The tourist and the local

The contributions

Historian Stefanie Schaefer argues that a single event can dominate the identity of a place, and in the context of global tourist flows, local identity can trump regional and even national identity. She provides a meticulously researched article on the rhetorical framing of Hiroshima bomb memory. Using archival evidence, she found that making this horrific act of war a symbol of “Peace” was originally suggested by United States military occupational forces in Japan immediately after the war. Hiroshima political elites listened very carefully as the US Command argued the need for a “correct” bomb memory narrative for future international tourism development, especially if there was to be any hope of attracting tourists from the United States. Semiotics 101 teaches us that the meaning of all symbols is arbitrary (“guerre” can mean war just as “war” can mean war) and is based on nothing other than conventional agreements between their users. Once established in conventional usage, however, the original arbitrariness of the symbol is necessarily forgotten. Hiroshima’s success at establishing a global agreement that the bombing should be remembered as a symbol of “Peace” is perhaps the most dramatic contradiction that tourism has ever been called upon to obscure. Schaefer also documents concerns expressed during the early efforts to preserve artifacts of the bombing. There was well-founded official worry that any suggestion that these charred objects were being saved to attract tourists would constitute a kind of reflexive denigration of the seriousness of the event. Hiroshima takes great care to articulate the pretense that their representation of A-Bomb memory is not really for the purpose of attracting tourist dollars. For their part in this charade, the tourists at Hiroshima mainly claim to be peace pilgrims or activists. Schaefer further suggests that heritage tourism (especially at “Dark Tourism” sites) cannot work unless the tourists are enabled to deny, at least to themselves, that they are “tourists.”

Basing her contribution on extensive fieldwork in Northern Ireland, Bree Hocking revises and updates Goffman’s concept of “a veneer of consensus” to show how new regimes of political repression are inaugurated in the name of “tourism.” In considering the official response to the 2012–2013 loyalist protests over limits on flying the British flag at Belfast City Hall, Hocking explores how the tourist gaze was invoked as a “neutral arbiter,” a means to order and regulate allowable expression within post-conflict Northern Ireland. The protests are subsequently assessed as a form of power negotiation, whereby contestation over the right to define the image of a place in both physical and virtual space assumed a quasi-political role. She specifically argues that the definition of the image of a place, an image that might receive currency in global tourist flows, is supplanting prior civic compacts. She finds it necessary to distinguish between “the spatial staging of the tourist city” and the “actual spatial practices of residents,” going on to say that “In many ways, simply to live in such a city is to become a part of the tourist product.” It is evident from her account that under the regime of global tourism, local politics are pressured to become content free. She describes a “political” event that aimed to advance the theme of “no to silence” (without a “yes” to any specific demand) and another “operation sit-in” which was an initiative to get local people to patronize restaurants and cafes catering to tourists.

Igor Tchoukarine provides a historical case comparison of the 1960s development of resort villages on the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia long before the fall of the Iron Curtain. One of the villages was conceived, built, and administered in the framework of Western market principles by Club Med. The other was built by a Czechoslovakian labor union to service the leisure needs of its workers. Tchoukarine provides a richly detailed account of the planning and construction of both villages and the mixed motives and political concerns of the Yugoslavian socialist planners who facilitated the creation of these two very different resorts. The origins of the resorts in the two different and opposed global economic systems, socialism and capitalism, eventually had little discernible effect at the human level where the pleasurable pursuits of Eastern Block and the (mainly French) Western tourists were remarkably similar. Tchoukarine finds that the culture of resort tourism over-rides their opposing political/economic origins. He comments, “this matrix of experiences and services constitutes a common and constant feature that cuts through the ideological distinctions between the (capitalist) Club Med and (socialist) ROH resorts.” The configuration of the resort experience is shaped more by efforts to cater to tourist desire than by their different macro-economic origins. Tchoukarine further argues that the peaceful co-existence of these two kinds of resorts and their commonalities resonates with the larger role of Yugoslavia as an arbiter of East West differences during the Cold War.

