounter must be considered as a moving border zone, a zone of creativity and emergence. Defining the touristic experience is a fundamental problem. Several of the conference presentations emphasized that the experience is a dialectical one. According to Tom Selwyn (Roehampton Institute, UK), there are three kinds of actors in the touristic experience: the tourist, the host, and the site. Who is the tourist? The tourist stands in semiotic opposition to the native or host. Each of these roles, however, is a mutable position in which there is an alternation of identities. MacCannell’s Empv Meetiy Grouna!s(1992) discusses Dennis O’Rourke’s film Cannibal Tours, citing a Papuan who says, “I could be a tourist if I only had enough money to travel with people on boats.” At the same time, German tourists to the area begin to describe themselves as residents of Papua, and in the film tourists play at being Papuans. Thus, there is both the possibility of a role exchange and a strong desire to change these roles. This commutative understanding of the interpersonal basis of tourism is a key to grasping the importance of tourism in the postmodern experience. The paper by Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola (both at University of Jyvlskyli, Finland) pointed out that the question of masculine/feminine iden-

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tity is very important in the touristic stake, which also has an embodied dimension: tourism is an incarnated experience. Juliet MacCannell (University of California-Davis, USA) underlined the observation that the body is an active part of the touristic experience. Moreover, the experience is dialog&l. It is a process of touristification in which both the hosts and guests express themselves in an active way. This process was foreseen in MacCannell’s first book, The Tourist (1976), in which the touristic sight is conceived of as a geographical and ideological construction. Ariel de Vidas (CERMACA, France) discussed the members of a Mexican community who did not want to depict their heritage in a performance for outsiders. The community members wanted to wear plastic helmets instead of local dress. This innovation emphasizes the ways in which touristic imagery is symbolically and ideologically constructed. Tourists are not passive; they have active selves. As a response to tourists’ images of themselves, American Indian artists produce new art in opposition to tourist art. There is also a need to disrupt the fixed notion of heritage, patrimony, and tradition, as Marie-Francoise Lanfant (URESTI/CNRS, France) emphasized, we are examining the paradoxes implicit in the processes of patrimony and memory. The papers by Edward Bruner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) John Allcock (University of Bradford, UK) and others indicated that heritage is contested. It is a struggle. Tradition is not given before the touristic encounter but, rather, the encounter generates the definition of heritage. The latter is a construct that is emergent in tourism. What tradition, heritage, or patrimony will be prior to the touristic interaction is never entirely known in advance. Different segments of society have competing political interests. There is a struggle to make claims as to what the patrimony will be and who owns or controls it. It becomes a question of power. People struggle over the meaning and the expression of heritage. Authenticity is a struggle. Its nature is contestable and emergent. Patrimony may be manipulated and transformed. An artificial construction of a culture takes place through geographical transfer and the appropriation of tradition. This process was addressed in the presentation by Shelly Shenhav-Keller (Hebrew University, Israel) dealing with the memories from Israel as they are transmitted across ethnic groups. This transmission raises questions of identity. The ambiguities of Balinese identity (balinile) were described by Michel Picard (CNRS, France). Nelson Graburn’s (University of California at Berkeley, USA) notion of the hyperreal in tourism, underscores the complexities of cultural identity. Also raised was the question of appropriation of ethnic traditions and problems of authenticity. MacCannell’s new work on the tourist art and on Native American and African artists mentions the idea of hysterical metaphorical appropriation, in which Westerners seek to claim the art of others in order to redefine their ambiguous personal identities. In this respect, tradition cannot be considered as a fixed, or restricted, phenomenon. Considerable room for debate exists on this topic. As to the notion of the fixed site, there is very good evidence from the CBte d’Azur. The whole notion of the Riviera as an invention has evolved over time, and the site also changes with the season. The Riviera is a moving target, as the context shifts and as people change. Individual tourists come to visit the C&e d’Azur. They experience it for themselves, and hence construct the C&e d’Azur. A multiplicity of individual constructions exists in every tourist site. For example, as Tom Selanniemi’s (University of Jyvlskyli, Finland) paper emphasized, Finnish tourists construct Greece in their own way. In Jerusalem at Easter, there are pilgrimages of many different religious groups-Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and many Protestant denominations. Each religion has its own pilgrimage route. There are many Jerusalems. It is not a monolithic, or solid site. Of course, neither the Israelis nor the

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Palestinians need to be told that Jerusalem is contested, but sometimes the scholars conducting research need to be reminded of this. Black Paris is not a unified site, and in Yugoslavia, touristic settings have practically been eradicated. These settings are contested and mutable. This discussion leads one to the notion of touristic enclaves and mass tourism. Questions raised in the papers about mass tourism were not entirely resolved. Dean MacCannell stated that mass tourism was a fiction created by economists. David Harrison (University of Sussex, UK) retorted that mass tourism should be watched, since there is an elitist tendency to belittle mass tourism in recent research. The applied studies presented warned against the negative effects of mass tourism. Tourist arts and crafts also deserve more attention. The manufacturing and consumption of souvenir items and artistic objects are a means of communication between ethnic groups, across cultures, and between tourists and their hosts. In addition, tourist arts and crafts have explicit political, economic, and cultural connotations. The symbolic exchanges of tourist art deserve more study, as Graburn, Shenhav-Keller, MacCannell, and Jules-Rosette stressed in their papers. Tourism is a stage in a process that has different configurations in relation to modernity and postmodernity. Jean Poirier (University of Nice, France) illustrated this point clearly. Tourism is in evolution. It may disappear and be replaced by a televisual apparatus that simulates the vacation resort as a virtual reality. People shall use earphones and go on vacation with their computers. These possibilities suggest a wide field to exploit and explore in future research. Thus, there is no definitive conclusion for these discussions. Sociologists and anthropologists need to continue to reflect on these problems. It should be emphasized that the touristic encounter is less monolithic, more dialogical, more layered, more complex, more divergent, more processual, more experimental than previous scholarship has indicated. Indeed, tourism studies constitute an important challenge to sociological theory. c] 0 Bennetta Juks-Rosette: CA 92093, USA

Department

Sociology, University

California-San Diego, La Jolla

REFERENCE MacCannell, Dean 1976 The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken. 1992 Empty Meeting Grounds:

The Tourist

Papers.

London:

Routledge.

Submitted 15 June 1993 Accepted 1 August 1993

Residents’ Concepts of Tourism Stephen E. G. Lea University of Exeter, UK Simon Kemp Karyn Willetts University

of Canterbury,

New Zealand

A substantial part of the psychological literature on tourism is concerned with the perceptions of the effects of tourism held by residents in host communities, and their attitudes towards it. Such research has recently been reviewed