Abstract
Since the early 1960s, a growing number of young Britons have taken advantage of cheap international flights to spend some of their holiday time in European resorts built around an accentuated version of domestic nocturnal economies. In this context the first few pages of Briggs’ book cite a range of statistics indicating the sheer prevalence of deviance and risk-taking common among young British tourists in the Balearic resorts. Half of all such holidaymakers, for instance, claim sustained or recurrent drunkenness and significantly elevated levels of illegal drug use, both of which contribute to a range of harms amongst young foreign tourists including poisonings, heart attacks and physical injuries resulting from poolside accidents, stumbling into traffic or falling from hotel balconies.
Briggs’ explanation of his theoretical framework begins with the identification of a media and academic discourse too quick to portray deviance and risk-taking as either ‘pathological faults of … individuals … and/or … some sort of dated subcultural reaction to … social position’ (p. 13). The latter approach in particular really seems to drive Briggs’ work as he rejects the assumption that ‘hedonism is a means of self-actualisation’ (p. 35) in favour of questioning the beliefs, values and ideological preconceptions that drive people to hedonic excess. Where large parts of criminology have a tendency to present low-level deviance as a reassertion of individual freedoms in opposition to hierarchical structure and its attempts at social control, Briggs takes more of a critical realist approach to the relationship between holiday deviation and dominant social ideals.
What’s missing from the prevailing criminological narrative, Briggs suggests, is any adequate and convincing explanation for why British holidaymakers seem more than willing to accept all manner of pains and humiliations as part of their Ibiza experience. In the course of the book, members of the research cohort recount humiliating contact with sex workers, self-defecation, sexual harassment, all manner of personal injury and alcohol-fuelled blackouts. The eighth chapter, for instance, introduces the reader to ‘Mark’ whose first appearance sees him stumbling along the pavement in bare feet with a torn ear and blood running down his shirt. Later on, when Briggs gets a chance to talk to him, Mark explains that a bouncer bit off his ear and he has spent three weeks homeless in Ibiza after blowing £2000 on drink, drugs and club entry in a matter of days. Nevertheless, he still claims to be ‘living the dream’ (p. 186).
This pattern of conviction and belief winning out over practical experience is repeated throughout the volume. While the dominant representation of Ibiza is that of an adult theme park allowing for the fullest expression of individual freedom, Briggs’ research subjects collectively fail to articulate exactly what is so enjoyable, precisely how what they do on holiday is functionally different from weekends at home or indeed the actual physical benefit of spending hundreds of pounds on a single evening in one of Ibiza’s ‘superclubs’. In nearly all cases the stock response is absolute conviction that Ibiza is ‘the place to be’ even though actually being there frequently results in ‘return[ing] home injured, with an STI, penniless and feeling existentially hollow’ (p. 184).
The net effect of this apparent disconnect between perception and reality is that the prevailing representation of Ibiza quickly starts to resemble nothing so much as a naturalised ideology fundamentally incompatible with the lives and experiences – if not convictions – of the research cohort. What these holidaymakers get up to is not so much, Briggs suggests, about the enactment of autonomous subjectivity as a clear illustration of near total allegiance to a monolithic libertarian ideology. This assertion alone brings Briggs’ work into an automatic intellectual affinity with certain quarters of contemporary continental philosophy far more than the aridly predictable libertarian assumptions of preceding criminological analysis. The most prominent influence is that of Slavoj Žižek and his assertion that the primary ethical affiliation of post-industrial western peoples is an aspirant fantasy of consumer solipsism. In Briggs’ work this boils down to the suggestion that the supposed ‘liberation’ of Ibiza is not about throwing off the shackles of home so much as fully submitting to a dominant ideology in a way that creates scope for all manner of harms.
What Briggs has produced, in other words, is a clear-sighted, razor sharp and entirely unsentimental ethnography of British tourism that cuts through the rather old-fashioned radical libertarian bluster of far too much criminological research. Instead of automatically resorting to a language of creative resistance and the reclamation of identity through enjoyable ‘deviation’, he shows how these concepts have become part and parcel of a dominant ideology that moulds social interaction into forms that facilitate the circulation of capital whilst promoting a suite of harms in the lives of ‘true believers’.