Tourism’s lost heart
Rahul Goswami (COCHINCHINA) / 3 May 2014
The traveller is long extinct. The programmed tourist has taken her place
A family of five, the two younger children taking pictures of themselves and all the others, the elder daughter and the mother exclaiming over the goods on display in the airport shops and the sales advertised, the father prodding the screen on his smartphone to complete a business call before boarding the aircraft. The flight itself — nowadays a few hours whose passage is dictated by the diversions of the in-flight entertainment system.
Then the arrival. The father resumes his negotiations on the phone, pausing now and then to correct the two youngsters or to guide his wife, who has ensured the forms are filled. The usual movements until they are met by a car and driver, sent by the resort in which they are booked, and a holiday begins. This one, like many millions of family holidays in South-East Asia, to be shaped and coloured by how much the touring family consumes, and rarely if at all by how much the touring family actually finds and meets a culture that is not similar to its own.
One could argue that this change began, not with the appearance of cheap air fares and the ease with which holidays (‘getaways’ was a term that shot into prominence for some years) can be planned and fixed via the internet, but when the era of the traveller ended and that of the tourist began. The tour has arrangers, suppliers, planners, expected returns, canned people, arranged halts, arranged transport, schedules precise to the hour, loyalty points, carryover discounts, rehearsed cultural shows, revenue targets. The traveller had none, and would have been thoroughly repelled by any of these.
So South-East Asia — whether Burma and Laos where tourism is still less formalised, whether the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, where there are structured industries that govern tourism, or whether Singapore, Malaysia and Bali (also Indonesia, but whose passenger traffic places it in a category different from Indonesia) — is offered as a cultural smorgasbord but practiced as a plastic parade interspersed by culinary inventions pretending to be local food.
There is no government in the region, not a single one, that can claim to or has any honest intention to treat the meeting between the touring family and its own people as a meeting of cultures and ideas. Undoubtedly this is difficult, and has grown to be more so over the last two generations, but it is the essence of human and cultural interaction. The histories of South-East Asia, of China and the Indian sub-continent, are illustrated by and rest upon the accounts, written in many scripts that are still preserved in archives, of such meetings. Many of these meetings came about through trade — whether overland or maritime — and the natural propensity of merchants to seek new consumers, and of trading firms to seek new sources, was what facilitated the meetings. Interpreters were found, letters were exchanged, curiosities led to pacts and cultural exchanges, and learning followed.
This history of the meetings of cultures in South-East Asia has been steadily overturned, with the result that the exchanges between people that were the staple of trade-based meetings for two and more millennia have been replaced by a filter in the form of the modern tourism industry. In this model, nothing ought to exist without a monetary purpose — no ‘authentic’ meal (prepared by a trained chef) no ‘typical’ crafts-product (the factory in which the little carving was made claims small industry benefits), no ‘cultural show’ (part-timers from the local university contracted by the tour company).
The result, for the countries of South-East Asia (but they are far from being the only willing victims), is the elevation of the tourism ‘industry’ (unregulated and politically influenced in most countries) to the status of being an important contributor to national GDP. In this form of industrial-scale tourism, the cumulative impacts on the host society and its environment are kept out of the calculations. There is a grave long-term effect on the collective psychologies of communities, where children see visitors as ignorant victims placed before them by the money-mill of a tour package.
Although exemplars exist of humane and culturally grounded tourism, these have struggled to find and keep their place, and cannot do otherwise with an economic model — so tiresomely the same wherever we look — that demands rapid consumption take the vanguard of all human activity.
Only when the idea of continuous ‘growth’ (physically impossible and morally flawed) is jettisoned can tourism regain its lost heart.
The author is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia
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Tourism"s lost heart
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