Tourism scholarship has always sought to prioritise
the two ends of the leisurely system of global mobility: at one end stands the tourist, the person that moves across borders
and through time and space to reach the desired destination, the holiday, the accommodation,
the beach, the sightseeing complex. At the other end stands the system itself,
the hotel, the resort, its labour organisation and bureaucratic structures. In
terms of narrative, a dated business model placed the tourist at the centre of
research for reasons other than scholarly investigations (customer
satisfaction, maximisation of profit). Beyond this model, social scientists
sought to elucidate the nature of individual experience in terms of authenticity,
originality and adventure (e.g. Cohen 1979). Cultural anthropologists took an
extra step towards examining communal constructions of experience as
perceptions of authenticity, but with the individual as a starting point, contemporary
tourism theory did little to bridge the collective with the individual in terms
of plot.
By this I mean that
the prioritisation of human capital (the tourist, the tourist group, the host
community) constantly shunts aside the actual scheme of movement. The urgency
to rescue the human from the pressures of ultra-modernity, post-modernity or
trans-modernity (Ateljevic 2008) – no doubt, humanism’s offspring – suggests that
the ways the travel’s quotidian aspects are assembled into a ‘plot’ are less
important – nay, they are parts of an evil structure preying on human agency.
We tend to forget that even hermeneutic movements by people sit on the structural
lattice of experience. However, the belief that, by shedding light on the
tourist-subject as the journey’s hero (Tomazos and Butler 2010), we manufacture
a ‘Holy Grail’ to narrate social research plausibly does no justice to the
social webs of movement as such. There is a ‘stronger program’ (Alexander and
Smith 2001) of tourism analysis still waiting to be discovered, investigated
and developed as an epistemology and methodology of mobility – the politics and
poetics of movement (Cresswell 2006, 2010) enacted by everyday heroes but with
movement claiming centrality in the narrative and humans populating it with
meaning. Should it be passed in silence?
References
Alexander J.C. and P. Smith (2001) ‘The strong program in
cultural theory: Elements of structural hermeneutics’, in J. Turner (ed.) The Handbook of Social Theory. New York:
Kluwer.
Ateljevic, I. (2008) ‘Transmodernity: Remaking our (tourism)
world?’. In J. Tribe (ed.) Philosophical
Issues in Tourism, Bristol and Toronto: Channel View Publications.
Cohen, E. (1979) ‘A phenomenology of tourist experiences’, Sociology, 13 (2):179-201.
Cresswell, T. (2006) On
the Move. London: Routledge.
Cresswell, T. (2010) ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D, 28
(1):17-31.
Tomazos, K. and R. Butler (2010) ‘The
volunteer tourist as “hero”’, Current
Issues in Tourism, 13 (4): 363-80.
