{"id":31,"date":"2005-03-01T12:04:04","date_gmt":"2005-03-01T16:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/03\/01\/what-about-the-tourists\/"},"modified":"2007-02-16T00:42:50","modified_gmt":"2007-02-16T04:42:50","slug":"what-about-the-tourists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/03\/01\/what-about-the-tourists\/","title":{"rendered":"What about the tourists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> Now that Joseph Heath’s and Andrew Potter’s book, Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture<\/a>, is readily available in the US (it was originally published by HarperCollins Canada<\/a> as The Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can’t Be Jammed<\/a>), and now that many folks are planning their upcoming summer holidays, I thought I’d quote from Heath & Potter on the subject of tourism:<\/p>\n

…the modern traveler is left with a serious dilemma. On the one hand, the exotic urge that creates travel as a provisional good and causes serious travelers to constantly strive to keep ahead of the waves of mass tourism is something that is shot through with self-deception, power imbalances and exploitation. On the other hand, as the tourist wave passes through a previously untouched area, the local economy is completely reshaped in anticipation of the visitors to come. The very antimaterialist attitude that leads people to seek out exotic places in the first place draws more and more regions into the global economy.<\/p>\n

It might seem that there is no way to avoid either of the horns of this dilemma. Mass tourism is disgusting, shallow and exploitative. The pleasures of apparently exotic travel are sullied by the realization that the ongoing search for authentic connection by escaping modernity is not a solution to the problem, but its cause. Even just staying at home reneges on an implicit intercultural economic bargain. Whatever is the well-intentioned traveler to do?<\/p>\n

One form of travel that is rarely, if ever, mentioned by sociologists and other students of tourism is the business trip. Yet there is something to be said for the business trip as the only truly authentic and nonexploitative form of travel. For many travelers, expecially those concerned (even unwittingly) with the exotic, the problem is that they are too focussed on the social psychology of the travel experience, and not on the experience itself. That is, instead of choosing a destination based on relatively objective criteria such as comforts, amenities, cost, friendliness of the locals and so on, they choose their destinations based on how “authentic” or “exotic” they are and on how much social capital will be conferred in the ongoing quest for distinction. The value of a destination hinges on how many “moderns” have been there already and on how unprepared the locals are for their arrival. This concern for the symbolic aspect of tourism transforms potential destinations into positional goods.<\/p>\n

None of these problems apply to business travel. Unlike the exotic traveler, who spends as little money as possible while commodifying the natives’ difference, the business traveler is there at the express invitation of the locals. The business traveler’s trip represents a declination from the symbolic to the material. He or she goes not in search of spiritual meaning, or positional goods, not even to “see the sights,” but in search of trade — trade that, in principle, need not be exploitative or voyeristic. There may be competition involved, such as that between foreign firms competing for market share in a foreign market. But unlike the leapfrogging waves of tourists generated by those who travel to earn social capital, this is the sort of competition that works in favor of the locals, since they will then be able to negotiate for a better deal. In the end, it may be that the only “authentic” form of travel is business travel. Everyone else is just a tourist.<\/em> [from the Canadian edition, pp.277-78.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you think of the early adopter travelers who, searching for the distinctively cool and the “authentic,” started what turned into a flood of tourism to Thailand, creating in their wake an industry that left huge numbers of Thai people dependent on tourism as well as ultra-exposed to the December 04 tsunami, you really should stop yourself next time you’re thinking of how to shore up your social capital, and what bragging rights it would give you, if you could snoop out the next and latest recherch\u00e9<\/em> elephant experience in Bali<\/a> or the coolest “wilderness experience” in an Ellesmere Island-like environment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, back to reading Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture<\/a>. The travel brochures will have to wait….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that Joseph Heath’s and Andrew Potter’s book, Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, is readily available in the US (it was originally published by HarperCollins Canada as The Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can’t Be Jammed), and now that many folks are planning their upcoming summer holidays, I thought I’d quote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}