Lesson 5 : Travel and Tourism Flashcards
(30 cards)
Learning outcomes
Understand key theories explaining the emergence of modern tourism
Identify ways in which tourism is based on existing social divisions and inequalities
Consider the benefits and costs of the global tourism industry
Defining Tourism
(World Tourism Organisation 1974): defined tourists as people who travel and stay in places outside their usual environment for not more than 1 consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes.
- Movement
- Lack of work
- Away from home
- Choice
Tourism has become a metaphor for the way we lead our daily lives in a consumer society / showcases what the modern life is like
What can tourism do to a place (good to bad)?
Takes something natural and beautiful and makes it bad : social media (shows the current day in age) : destroys the value with the obsessive seeking to see things online and be perceived as the nichest / first person to do this- rush to look best be the most aesthetic
Turner and Ash 2015
‘One can simply argue that international tourism is like King Middas in reverse, a device for the systematic destruction of everything that is beautiful in the world’
Historical Development of Modern Tourism - Precursors to modern tourism include:
- Pilgrimages
- Campaigns of warfare and conquest
- Voyages of exploration
Common features of Historical Development of Modern Tourism
- Movement of people (throughout the globe)
- Interaction of cultures (cultural hybridity/ for example: creolisation
- Some basic commercialisation and infrastructure
- McDonaldisation: Nowadays you can find everything like McDonalds everywhere but back then it would be getting adjusted to another culture/ lifestyle across the globe/ diff country etc etc …
But when people travel they want their sense of comfort too
The ‘Grand Tour’ from the late 16th C. involves the young (men) of English elites travelling to Europe
What is creolisation?
Creolisation, originating in the Caribbean, refers to the blending of different cultures and languages, resulting in the creation of a new hybrid culture.
Jamaican Creole (Patois): An English-based creole spoken in Jamaica, often considered a vivid expression of the island’s culture and history.
Mauritian Creole: A French-based creole spoken in Mauritius, also known as Morisien.
What was the Grand Tour? (17th century elites class)
- Involved young men (English background specifically) travelling to Europe and seen as essential training for aristocrats in the 17th century and those entering public service.
- Often travelling with a tutor to Italian city states
- Cultural training (language, the arts, ‘classical’ culture)
18th Century Tourism
- Grand tour (bourgeoise adopting this)
- Increasingly standardised - (e.g. English Inns, cafes, restaurants in Rome)
- Shift from education to more romantic ideal – ‘experience’: experience more sex
- Increased criticism of actions of English ‘tourists’ abroad (this still sticks)
- 18th century Grand Tour often including sexual liaisons with European women
- But also ‘threat’ of homosexual experimentations : Homoerotic? Dorian Gray?
- Many rich men went out and travelled, wouldn’t just stay at home?
Tourism and the Industrial Revolution
- Emergence of modern idea of leisure, recreation and tourism rooted in the transformations of the industrial revolution (Bull, Hoose, & Weed, 2003)
What was the Laurie painting?
- depicted people moving from the countryside to the cities for work, hence there was a concentration of labour and factories and mines began to profit in this industrial society
- Concentration of labour: football matches and mass entertainment was founded
Thomas Cook’s vision of Mass Tourism:
Viewed it as a Victorian moral discourse of ‘self-improvement’ and ‘respectability: wanted to see travel as a source of leisure for ordinary people etc WC and relaxing - prior was only for elites and bourgeoise. Paired with the rise of labour movement/collective action forcing rights to better pay and leave entitlements/
Christianity and Tourism
Saw leisure as a way to improve as well/ it would improve Christian behaviour as well in their mind / it was seen as a way for moral improvement instead of seeing how urbanisation was decaying society etc: wanted their children NOT to work in the mines and then began to fight for their rights etc Sundays off and then realise the importance of leisure and relax - pleasure importance (Eg: Sunday’s off and more pay (bit more money in their pockets) so they can relax as it improves their lifestyle)
Tourism as a Pseudo-event (Boorstin)
American historian Daniel Boorstin (1961) descried the superficiality of modern tourism
- Travel: dangerous, challenging, risky, unknown
- Tourism = passive, standardised, safe, regulated (seen as snobbish since there is not much adventure and seen as not like ‘real travel’ - Package travel)
Boorstin described how the modern tourist ‘has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all’ (Boorstin, 1961:80)
(Turner and Ash 1975)
- Described tourism as peripheral to the main metropolitan areas of developed Western nations
- The “pleasure periphery” refers to marginalised areas, often those outside established tourist routes, that are drawn into the tourism economy due to their perceived appeal for recreation and escape.
