Afterword: Hope amid precarity in tourism

The articles in this special issue of Tourist Studies all tackle the somewhat oppositional, yet interrelated, concepts of precarity and hope in tourism and tourism development. As Kaul and Tuchman-Rosta’s Introduction suggests, while the connection between the two of these terms may not seem clear, they are much like Levi-Straussian binaries that may reveal an underlying structure to the lived experiences of tourism. That is, one may not exist without the other. Structurally, tourism is built on this interplay of precarity and hope. As Nelson Graburn long ago (1977) suggested, tourism is a ritual and the experiences it promises reside in the liminal, or in-between area, of that process. As a rite of passage—which roots or birthright tourism are—participants seek status change through travel. As a rite of intensification—a form of ritual that aims to refresh and renew the social order, such as a holiday or vacation—participants seek rest, relaxation, and a recharge of their proverbial batteries (Di Giovine, 2009a; Graburn, 1977). Yet none of these changes are immediate or certain; tourists must first ritually separate themselves out from their quotidian, workaday life (most often through physical travel to a different place), where they enter a liminal state in which they find themselves “betwixt and between” statuses (Turner, 1969)—outside of their own social worlds but not yet changed or refreshed. Time seems to flow differently in the liminal period, and participants find themselves in a gray area that is precarious yet pregnant with possibility and creativity, full of hope.

“Precarity” means uncertainty or insecurity, a liminal state in which a process can turn out for the better or the worse. Modern tourism epitomizes precarity. On the provider side, investment in tourism development has long promised economic growth, yet, some of the earliest studies have shown that the benefits do not always turn out as imagined. Tourism development schemes often exhibit more vertical economic integration than a trickle-down effect (de Kadt, 1979), a “brain drain” of educated workers rather than an enhanced workforce (Dragolea and Cotîrlea, 2011; but see a counterargument in Jagyasi, n.d.), tourist gentrification that prices locals out of their homes rather than enhances their income and standard of living (Gotham, 2018), and, broadly speaking social inequalities akin to imperialism (Nash, 1977). On the consumer side, despite tourism being seen as a leisure activity, tourists often spend large amounts of time and money, experience physical and emotional discomfort, and sometimes assume great risk to fulfill a rather uncertain and unarticulated set of expectations about their experience on-site. They therefore may encounter what I have called a negative “expectations gap” between positive imaginaries of the destination and their unique embodied on-site experiences (Di Giovine, 2009a: 176; see also Salazar and Nelson, 2016). Indeed, tourism itself is one of the ficklest sectors (see Bott, 2023: 108), as a host of unpredictable elements can cause a destination to boom or bust—from the popularity of a film portraying the site in a positive or negative light to natural or manmade disasters, terrorism and warfare, and even global pandemics.

As several of the pieces in this special issue show, tourism workers are caught in the middle. Studies reveal that tourism and hospitality sectors have the highest levels of “precarious employment”—typically low-paying, seasonal jobs that are unstable and for which workers bear the most risk with limited social benefits or statutory protections (Bhattacharya and Ray, 2021; see also Hewison, 2016; Kalleberg, 2000; Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013; Rodgers, 1989; Vosko, 2010). This precarity, marked with a lack of job security and predictability, has been shown to produce deleterious effects on workers’ physical, mental, social, and economic wellbeing (Robinson et al., 2019; Valente et al., 2023). In this collection of articles, Keegan Krause’s evocative examination of Haitian tourism workers in the Dominican Republic illustrates this quite well. Although Haitian workers have come in part to escape the precarious political and economic conditions of their own country, they encounter another sort of precarious existence, one marked with social marginalization, racism, structural violence, surveillance, and what he calls “occupational exploitation.” The structural inequalities and even structural violence that marks this system is based on Haitians’ own “precarious subjectivities,” he states, of being from the same island but of noticeably different phenotypes, first languages, and irregular documentation. This allows them to be exploited, as occurs in many migrant labor markets. Krause’s paper is an important one, not only for its ethnographic detail that gives voice to largely voiceless actors, but also because it complexifies an already-complex set of anthropological literature that delves “behind the smile” (Gmelch, 2003) of Caribbean tourism workers. Gmelch’s classic eponymous ethnography, as well as A. Lynn Bolles’ more recent Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica (2022), both examine the precarious employment of tourism workers in Barbados and Jamaica, respectively, but these are largely ethnic nationals, many of whom come from rural areas in search of a better life. They both argue that, while hospitality workers in these island nations are quick to flash a broad smile, it is a type of coping mechanism as much as it a symbol of hospitality. While Gmelch’s interlocutors include men and women, Bolles focuses primarily on women, who are particularly precariously employed; in general, although women workers outnumber men in the global tourism industry, they still make 14.7% less than men, and occupy some of the lowest-level jobs, leading to further marginalization (UNWTO, 2019). In addition to providing a poignant look at non-nationals working in the Caribbean tourism sector, Krause’s paper here also complements Bolles’ work in his focus on male immigrant labor, which is both racialized and gendered. Together these ethnographic explorations into Caribbean tourism workers’ struggles show that precarity and hope transcend national, ethnic, class, racial, gender, and legal borders.