Sarah Gothie provides a lively analysis of how, once a place falls under the regime of tourism, life begins to imitate art as a matter of economic necessity. Her case is Anne of Green Gables tourism on Prince Edward Island (PEI). Tourists from all over the world are drawn to PEI to walk in the 100-plus-year-old footsteps of a fictional character, an orphaned girl child with fiery red hair. Gothie documents in detail the ways Lucy Maud Montgomery’s fiction continuously and effectively mediates landscape design and commercial development of PEI, and the embodied tourist performances and identifications that occur in the liminal space between the real place and the fictional character that inhabited it. PEI is now substantially reconfigured to conform to fictional Anne’s perceptions of it. Gothie’s explication of Anne of Green Gables tourism makes evident the powerfully constitutive nature of the tourist experience of the PEI and the many ways the place has made itself into what tourists want it to be. Gothie effectively responds to the challenge made by Tim Edensor (2001) in the inaugural issue of this Journal that “tourist” should be defined as a type of performance, not as a special social role or status. The elaborate “Annefication” of PEI draws in almost every type of tourist (male, female, young, old, from every continent) who are encouraged put on straw hats and false red braids and play Anne in the homes, fields, and farms of her fictional childhood. Gothie convincingly argues that as it is developed for tourism, the region is being framed as a “materialized childhood imaginary.” There may well be something childlike in each moment of a tourist’s first encounter with the other of their imagination not just at PEI but everywhere. Playing at being Anne is not the same as experiencing the actual place she (fictionally) inhabited, but the touristic success of PEI is clearly founded on making both possible.

Louise Ryan’s study of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, focuses on the ways this “Temple of Provocation” is remaking Tasmanian identity. Before the museum was built, Tasmanians believed that “anything important happened elsewhere.” Now they have begun to lose that mind-set. Called the “Getty of the Antipodes,” the museum mounts a permanent collection and special exhibitions intended to shock conventional moral sensibilities. MONA was privately built and houses a private collection, but it has succeeded in leveraging changes in public policy in everything from the definition of cultural institutions to zoning laws and the tax code, all in the name of tourism. Ryan argues that the conservative New Zealanders embrace their intentionally provocative attraction because it has put them on the map of global tourism flows. Ryan’s article raises a number of questions. Does becoming an attraction in the eyes of others change the locals’ self-perception? Does creating an attraction and the arrival of tourists actually change local culture? Ryan provisionally answers “yes” to all of the above. MONA and the tourist attention it has attracted is changing the psyches of the people of Hobart as they express their appreciation for its exhibitions and mingle with outsiders at the rock concerts it sponsors, and so on.

Duane Jethro provides a study of a commercial “Freedom Park” in South Africa. His observations make clear the difficulties facing those who would attempt to forge a link between heritage and tourist perceptions and desires. In this case, manufacturing a heritage attraction by monument construction and marketing can yield mixed results. The noble task Freedom Park set itself may be impossible—creating a popular (and therefore commercially viable) symbol of “inclusive heritage” from the ruins of a historically divided society. While it is intended to celebrate indigenous South African groups and the successful struggle to end apartheid, in practice, it mainly exemplifies a contradiction within tourism between heritage and commercialization. Simply marketing a place as “sacred” and decorating it with words and affective design elements does not necessarily open the way for its entry into the tourist symbolic order. Despite its claims to relevancy in term of “heritage,” it is still functioning mainly in the interest of a private corporation and not primarily in the interests of the people of South Africa or the World (as, for example, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site would function). The capacity of a site to provide symbolic cover for contradiction and conflict may be dependent, first of all, upon its capacity to resolve its own contradictions in favor of heritage, not commercialization. Jethro’s study makes it clear that Freedom Park has yet to confront its own internal contradictions.

Lena Tegtmeyer gives us the case of Detroit now experiencing a growth of “ruin tourism.” Increasingly, European tourists and others are visiting the ruins of Detroit as symbolic of the death of modernity. Tegtmeyer proposes a novel application of my model of “sight sacralization” to explain Detroit’s reframing of industrial failure as touristic success (MacCannell, 1976 [2013]: 43ff). Initially, official Detroit ignored the first tourists who spontaneously arrived to view the ruins of industrial capitalism. As often happens in similar circumstances, an object eventually deemed to be worth seeing was initially discovered by artists, photographers, explorers, poor students who cannot afford commercialized attractions, and well-heeled hipsters with exotic tastes. It was only after the process of sight sacralization was well underway that the potential larger, commercial value of the Detroit ruins were noticed by the Detroit Tourist Bureau and tourism developers. So the last stage of the first “naturally occurring” sight sacralization (mechanical reproduction) became the first (naming) phase of the second (commercial) sacralization process. Tegtmeyer’s main point is that sight sacralization, by and for tourists, has the power to reframe physical evidence of disastrous economic “failure” into neo-liberal service (tourist) economic “success.” As neo-liberal economies increasingly understand and control tourism and its ideological powers, they vastly expand their capacity to make money out of anything whatsoever even abject economic conditions. Tegtmeyer notes that tourism’s capacity to package and commodify and profit from urban decay, abandonment, unemployment, and failed markets does not change the underlying human condition left in the wake of disaster and the tourist interest in disaster.

