Tourism and Culture in an Unequal World
A gaggle of tourists constantly crowds the rear of Notre Dame cathedral, each one eagerly awaiting her turn to snap a photo of the model of the church that sits enclosed in a glass case. Virtually oblivious to the medieval architecture surrounding them, the travelers quickly snap their shot of the miniature before shuffling past their fellow pilgrims on their way out of the church. Some certainly admire the Gothic arches and ancient stained glass, but most seem content to capture an image of the prepared reproduction and move on to the next site on their itineraries. These 21st century tourists embody the capitalist ethos by conceptualizing themselves as consumers of commodities rather than viewers of unique genius. The prepackaged model allows them to store an image of the entire building in a single photograph that can be taken home and shown to others as proof that one "saw" Notre Dame. The size of the actual cathedral becomes its detriment in a commodified world, since the viewer cannot easily frame a picture of the entire church. Whereas visitors used to stand in awe of the the craftmanship and beauty of works of art, today's traveler quickly takes a photograph, preferably of a more easily captured miniature recreation, to add to her collection of "sites", and moves on to the next scene. Conditioned to equate value with ownership, the Western bourgeoisie tourist disconnects herself from the subjective experience of travel in an insatiable quest to possess a piece of her destination. The ubiquity of cameras fuels this obsession with the tangible image, but many tourists today end up with photographs of places that they have scarcely seen. More dangerously, wealthy Western travelers to the developing world caricature and exploit other cultures in their quest for a commodified version of their experience. Only a more fair global economy can facilitate a truly free and authentic exchange of peoples and places.
Pre-modern tourism revolved around holy sites. The pilgrims that flocked to churches and historical places sought a closer connection with the divine. Though they often took home physical reminders of their journeys, the spiritual experience directed their purpose. Church and temporal powers encouraged a certain level of pilgrimages, since once-on-a-lifetime trips by the serfs hardly threatened the feudal economy. Indeed, religious pilgrimages reinforced the prestige and wealth of the existing authorities, and the benefits of a pious underclass outweighed the lost productivity of a single pilgrimage.1 The Industrial Revolution ended the feudal "pilgrimage tourism" in two main ways; it codified free-time and working-time, and it attached primary value to ownership of commodities instead of experience. Between the 1820s to the 1960s, that is, the height of the factory-based economy in the West, leisure and consumption replaced salvation and piety as the motivators for travel, but economic disparity limited vacations to the managerial class.2 . The post-Industrial economies that took shape in the 1960s facilitated more travel for the Western masses, but the bourgeoisie values of the 19th and early 20th centuries, coupled with image-taking technologies, informs the commidity-fetishism that underlies contemporary tourism.
Technological and economic innovations following the Second World War (e.g., air travel, the World Bank) precipitated the development of mass tourism in the 1960s. Yet just as world travel belonged exclusively to the elite class in the Industrial Age, tourism starting the the second half of the 20th century is virtually limited to citizens of the First World. Globalization shifted manufacturing to the developing world and radically altered the economies in the West.3 Though many former factory workers in the West find themselves struggling in low wage service jobs, the middle class has more time and credit to see the world. Freed from the constraints that first stage industrialization (i.e., the 19th and early 20th century factory economy) imposed on their parents, today's Western tourists consider traveling a right (Ostergren and Rice, p.341). Most European travelers stay within the Continent, and France attracts the most tourists overall (Ostergren and Rice, p. 342), but many people are increasingly looking for cheaper alternatives outside the West. The harmless obsession with image taking and consumption in the West takes on a more sinister form when it commodifies culture, race, and gender in the developing world.
Mass tourism from the West began when production shifted to the global South, and has intensified just as global economic disparities grow wider. Many people in the destination countries look to the tourist economy as an alternative to poverty and sweat-shop labor, often at the expense of cultural and personal dignity. Within Europe, cheap prices are drawing more and more travelers to eastern and southern European countries like Romania and Turkey. My recent sojourn to Istanbul revealed the tension between a country's economic reliance on tourism and the people's annoyance with the incessant inflow of wealthier and culturally ignorant outsiders. Dozens of salesmen lined the streets beckoning me with their Turkish carpets, porcelain, and cloth. Trying to stoke my own commodity-fetishism, they claimed that a trip to Istanbul would not be complete with an expensive souvenir from their shop. Though all were outwardly kind when I declined their offers, I undoubtedly sensed frustration as they pushed me out of their stores to make room for their next prospective client. The pressure to commodify culture is strong within Europe, but the economic disparities between the West and the developing world lead to more egregious examples of this phenomenon.