Nevertheless, tourism remains one of the largest and fastest-growing global sectors (UNEP, 2024), before and after the pandemic (UNWTO, 2024b), which mobilizes more people than warfare—even in this era of heightened global conflict. The reason is that, despite its uncertain nature, it still promises positive, meaningful, and beneficial outcomes—in short, because stakeholders have hope in its intended benefits.

Something cannot be precarious or insecure, therefore, without hope—without the hint of eventual stability and security, the possibility that things will turn out for the better. Hope is the optimistic expectation of a positive outcome, which, it is believed, may be possible to attain—“hope is about that which is unsettled” (Snow, 2024: 2). There is a future orientation to hope, as well as an emotional component (Gulliford, 2024). Although often promised, the outcome nevertheless is not certain, and it likely will not be easy. Hope can be defined as “the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain” (Livingstone, 2006). We desire—we expect, even—that something will happen, but we are unsure if it will really come to fruition. Hope also conveys the desire that something be true (Cambridge Dictionary, 2024); it is not truth manifest itself. Finally, many definitions of hope include the concept of trust—the firm belief in an outcome, of steadfastly enduring trials of pain amid precarity (Nelson, 1996).

These concepts of hope, furthermore, often emerge in tourism development: that amid the discomfort and uncertainty of a new tourism initiative, waiting it through the end will bear economic fruit. This takes a certain amount of trust, albeit begrudgingly. Celia Tuchman-Rosta’s eloquently crafted article certainly shows this. When the Angkor Archaeological Park was created outside of the provincial center of Siem Reap, Cambodia, the management plan called for the gradual relocation of those who lived within the boundaries of the World Heritage site. Those who settled after the designation were divested of their land, while the older generation (but not their children) were grandfathered in (Di Giovine, 2009a: 345). Although the concept of personal property may not be the same as in Western culture, there is still a feeling of being torn away from a place to which one was intimately connected. “THAT was MY land,” the dance teacher said to Tuchman-Rosta; not “their lands” (emphasis in original). Locals were removed ostensibly for both preservation as well as tourism development purposes, which would intangibly and tangibly benefit all. For the dance instructor and her students, this could mean direct economic benefits, as the government plans to construct more touristic infrastructure, such as a dance theater. This has yet to come to fruition, and her interlocutors’ precarity—their uncertainty as to where they will live, what will become of their land and its memories, and how they will survive—is tempered by their hope that this upending of their lives would enhance their livelihoods. They must patiently endure such difficulty and uncertainty and trust in the government to make good on its promises.

Tuchman-Rosta’s paper also fits in with the literature on the anthropology of tourism in the East and Southeast Asia. As I have discussed for both the Cambodian case of Angkor Archaeological Park (Di Giovine, 2009a) as well as the Vietnamese Buddhist site of Yen Tu (Di Giovine, 2015), removing living people from a cultural or natural heritage site seems to be a common proposed first step by a nation-state when creating a conservation plan for UNESCO. When I was on a Vietnam government-sponsored site visit to Yen Tu Mountain between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, and was matter-of-factly told by the government representative to envision the site without the corrugated metal roofed settlements in its valley, my protests were met with an explanation that, while difficult for the inhabitants facing an uncertain future, in the end it would be of benefit to all—at least, it was hoped (Di Giovine, 2015). But what came to mind for me was Vietnam’s previous treatment of the Montagnard (“mountain people,” primarily Arem and Ma Coong) minority groups in Phong Nha-Ke Bang World Heritage site. When the karst caves and lush forests of the park was named a natural World Heritage site, the locals’ social organization was upended by the banning of the hunting and sale of wild game—considered men’s work—under the aegis of conservation (Di Giovine, 2009a: 241–50). Now that it was a natural World Heritage site, the land had to be preserved from the very people who stewarded it for centuries. The people were given a new trade: work in the tourism industry. However, the promise of tourists only exacerbated an uneven division of labor, as the men were divested in their forestry-centered livelihoods but seemed unwilling to take up tour guiding or ferrying tourists through the park’s cave waterways. Hosting tourists was seen as a woman’s job, linked to their familial and householding tasks. Indeed, anthropologist Feng (2017) discusses the same dynamic at work in a state-funded tourism development program among the Miao (H’mong) ethnic group in China’s Hunan Provence. Feng argues that since hosting and hospitality is “women’s work,” tourism development schemes among the Miao, which are meant to enhance economic viability and quality of life, really create idle, disaffected men and over-worked women. Like Tuchman-Rosta’s paper, precarity and hope emerge at several levels in this literature: on the one hand, administrators are asking locals to trust in the government to secure their wellbeing despite sacrifice, but at the same time, the government is trusting—hoping—that a UNESCO designation will adequately raise awareness among tourists to produce economic benefits for the nation-state. Both are precarious and uncertain, and even UNESCO warns against placing too much trust in a World Heritage designation (de Kadt, 1979; UNESCO, 2008: 8–10).

