» Tourism is a Cancer
Would it be bad if we couldn’t cheaply and freely fly all over the world? Well, it would dampen tourism for one thing. Would that be good or bad?
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.
I don’t think that diversity is morally good. (Nor is it morally bad, of course.) Does Arthur Erickson or you think that immigration is also a grave threat to human cultures or something that could be considered a crime against humanity in the future? Because it seems to me that following the identical reasoning leads to the conclusion that immigration is even worse, morally, than tourism. If someone spending a bit of time and money in another land incentivizes the locals to change their culture or transports the tourist’s values and demands to the local culture, then doesn’t an immigrant have an even bigger impact, offering more incentives and transplanting more of their demands over a longer period of time?
I do agree, of course, that a tourist offers incentives and affects local cultures in ways that will change those cultures. But how is that morally worse than other incentives and demands, coming from within a culture, that will change the culture? Because it seems that the argument is based on the assumption that change to a culture is immoral. This looks like either elitism (as in the Académie française‘s reaction to “le hotdog”) or infantilization of some “quaint” cultures.
Don
23 Apr 10 at 6:43 am
Welcome to the post-modern condition, Maasai. You’re welcome.
Seriously: That quote is wicked.
Jack
23 Apr 10 at 11:34 am
Yes: First, the ability to freely move is a basic freedom. Second, I want to be able to visit my geographically-distributed friends and family at a time cost of less-than-years.
Jack
23 Apr 10 at 11:39 am
@Don: Immigration doesn’t carry the same economic incentives. When immigrants go to a country, they move that country toward a creole culture – that’s different than an inauthentic culture.
The intent of immigration is also different. Most people don’t immigrate because a place is exotic. So they’re not consuming the very resource that brought them there in the first place.
My conclusion was written as a conditional because personally I’m with Jack: who cares if the world is fake? Disneyland and Vegas are popular tourist destinations, too.
Jared
23 Apr 10 at 12:29 pm
@Jack: The Charter guarantees your right to move between provinces; where does your right to move between countries come from?
Jared
23 Apr 10 at 2:44 pm