Abstract
This edited collection is a welcome addition to the growing body of research on slow travel and tourism. The organizing logic of the book rests on a mobilities perspective, which the editors invoke not only to hold together the wide range of tourism practices discussed in the various chapters but also to highlight the desires, meanings, and sensibilities associated with “slowness.” Although the editors refrain from offering an explicit definition of “slow tourism,” the questions they pose in the introduction set the book on a particular path: “What effects do slow mobilities have and how do they evoke different ways of engaging with people and place?” And, how are we “‘moved’ by slow travel experiences in ways that lead us to question, connect with and desire to know the world differently?” (p. 2). Clearly, slow tourism is about something other than the reading on the speedometer. Taking us on journeys through Australia, Brazil, Canada, Fiji, France, India, Japan, Peru, and the United Kingdom, and hitchhiking across Europe, the chapters that make up the book address slow tourism not just in terms of speed or movement but also as a set of “experiences and mobilities” laden with social meanings and possibilities.
Following the introduction are 16 chapters organized into four parts. The first part, “Positioning Slow Tourism,” contains three chapters that reflect on the temporal, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of slow travel and tourism. In Chapters 2 and 3, Howard and Moore focus on pilgrimage and the search for the “good life,” respectively, to highlight the alternative temporalities and moral implications of moving slowly. Drawing on a range of classical and contemporary thinkers, including, inter alia, Aristotle, Simmel, Weber, Heidegger, Virilio, and Beck, these opening chapters establish a theoretical foundation that is useful not just for positioning subsequent chapters but also for theorizing slow tourism more broadly. In Chapter 4, Wearing, Wearing, and McDonald extend this conceptual discussion in their promotion of “slow ecotourism” as an agent for environmental sustainability and positive social change.
The second part of the book, “Slow Food and Sustainable Tourism,” explores the provenance of slow tourism from the Slow Food Movement. Tourism scholars have long been fascinated by the rich intersection of food and mobility (Gibson, 2007; Long, 2004), and from these chapters, we see slow consumption extending into a variety of lifestyle mobility practices. Hall’s discussion in Chapter 5 focuses on anticonsumerism, suggesting that the Slow Food Movement bears important lessons for more sustainable hospitality and tourism arrangements. However, Hall warns, “Slow” requires critique lest it becomes “yet another marketing slogan for screwing the Earth” (p. 65). In Chapter 6, Parasecoli and Abreu e Lima introduce the notion of “sustainable gastronomy.” Focusing on the Brazilian coastal town of Paraty, the authors illustrate the way a slow and sustainable approach to food tourism engages tourists as co-producers of living culinary practice rather than as distanced spectators of museumized or exploited cultural traditions. Lipman and Murphy also focus on agricultural practices, namely, Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) programs in Australia that integrate tourists into rural areas. In Chapter 7, they note that few WWOOFers consider themselves to be “slow travelers,” despite an overlapping ethos of anticonsumerism and environmental sustainability that informs both practices.
Part 3, “Slow Mobilities,” introduces us to four quite different examples of slow tourism: cycling, wandering, hitchhiking, and canal boating. In these chapters, slow tourism is framed as a way of relating to the self and to the world. In Chapter 8, Fullagar’s ethnographic account of women’s cycle touring in Queensland highlights the way the embodied journey of cycling “creates a different temporal relationship with local places and cultures” that contrasts with masculine narratives of speed and racing (p. 100). The sense of self-transformation that Fullagar observes among female cyclists is echoed in Chapter 9, where Tiyce and Wilson discuss independent travelers wandering in Australia. Like Fullagar’s cyclists, these wanderers see their mobility practices as a different way of being in the world, one that resists the fast-paced hyperconsumerism of modern life. Instead of striving toward a future goal, these wanderers live in the moment and go with the flow. This idea of traveling slowly as a way of taking control of time, rather than the other way around, is one that motivates the hitchhikers O’Regan describes in Chapter 10. It is somewhat surprising to see a chapter here on hitchhiking, reliant as it is on fast-paced car culture. However, as O’Regan describes it, hitchhiking reconfigures motorways not as conduits of seamless mobility but as sites of turbulence, friction, fragmentation, and inconvenience—not to mention hours and hours of waiting. Similar to the wanderer, the hitchhiker is after freedom and “an individual desire to inscribe one’s own rhythm on the world” (p. 128). In this case, hitchhikers see their mobility practices as a way of connecting to other people and as a form of resistance against the isolation of private automobility and the placelessness of globalization. The idea that speed produces a distanced and dehumanizing relation to people and places emerges as well in Chapter 11, where Fallon introduces us to yet another mode of slow traveling: the canal boat. In contrast to the disengagement wrought by speed, canal boaters moving along at 4 mile/h create a new space–time relationship that allows for more environmentally sensitive and authentic connections to nature and people.