Yet sometimes when faced with a precarious situation, local people can take control, proactively improving the (still precarious) possibility of a better outcome, as Robert Shepherd shows in his appropriately named book, Faith in Heritage, which examines tourism development and the hope of success at the sacred Chinese mountain, Wutai Shan. When Wutai Shan was designated a World Heritage site, Chinese elites also proposed forced removal of locals from their centuries-old habitations. As locals saw their protests increasingly falling on deaf ears and considered their continued existence within the boundary of the site as increasingly more precarious, they made an equally precarious gamble on what, on the surface, seemed counter-intuitive: invest heavily in a construction boom to enhance the values of their homes before being evicted. They hoped that this practice, called qiang jian (“snatching-constructing”), would result in greater reparations. And it paid off; those residents received up to seven times the original amount of reparations (Shepherd, 2013: 110–2).

Most of the articles here show tourism subjects asserting their agency and attempting to take control of their precarious situations, creating a sense of hope out of hopelessness. In her article, Lizz Mellville looks at Ijuí, Brazil’s Festa Nacional das Culturas Diversificadas (FENADI), a multiethnic festival held for eleven days each October. Fourteen different ethnicities are represented in different pavilions-cum-museums constructed to look like houses. Although intended to enhance economic opportunities for minority ethnic groups in rural communities surrounding this majority-white city, FENADI performs racial-ethnic inequalities. Like Feng’s aforementioned study of ethnic tourism among the Miao in China, Mellville suggests that ethnic tourism itself is built on ontological precarity (Han, 2018)—that is, on structural inequality and the othering certain subjects over others. On the one hand, the very semiotic divisions inherent in this celebration of “multiculturalism” reifies ethnic differences and their depictions (see Asad, 1993). On the other hand, the very spatial placement of these houses, along with their given architectural styles, reveal a hierarchy of power (much like World’s Fairs would do; see for example, Griffiths, 2002). While the “white” German and Italian ethnic houses benefit from wealthy donors and are well-positioned in the festival, pavilions such as the Afro-House exude political, social and economic precarity in its less aesthetically appealing construction and its unfavorable placement. Nevertheless, the Afro-House subtly and deftly negotiates such subservient discourses attributed to them through the material culture displayed inside and the narratives used to contextualize the artifacts.

Likewise, based on long-term fieldwork, Joe Quick’s article longitudinally examines cycles of precarity, hope, and hopelessness among Indigenous laborers living on Quilotoa, a picturesque inactive volcano in Ecuador’s Western Cordillera. When Ecuador abolished the hacienda system which, while exploitative, maintained a level of social and economic stability, the community faced a high level of socio-economic precarity, resulting in destabilizing out-migration of its youth. To combat this, young student artists called upon the hacienda-era’s labor management tool, the minga (a compulsory communal work party), to organize itself into a tourism promotion organization-cum-union called CTC Quilotoa. This provided employment and economic benefits through tourism. However, like Mellville, Quick points out that precarity and hope are geographically distributed; while CTC Quilotoa was successful, similar organizations in neighboring towns were not. Nevertheless, in Quilotoa hope amid precarity was created, and the system endured for a generation—at least until COVID-19.