Colonial propaganda ingrained the European mind with images of the exotic and mysterious qualities of the non-Western world.4 Today, the West's latent myths about the "Other" world combine with the urge to take home pieces of one's travels has led to bizarre cultural practices in the developing world. Driven by economic necessity, people in some poorer countries try to draw tourists by simulating the West's distorted vision of their "authentic" culture. In Cuba, for example, licensed actors dress up in "traditional" garb to attract rich tourists. For a fee, the Western traveler can get a picture with a "real old fashioned" Cuban.5 The tourists' love of artificially framed pictures , as more benignly displayed at Notre Dame, takes on a personal character here. To assuage their guilt about the economic inequality that fosters this environment, many tourists tell themselves that they are pumping money into the economy. Taking photographs with simulated and exoticized foreigners does not alter the economic system that creates these disparities, though, but rather reinforces the "neoliberal commodification (that) creates pleasures but also poverty, and, as ever, social inequality is raced and gendered, with women and people of color inexorably "winning" the race to the bottom."6 Indeed, women and minorities are most victimized in "sex tourism", which is the logical end of cultural commodification. In this perverse industry, men from wealthy countries travel to poorer areas to fulfill fantasies about obediant and exotic foreign women. Few would argue that participation in this exchange helps the women involved, yet this practice is merely an extension of the commodification of cultures endemic to the present global political economy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with tourism, and even the West's obsession with ownership can express itself benignly. Unfortunately, the one-directional, global north-to-south flow of travelers testifies to the unequal system on which the present tourism industry depends. Europeans may consider vacations to be a human right, but for the millions of people in the developing world without the means to leave their villages, "tourism" only means showing the Western travelers what they want see. The free flow of individuals across continents and cultures can only improve our understanding of the diversity of human nature, but such a scenario will not exist until there is an equal exchange of travelers between north and south. Solving global inequality is a herculean task and beyond the scope of this paper, but the enormity of a problem does not excuse participation in it. The first step toward tackling global inequality is to recognize its existence, so instead of snapping photographs of "the natives", Western travelers should question the conditions that force them into the costumes in the first place.
1The notion of lost productivity is something of an anachronism in the pre-wage fuedal economy. Feudal lords calculated their wealth in terms of the size of their land and the number of serfs working it, rather than the hourly or daily productivity of the peasants, so they allowed the rare and temporary pilgrimage because they likely did not account for its effects on their wealth or prestige.
2Though progressive politicians opened up royal parks for broad public use in the 19th century and facilities like Battersea Park offered day trips to the working class (Ostergren and Rice, p. 344), tourism in the contemporary sense, i.e., extended visits to foreign locales, remained the exclusive right of the elite (Ostergren and Rice, p. 345).
3In depth analysis of the world political economy lies outside the scope of this paper. I here refer to the general trend of basic manufacturing to places like China, Mexico, and Southeast Asian countries and away from the global North.
4Humanities has established postcolonial studies as a subfield to analyze this phenomena. Danial J. Sherman's article "The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism" in French Historical Studies (Vol. 23 No. 4) 2000 pp. 707-729, provides a good literature review.
5Maki Tanaka. "Tourism Development in Socialist Cuba: Old Havana and Its Residents". 2005 Summer Research Report, 2005. University of California, Berkeley. Center for Latin American Studies. Accessed at http://www.clas.berkeley.edu:7001/Research/graduate/summer2005/tinker/Tanaka/index.html
6Joe Perry. "Consumer Citizenship in the Interwar Era: Gender, Race, and the State in Global-Historical Perspective." Journal of Women's History (Vol. 18, No. 4) 2006. pp. 157-172
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