Abstract
When fetching the complimentary copy of Tourism in Southeast Asia: Challenges and New Directions at the Brunei Darussalam post office, I was asked to open the parcel in front of a custom’s agent, standard procedure in this small country on the Island of Borneo in South East Asia. The agent flipped through the pages to make sure the content did not transgress the Islamic values and beliefs undergirding Bruneian identity. When the brief inspection ended, she handed me the book and with a simple smile said, ‘Bali!’
Now, I am not sure if speed reading is common in Brunei since I have been here for only a few months. But the agent’s method, which I must say lacked the kind of rigor we academics come to expect in a book review, uncovered the intellectual nub of this book: Bali. Not all, in fact not even half of the articles in this edited volume focus on the island of Bali, unique for its hybridized Hindu culture situated within the Republic of Indonesia, a country having more Muslims than any other in the world. Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and certain other islands of Indonesia are also dealt with here. But Bali looms.
The bombings of 2002 and 2005 are the temporal demarcations used in a few articles to measure recent changes in tourism and development in South-east Asia. Others offer what seems an obligatory account of the attacks, and then they set off to explore more or less tangential issues. This before-and-after prospect is, according to the editors, one justification for updating and expanding our knowledge of Tourism in Southeast Asia (1993), the title of their earlier book. After several turns, the Bali that looms becomes memorabilia of the mind.
There is another Bali between the lines in the chapters of this volume. For sometime now, the island’s rich cultural and environmental heritage has drawn in explorers, merchants, travellers and now a subject we call ‘tourist’. This rich swirl of activity has also made Bali the Costa Rica of the east – an open air research laboratory for the pursuit of academic knowledge. The editors acknowledge the unevenness of research on South-east Asia with the weight of the anthropological gaze tipping the scale towards this small island, but they offer only a suitable spread of information and findings elicited from a few destinations. They intend to cross disciplinary boundaries and erase existential borders even to reach a land where the notion of tourist becomes synonymous with researcher. This perhaps is the lesson learned from years of surveilling Bali’s swirl.
The introductory chapter written by the editors gives an extraordinary overview of the academic literature on tourism in South-east Asia. They begin with a description of their initial book on the subject which uniquely reaches out for key themes dangling from a nascent (de)constructionist social research agenda and places them within the context of tourism development, host/guest relations and various categories of tourism. Case studies seize on themes such as representation, identity, ethnicity, sustainability, etc., not normally belonging to the intellectual territory of tourism studies, which is always more inclined towards outcomes concerning management, marketing and development. In both the earlier and present volumes, the business orientation is disabled even though most of the contributors to the present reside in departments of business management where they now explore conceptual protrusions – hybridization, translocation, deterritorialization, (in)authenticity, real-imagined and globalization – from earlier territorial gains. These themes, rooted in sociocultural tensions, are what make both volumes different from others written during the intervening years.
Still, the book wobbles a bit because only a few essays can steady the intentions of the editors by pressing down with new angles and fresh insights. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the aim is not only to consider the multiple discourses invested in contests for tourist places and landscapes but also to muster an array of academic perspectives to better understand tourism in a region, even if their specifications were designed and applied elsewhere.
Some chapters are descriptive as they peel back the layers of political economies affecting tourism in say Vietnam (Bennett) and Laos (Harrison and Schipani). Others examine the same layers through a bifocal lens of sustainable development and natural landscape (Borchers, Cochrane, Parnwell); their diagnosis for certain tourist destinations – ecocentrism. Prognosis is long-term sustainability but only if these natural places and landscapes are first and foremost developed, managed and sustained through local grass-roots initiatives and know-how.
‘From Kebalian to Ajeg Bali’ (Picard) reveals inherent problems with ‘grassroots’. The Bali bombings, the Kuta Bombing in particular, are a moment in history that changes the political culture of Bali and initiates a drive to redefine the essence of Balinese identity. Through a discourse analysis from a scholar with a profound understanding of Bali’s history and culture, the author teases out the tensions and contradictions of a post-colonial present and recognizes but bemoans the cultural essentialism taking hold under the slogan of Ajeg Bali. The culture of cultural tourism in Bali has become circumscribed and fortified, and revenues channelled to the most authentic of Balinese. I would say the trauma of the bombings, with its cache of pain and fear, has reached the heartland. The Balinese have found catharsis in expelling the ‘Other’ – that which should not have happened becomes that which does not belong. The purge cleans the way for a return to an idealized, imagined community – a golden age before the traumatic event.
Other studies steady the wobble. ‘Indonesian Souvenirs as Micro-Monuments to Globalization and Modernity …’ (Adams) is a short, fascinating essay that momentarily freezes and displays the dynamic and ephemeral intersections where culture, politics and economics bring souvenirs into existence. You will never again look at your collection in the same way. Romantics are warned! This warning is also appropriate for the two essays centring on sex tourism in the region. One is a taboo glimpse of the feminine desires of European women touring the beaches of Indonesia (Dahles). Romance wafts in the air but the ‘Kuta boys’ are jacks of all tourist trades hustling a living through the mundane and dreaming of being taken to finer lands by a knight in a shiny white bikini, so to speak.
Similarly, in ‘Culture and Gender Politics in China–Vietnam Border Tourism …’ (Chan), certain cities along the borderlands of these countries are sexual and sensual playgrounds where the boundary separating victim/victimizer dissolves, and the enchanting epic dream of many working Vietnamese women of finding love with a relatively wealthy Chinese man rarely materializes. The women continue to play their seductive games, though while increasing their personal wealth and escaping the perceived torment of Vietnamese wedlock. If the borderlands are grey, the portrayal is brilliant.
‘Is the beach party over?…’ (Hampton and Hampton) asks the authors examining the impact of marine tourism on a coral reefs skirting Gili Trawangan, Indonesia. The study neatly applies a holistic approach, the forte of integrative geography that aims to relate geophysical processes with cultural ideas and practices. Yet, it is also evidence of the existential dilemma faced by tourists and their hosts in an age of merging, mixing and border crossing:
If Gili Trawangan is viewed through western eyes, then allowing the virtually un-checked growth of tourism, with its resultant environmental damage, appears to be somewhat myopic and short–termist. However, if seen through the eyes of a Gili Trawangan islander perhaps facing real hardship and uncertainty, then a western frame of reference becomes at least problematic. (Hampton and Hampton: 306)
What precise direction do our academic qua touristic eyes see, read and write from?
The beach party is just beginning in Brunei Darussalam apropos no mention in the book. Maybe one day we will not be flipping for Bali anymore.