Perhaps no phenomenon in recent history characterized precarity and hope in tourism more than the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Natural disasters often accentuate feelings of helplessness and precarity, as they are often marked by social disruption, disorganization, and dislocation, which, psychologists argue, produce fear, stress, shock and sometimes long-term trauma (Baum, 1987; Reser, 2004). Spread through travel, tourism, and mobility, it is no wonder that the biggest tourism destinations were most heavily affected by COVID-19 (see Di Giovine and Bodinger de Uriarte, 2021). Global lockdowns dropped tourist numbers precipitously; 2020 saw a total 72% decrease in tourist arrivals—the worst in recorded history (UNWTO, 2024a), and although eventual vaccinations increased the number the travelers the following year, total tourist numbers were still 71% less than 2019. This caused a loss of over 1 trillion dollars each year in export revenues, significantly impacting the GDP of those countries for whom tourism factors heavily (UNWTO, 2024a). This did not simply affect large destinations (like Angkor Wat); many of the papers here discuss the impacts on their smaller-scale field sites as well. On the consumer side, people clearly felt their own senses of fear, desperation, anger, and helplessness in their immobility, and often longed to travel—exhibiting, perhaps, a glimmer of hope during the bleakest time of the pandemic. They employed a number of coping strategies to get through this precarity; coping strategies themselves involve a sense of hope (Folkman, 2013). Once global travel began to reopen, tourism saw a notable surge; on the one hand, this seems to reveal a fulfillment of these hopes and a resolution of such a precarious situation. However, some scholars dubbed it “revenge tourism” (Vogler, 2022), yet another coping strategy (Meenakshi et al., 2024) that suggests further precarity. It also suggests that hope, while essential for coping with stress, is “not a perpetually self-renewing resource” but “dynamic and reciprocal,” marked by “peaks and valleys” (Folkman, 2013: 119).

On the producer side, in retrospect many governments demonstrated remarkable resilience and proactiveness in their crisis mitigation strategies. For example, Quick points out that Ecuador (like many other countries—see Choe and Di Giovine, 2021)—pivoted to domestic tourism, appealing to locals’ desire to travel. Other countries took a productive pause to recalibrate their strategies and plan for a greater diversification, both by developing their domestic tourism offerings as well as creating a more multifaceted tourism product. Tuchman-Rosta discusses, for example, Cambodia’s new Tourism Masterplan, which, while developed immediately prior to the pandemic, took on added weight during COVID-19. The Masterplan included a new identity: “Siem Reap Beyond the Temples,” which, aiming to foster sustainability, focused more on developing nature tourism, since the landscape surrounding the Angkor Archaeological Park boasts beautiful forests and waterfalls, which became beneficial to visit during the pandemic, when people had to safely aggregate outdoors. It also enhanced cultural tourism such as Apsara dance performances.

Yet in both cases unintended consequences arose. Although the government’s “Me quedo en Eucador” (“I’ll stay in Ecuador”) campaign was widespread throughout the country, Quick notes that it failed to generate significant tourism, and did not stave eventual out-migration. The lack of tourists was so prolonged, and the sense of hope so diminished because of an already precarious situation, Quick says, that locals left Quilotoa first for the cities and coastal plantations, and then abroad, to New York and Chicago; of course, the journey of an undocumented migrant is itself extremely precarious, as Jason De Léon has shown in his impactful monograph, The Land of Open Graves (2015). And Tuchman-Rosta’s Apsara dance practitioners from the Angkor Archaeological Park area still are left largely divested of their land, with promises of new economic benefits that are yet to come to fruition.

I do, however, want to end of a hopeful note. The success of tourism should not only be measured in tourist numbers or dollars, though they are more easily quantified. I have argued that resilience and revitalization in tourism development occurs at a socio-psychological level by inculcating a sense of valorization (Di Giovine, 2009b, 2010). That is, successful tourism projects often produce a feeling of unquantifiable value among locals that they have something worthwhile, worth visiting and worth safeguarding for the future. As the mayor of Pietrelcina, a small village in southern Italy that is the birthplace of St. Padre Pio—which sees only a tenth of the pilgrims that Pio’s shrine elsewhere counts—told me, the presence of pilgrims, journalists, tourists, and yes, even anthropologists valorizes them and their special connection to the saint. This causes them to want to work collectively to preserve their town, enhance their hospitality, and create new avenues for tourism: “It’s something so natural and obvious, like when you realize that your clothes are a little older, you buy new clothes to be more presentable,” the mayor told me. They reconstructed the town “not only for the dignity of the place’s inhabitants, but also to give a more dignified welcome—to show respect—to those who visit. So that our territory can have dignity” (qtd. in Di Giovine, 2010: 280). UNESCO, too, argues that it is uncertain how much a World Heritage designation will generate economic benefits, however, it is the valorization of being counted as “universal human value” that entices states-parties to “offer up” their own historical sites for this rather restrictive list: “The prestige that comes from being a State Party to the [World Heritage] Convention and having sites inscribed on the World Heritage List often serves as a catalyst to raising awareness for heritage preservation” (UNESCO, 2008: 9). As many of the authors intimate here, although tourism by nature is fickle, and both tourism development and tourism employment are quite fraught, it may just be this valorization—this sense that a community’s stories are important to hear, and its culture is important to experience—that provides an immeasurable level of hope during these precarious times.