The final part of the book, “Slow Tourism Places,” includes five case studies of slow tourism destinations. In these chapters, we see how various places become meaningful destinations not only through their “place myths” but also through their “pace myths,” from the hectic pace of urban Japan to clock-defying “Fiji time” (Germann Molz, 2010; Shields, 1991). This section begins with de la Barre’s discussion of “Yukon time” in Chapter 12. Due to the geographical remoteness of Canada’s Yukon, this area is perceived as existing in “a different time dimension,” where time slows down and even moves backward (p. 157). In one sense, this search for an alternative timescape promotes antispeed, antimaterialist values. In another sense, de la Barre argues that “wilderness time” is deployed as a problematic tourism marketing strategy, serving to “fix” the Yukon and First Nations people as “pre-modern” while also romanticizing limited physical infrastructure and unpredictable access to amenities as charming aspects of remote destinations. In Chapter 13, Murayama and Parker engage with Japan’s reputation as the “fastest nation” in the world and describe the emerging trend of urban “U-turners” eager to experience a slower pace of life in Japan’s countryside. Like the pilgrims, cyclists and wanderers profiled in earlier chapters, these “U-turners” associate the “good life” with slowing down. In response to this trend, regional tourism agencies are now promoting slow tourism as a way of opening up rural destinations for tourist experiences.
Chapter 14, by Gibson, Pratt, and Movono, also follows the tourist’s search for the “good life,” this time via a sustainable tourist development project called Tribewanted on the Fijian island of Vorovoro. Tribewanted is a hybrid online/offline eco-community that apes the backpacker/volunteer/adventure tourism market. Tourists participate not only by immersing themselves physically in the island community but also by connecting to other tribe members via online social networking sites. Tribewanted poses interesting questions for slow tourism researchers who are interested in the paradoxical role that high-speed information and communication technologies play in shaping the meanings and experiences of slowness. Groenendaal explores the case of Dutch entrepreneurs who move to France in Chapter 15. Her description of this particular circulation of Dutch migration to France hints at the potential links between slow tourism and lifestyle mobilities more generally. In Chapter 16, Singh wraps up this section with a discussion of slow tourism in India. Singh highlights the specific historical legacies and social structures that have shaped what is known as “slow tourism” in India today. Sounding a common refrain on alternative tourism practices, Singh argues that slow tourism holds promise—if it is developed properly. However, he also asks an important question: “Is all slow travel beneficial?” To which, I would add: “For whom?”
Indeed, as the editors point out in Chapter 17, slow tourism is rife with such contradictions and complexities. In this final chapter, they conclude by underscoring some of the paradoxes that have emerged throughout the book. Perhaps the most obvious paradox is the multimodal aspect of most forms of slow travel. Slow tourism often relies on other systems of high-speed travel: automobiles and motorways; airplanes that deliver tourists to their slow destinations; or high-tech, high-speed communication technologies. The editors acknowledge that it is precisely these contradictions and paradoxes that invite further critical attention from tourism scholars across disciplines, and I agree. However, I would add another paradox to this research agenda, one that emerges in the book in a less conspicuous way. This is the paradox of praxis. The editors note in the introduction, and again in the conclusion, that they are drawn to practices of slow tourism not just out of academic interest but also as part of their quest to embrace a slow ethos in all parts of their personal and professional lives. Nevertheless, how do we embrace a slow ethos while also critiquing it, and our privileged position to it?
Just on the heels of reading Slow Tourism, I picked up Carl Hoffman’s (2010) travel memoir The Lunatic Express. In this book, Hoffman chronicles his 5-month journey on the world’s most dangerous—and, not incidentally, slowest—transportation. Hoffman describes ferries in Indonesia, buses in South America, and trains in India that take days and days to cover the distance an airplane could chew up in mere hours. Unlike the slow tourists described in Slow Tourism, however, Hoffman’s fellow passengers have little choice in the matter. With safe flights and regulated railways unaffordable to most of the world’s travelers, the slow ferry or bus is the only means of transportation available. Also striking is Hoffman’s assessment of the environmental impact of slow travel. His vivid depictions of noxious bus fumes, lacking sanitation, and waves of Styrofoam containers floating in the ferry’s wake put paid to the notion that slow tourism is easy on the environment. These passengers, among the poorest people in the world, are not rejecting a hegemony of materialism and speed, they are just trapped on the other side of it.
The authors of the chapters in Slow Tourism might counter that it is the ethos, not the pace itself, that earns mobility practices the label of slow tourism. In which case, these bus and ferry rides may be slow without counting as “Slow.” But perhaps we should be more careful about clarifying what it is we are talking about here. I see the editors’ reluctance to define slow travel as both a strength and a weakness of the book. On the one hand, it invites a broad and ecumenical approach to slow tourism that makes room for everything from pilgrimages to canal boating and everywhere from the coast of Brazil to the countryside of Japan. On the other hand, a clear definition would give us a foothold from which to critique our own assumptions. Without it, the chapters revolve around an implicit understanding of slow tourism as a kind of postmaterialist, anticonsumerist, eco-friendly, and authentic mobility practice, but the book leaves these defining qualities largely uninterrogated. In order for slow tourism to achieve the goals attached to it by tourists and researchers alike, we must not romanticize slowness, but politicize it. Readers will find that some chapters more than others take slow tourism as an opportunity to develop a politics of pace alongside the touristic quest for the “good life.” For example, throughout the book, some authors hint obliquely at the ways in which the risks and pleasures of slow travel are differentiated by gender, race, and class. Fullagar’s discussion of female cyclists, de la Barre’s critique of the way slow tourism marketing initiatives “fix” First Nations people in place, and Singh’s acknowledgement that “slow travel may appear to be biased towards middle class tourists” (p. 221) stir up questions about power, access, control, and inequality. Readers looking for closure on these questions will not find it here. What they will find, however, is a collection of empirically detailed chapters that, by making visible the deeply paradoxical nature of slow tourism, opens up many avenues for further critical research.