When a tourist goes to a foreign place, they consume exoticness produced by the native people. Is exoticness an infinite resource that the underdeveloped world exploits, or is there a marginal cost to producing more of it?

One possibility is that tourism is a force for globalization: tourists bring homogeneous, dominant culture with them. Starchitect Arthur Erickson thought so:

Worldwide tourism looms on the horizon as the gravest threat to human cultures – a threat because its ultimate result will be to destroy the very reason for its existence – the variety and interest of the world at large.

The tourist, far from being a sensitive explorer, transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease decimating whatever values existed before.

…at some future time [tourism] may even be considered crimes against mankind.

But this assumes that tourists seriously engage with natives. I think that even backpackers mostly consume exoticness without bringing much of their own culture to the table.

Tourists don’t just consume any exoticness offered to them; they have specific preferences. They arrive with expectations and comfort zones (yes, even backpackers). What they consume is filtered through their existing beliefs. I know this because tourists tell standard narratives from it-was-so-convenient-having-prepaid-drinks to shopping-in-that-market-made-me-realize-how-much-we-take-for-granted.

In order to get maximum tourist dollars, native people perform exoticness (within comfort zones). Their cultures become inauthentic, hyperreal. As George Monbiot says:

[Tourism] extracts the differences between our land and culture and those of the nations we visit, until they scarcely exist. Remote and romantic beaches become mundane resorts. Remote and remarkable people tailor their culture to suit those who pay for it, until, in the words of a Maasai man, ‘We have ceased to be what we are; we are becoming what we seem.’

The inauthenticity opens these cultures up for globalization. Tourists, in consuming exoticness, deplete that resource. If you think diversity is morally good, then tourism is bad.

• don’t get married
• be your career
• be realistic about your looks but put effort into looking better
• enjoy sex
• get your boyfriends to buy you things

This pragmatic feminism was heavily criticized by 2nd-wave feminists but Brown’s work can now be interpreted as 3rd-wave feminism. But just because it’s on the 3rd-wave spectrum doesn’t mean it’s entirely positive, as Naomi Wolf notes (emphasis mine):

[Individualist 3rd-wave feminism is] ahistorical and apolitical… the world isn’t going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered…a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make…What we lack is a grass-roots movement that will drive the political will. “Lipstick” or lifestyle feminism won’t produce that movement alone.

Veer explores America’s fast-growing bicycling culture by profiling five people whose lives are inextricably tied to bicycling and the bike-centric social groups they belong to. The film follows these characters over the course of a year, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their personal struggles and triumphs. Veer examines what it means to be part of a community, and how social movements are formed.

There are two movies here. The bleeding-heart documentary (which has nothing to do with “culture” or social groups):

• Steven Kung runs an organization that teaches bike workshops; there’s some theme of international touring that gets mentioned but never explained
• Gabe Graff teaches bike safety to kids: he is very earnest and never shown interacting with other adults
• Scott Bricker lobbies the state government (although I’m not sure how a non-Oregonian was supposed to figure this out) on pro-bike traffic laws

And the journalistic look at the narrative of Portland bike culture: The zoobombers form the core of Portland’s bike social circle. Around them is built a summer bike festival. Lauren Pederson and some zoobombers got together to form the women’s ironic dance troupe The Sprockettes, which is prominently featured in the summer bike festival. Gabe Tiller, king of the zoobombers, and his queen* do a bunch of stuff at the summer festival and are also key players at the alternative winter bike festival.

I think the two themes were mashed into one documentary because the community organizers are too boring and the enthusiasts are too vapid to stand alone. The editing is very tight, so the material may have simply not worked in any other structure. The camera-work and sound is also top-notch, and the pacing is relatively good.

* Vancouver-based activist Ifny Lachance – thanks Dan!

I don’t really get neo-Marxism, while I do dig postmodernism, so I see the situation through a postmodern lens: The neo-Marxists are incredulous to the dominant meta-narrative (ie: work is good) but see their own meta-narrative (ie: wacky stuff is good) as more authentic. Postmodernism says that all meta-narratives are not credible and the craving for the authentic is part of the late-modern meta-narrative, so the neo-Marxists are part of the system they’re attempting to overthrow. (The highly accessible text that introduced me to this idea is The Rebel Sell.)

And then of course Steve-O has the world’s largest gallery of postmodern tattoos:

When I was shopping for a tattoo I considered getting something postmodern. In fact, I found my artist by Googling “postmodern tattoos”. I ended up getting a crafted (and therefore authentic), late-modern piece that is both abstract-minimalist and concrete-organic. And now that I write about it, it occurs to me that I need to work on the multiplicity of narratives surrounding it… (do you see what I did there?)