These articles do not exhaust the ways tourism inflects and re-shapes social compacts at the local level. But, together they cover a very wide range of tourist destinations and behaviors and point the way to a reconsideration of the local in the light of the touristic appropriation of it. They establish that tourism pressures localities to re-define and re-package their historical narratives, morality, politics, and traditional lines of socio-cultural difference. That this type of social change usually goes unnoticed within general social theory only serves to underscore its ubiquity and inevitability. It is occurring everywhere and it is taken for granted even before it occurs. And it is radically under-theorized.

A way forward

Permit me to make a brief preliminary comment on the epistemological implications of this reframing of “the local.”

The major social science traditions apply their methodological and theoretical powers to the causes and results of differences within human communities and population aggregates. They study tensions and oppositions, and life, on either side of the conceptual lines they have drawn between ethnicities, classes, genders, the rich and poor, politics left and right, center and periphery, rural and urban, and so on.

Tourism research deals with a different division, that between the locality (or region) taken as a whole (no matter how it may be divided internally) and the rest of humanity as represented by the desire of the tourist. This is most sharply evident in tourism marketing studies where destination identity and difference are regarded as primary drivers of market share. But it is quietly present in every other kind of tourism research.

The fact that tourist desire is founded on difference (natural and normative) is no longer in dispute. This, combined with historically recent very large increases in global tourist numbers, suggests that localities can no longer be assumed to exist in an innocent state of original unreflected uniqueness. Failure to recognize this will result in all the human sciences finding themselves in the same situation as cultural anthropology and ethnology at the end of the twentieth century, desperately clinging to a disappearing subject matter, searching in vain for new research sites, and problems that are relatively untouched by the arrival of outsiders.

In The Ethics of Sightseeing (MacCannell, 2011: 81 ff.), I suggested the need to interrogate classic assumptions about place and community. Can localities as conceived within the major traditions continue to be regarded as some kind of bedrock of human existence? Can subjectivity continue to be regarded as primarily a function of local, or class, or ethnic origins? It may be theoretical heresy to suggest that locality, class, ethnicity, and gender are now diffuse symbolic effects to be gazed upon and superficially “experienced” as mainly aesthetic examples of human difference or “otherness.” But it is a theoretical heresy that must be committed by tourism researchers whether they acknowledge it or not.

Today, every World City has more annual visitors than residents, with visitors sometimes outnumbering residents by a factor of two or three to one. Our understanding of what is happening at the local level has been blocked because twentieth century social science did not take the trouble radically to question and change the fundamentals of “center” and “periphery,” “place,” “migration,” “class,” “ethnicity,” and so on, in response to transnational mass movements of people, immigrants, refugees, and tourists, the largest movements and physical displacements, and new juxtapositions, in human history. We are still trying to study tourism in the twenty-first century using conceptual tools designed mainly to understand the new identities and dislocations caused by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.

As occurs more often than we may care to admit, artists and activists are out ahead of the social scientists when it comes to dealing with displacement and shifting meanings of “locality.” See, for example, the photographer David Bacon’s (2006) Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration; Lucy Lippard’s (1999) On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place; and (1997) The Lure of the Local, or the canonical work of Dorothea Lange, or the good works of groups like Doctors Without Borders.

Among colleagues in the human sciences, no one has gone further than Tim Oakes in confronting the conceptual challenge of locality today. Oakes (2005) convincingly argues against continuing to conceive of “place” as a bounded entity. He recommends approaching place as the locus of an ongoing dialogue between tourists, locals, and others who have an interest in the “place.” This dialogue produces new cultural forms and subjects. Even if unrealized, every such dialogue contains the possibility for the emergence of newly reflexive subject positions, or new insights about self and other. According to Oakes, the tourist/local dialogue maintains a “critical focus on the forces of determination within which subject formation occurs” (p. 52). But it is also the primary crucible that reconstitutes the modern subject or subjectivity on both sides of the tourist/local line. The modern subject is a space-making subject. It is not a passive consumer of space but an active creator of new kinds of space and spatial meanings.

Oakes is wise enough not to suggest that these new spaces and spatial meanings are morally or aesthetically superior or inferior to the ones they are replacing. They are newly constituted, exponentially increasing in numbers and dispersion, requiring study that is unfettered by adherence to outmoded assumptions about human communities and relationships. We have tried to provide several samples of this kind of study in the articles collected here.