- These areas, characterized by less developed infrastructure and facilities, become valuable to tourists seeking authentic or unique experiences beyond the typical tourist circuits.
- Marxist ideology
‘Tourism requires both large claustrophobic cities and the means to escape them’
The tourist as Archetype of Modernity / Dean MacCannell 1976
Saw tourism as a way of incorporating all the tensions of modernity: modern life often makes our lives a lot safer and standardised/ predictable which makes it less satisfying and authentic. This makes us search for this authenticity in others lives, in turn what we see is
this sense of unease/ they want something more meaningful and authentic than this predictability.
Rhetoric of Tourism is full of manifestations of the importance of the authenticity of the relationship between tourists and what they see (???)
The Tourist Gaze / John Urry 1990
Urry’s seminal analysis theorises tourism as a mode of something out of the ordinary (the scenery and views).
He theorises tourism as a mode of perception adopted by tourists ‘to gaze upon or view a set of different scenes, or landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary’ (Urry, 1990).
Global Nomads/ Backpacking and Youth Travel
Can similarities be made between backpacking and youth travelling against the grand tour in the 17th and 18th centuries?
GLOBAL NOMADS:
- First emerges from ‘hippies’ following the silk road to India in 1970s (Welks, 2005)…Since then huge network of backpacker infrastructure – hostels, budget travel, internet cafes, small tour operators
- Independence through travelling
- Experience and ‘open-mindedness’
- Appreciation of oneself
- Appreciation of others - learning from other cultures/ hadrships/ danger and risk
Backpackers ideology
- Can help you / challenge you alongside finding yourself as a worldly person for example.
- Try new cultures which may give you food poisoning but you’re putting yourself out there
Luke Desforges (1998: 176), drawing on Bourdieu, describes how young independent travellers ‘collect places’ and bring ‘experiences back home to use in the narration of identity’ i.e. cultural capital
For some it meant: not shaving their legs, armpits and not wearing makeup and after feeling like you’ve reconnected with a part of yourself such as not wearing makeup after being a girly girl for so long : no need to put up a facade
What is the Gap Year Phenomenon
- makes a statment about you as a person (both academics and employers).
‘It is no coincidence that the gap year’s popularity has taken off in parallel with this expansion [of higher education], as taking the ‘right’ sort of year out is emerging as an important means of gaining distinction over peers. In a period of increased competition and heightened emphasis on the ‘economy of experience’, the gap year serves to widen the gap between different groups of students as part of an ongoing process of positional competition’ (Heath, 2007: 101)
What can World Tourism help with?
- ‘World tourism can contribute to the establishment of a new international economic order that will help eliminate the widening economic gap between developed and developing countries and ensure the steady acceleration of economic and social development and progress, in particular in developing countries’ (WTO, 1980:1)
- ‘It is generally assumed that tourism, preferably planned and managed in such as way as to minimise social and environmental impacts, provides a variety of economic benefits that contribute to economic growth and, hence, development, economic growth and development being implicitly regarded as synonymous. As a result, many important issues have, by and large, been overlooked, issues which question the alleged contribution of tourism to development’ (Sharpley and Telfer, 2002:2)
Positive Side of Tourism: + faustian pact
- Magic bullet which instantly transforms struggling economies and prompt rapid development and ‘modernisation’.
POSITIVE SIDE OF TOURISM : has given them an income but also able to share their knowledge and pride for their country | Responsible tourism can foster better lives for those who live in those countries etc: like children of these tour guides being able to go to school
AUSTRALIA BRIAN LEE: kids now get a chance to be educated because he gets to be a tour guide and show culture / more income with more tourism
Faustian Pact:benefits of tourism come with huge detrimental impacts, notably the loss of local identity, control and cultural integrity
Negative Side of Tourism
Faustian Pact:benefits of tourism come with huge detrimental impacts, notably the loss of local identity, control and cultural integrity
Galapagos Islands: 3 Planes come in everyday and can destroy the environment with greenhouse gases
The tortoises dying from influeza bc of the bacteria the Tourists bring
Economic Impacts of Tourism
POS:
- Assumed that tourism redistributes wealth from rich countries to poorer countries (Sharpley and Telfer, 2002)
- Tourism generates income for countries with little or no industrial base and/or no natural resources
NEG:
- Jobs created vary hugely in form and quality: formal/informal, part-time, full-time, ad hoc, permanent or temporary, seasonality
- Economic impact can be overstated with most profits actually leaving the country eg: if there is monsoon szn and hotels have to shut down since there aren’t enough tourists to get an income for all
- Overdependence on tourism industry can lead to the neglect of other industries
