What is 'cinematic tourism'? A mock undergraduate essay-definition

This draft has been created for my SLSP2160 (Tourism & Culture) undergraduate students as a sample answer to part of an essay question. It can also be treated as a Wikipedia-style entry, which has nevertheless (openly) been created by an academic expert in the field. If you use it in your own essay or academic work, please note that its discourse is by no means exhaustive of the (rapidly growing) literature in the field.

Cinematic tourism: Definitions

It has been noted that especially over the last couple of decades, an increasing number of tourists began to visit destinations featured through films or TV series which are not directly related to tourism promotion campaigns. Many tourists also began to form tourist fan communities online and in filmed locations. This mass phenomenon is known by different terms, including ‘cinematic tourism’, ‘film-induced tourism’, or ‘movie-induced tourism’. All these terms forge links between tourism in new blended forms (e.g. visiting filmed locations to experience the cinematic story and to learn about the filmed location and its culture, or simultaneously engage in other types of tourism) and a particular medium (cinema and film).

Cinematic and film/movie-induced tourism are both interdisciplinary academic subjects and emerging agendas for business and policy-making concerning the management if tourist destination images and reputations. Although film-induced tourism is more connected to business studies rather than social science theory, it is by no means conceptually irrelevant to sociologists and tourist theorists. By the same token, although cinematic tourism traces its roots in social and cultural theory, it is practically applicable in business and management studies and state policies. Both terms, and especially that of cinematic tourism, are concerned with contemporaneous types of tourism we associate with the dawn of the 21^st century and are connected to advanced forms of technology such as cinema and the Internet. Their chronological anchoring presents cinematic and film-induced tourism as part of late modernisation processes and the era of late modernity or postmodernity.

Cinematic tourism is a phenomenon connected to globalisation: not only does it presuppose particular forms of technological advancement (in old and new media), it also promotes tourist connectedness, cultural hybridisation as well as economic mergers and development. (Post)modernisation processes (including industrialisation, technological progress, automobilisation and urbanisation) enabled the growth of entertainment industry and international travel (Hudson & Ritchie, 2006b). At the same time, they suggested the convergence of tourist and media businesses located in different parts of the world and operating independently from each other. Let us not forget that not only do cinematic narratives tend to romanticise communities and landscapes, they are also themselves industrial products of the city, which is a major outcome of late modernity. Cinematic tourism builds on such romanticisations, disseminating particular ideas and practices to every part of the world.

Scholarly debates

As noted above, terminological precision determines emphasis in the content of academic studies. For example, Tzanelli (2004, 2007, 2013) prefers the term ‘cinematic tourism’ and ‘cinematic tourist’, arguing that these

Are not uniform conceptual tools, but theoretical models internally differentiated by the moves and motions of travel through and after film, as well as the cinematic production of travel and tourism.The Hollywood model of the tourist exists within cinematic texts, in the movies that we watch: it suggests ways of consuming places, enjoying and “investing in” (for educational purposes) our holiday time. At the same time, touring through cinematic images produces a second type of tourist who uses the power of imagination to explore the world. This version of the tourist corresponds to the movie viewer, who “reads” and consumes film. The surplus meaning of a film enables audiences to travel virtually, to experience the filmed locations at a distance: thus the impulse to visit these locations originates in the imaginary journey on the screen. A third version of the ‘cinematic tourist’ is created when a tourist industry is established in filmed locations, through the products that tourist industries offer when they exploit the film’s potential to induce tourism. There is also a fourth type of cinematic tourist that completes the imagined journey of movie watchers. This is the tourist in the flesh, who visits places because they appeared in films, and whose experience of travel may be influenced by film and the attractions that the tourist industry has to offer. The interdependency of these types is not fixed: filmed locations are also visited by tourists who never watched movies and watching a movie will not necessarily result in visiting the filmed place’ (Tzanelli 2007/2010: 2-3).

Tzanelli therefore builds a theoretical and analytical model that includes a variety of cinematic tourists such as

1. Cinematic actors/agents

2. Film characters

3. Film audiences

4. Web surfers of cinematic stories (for example, users and visitors of official film websites but also users of other tourist websites linked to the film that inspired tourist visits)

5. Visitors of filmed locations

She further explains that different types of tourism and tourists are condensed in ‘cinematic tourism’, and that not all of them are covered by the ‘film-induced tourism’ model.

•       Representations and simulations of tourist mobilities within cinematic texts (heroes in film as tourists)

•       The act and performance of film viewing and interpretation (by audiences)

•       Virtual travels and constructions of ‘tourist’ online (web surfers for relevant films, Internet business)

•       Film viewing that transforms into embodied visits of the cinematic stage (fans visiting filmed sites)

•       Film acting and directing as part of model (location-hunting, embodied presence in filmed sites) (Tzanelli, Tourism and Culture SLSP2160, 2012)

This typology highlights the complexity of global cultural industries and the ways in which different industries (tourism, media and film) may converge. Such contingent, loose connections are termed ‘sign industries’ (Tzanelli 2004, 2007/2010) – that is, industries promoting business through groups of signs that acquire the same meaning  (e.g. The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) cinematic trilogy or the Harry Potter Films) are connected and marketed in relation to particular places (New Zealand, England) and foster particular tourist rituals (e.g. visiting filmed sites, buying film and music products, or the original literature on which films are based as part of the cinematic myth). Hence, sign industries participate in the creation and modification of collective and individual imaginations (of film audiences and tourists, but also the filmed localities, nations and nation-states).

Tzanelli’s models of cinematic tourism and the sign industries are connected to John Urry’s (2002; Urry and Larsen 2011) conception of the ‘tourist gaze’, which is by turn inspired by Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism. For Urry there are systematic ways of ‘seeing’ tourist destinations that are rooted in Western occulocentric (= visually centred) practices, and which produce discourses of modernity. Hence, visual culture is for Urry essential for the construction of the tourist experience as much as it contributes to the maintenance and expansion of tourism as an organized system of leisure. Though Tzanelli regards the visual as essential component of cinematic tourist imaginations she also stresses the significance of other senses in the production of film (audiences and fans), virtual (web surfers) and actual (visitors of filmed locations) tourisms (see Tzanelli 2013).Her other emphasis on hyperreality, which is borrowed by Baudrillard’s conception of simulacra and simulation, is also shared with other sociologically orientated scholars, such as Stijn Reijnders (2011a & 2011b), who studied the multimedia character of tourism connected to blockbusters and popular films and TV series such as Inspector Morse, Dracula, The Lord of the Rings or The Da Vinci Code.  

Other new research on cinematic or media tourism suggests that tourism institutions connected to national centres or regional and global business networks must pay closer attention to the rituals and practices of cinematic tourists: Peaslee (2010, 2011) investigated the experience of visitors to the ‘Hobbiton’ (Matamata) location site in New Zealand that was included in the production of The Lord of the Rings films. Peaslee, who stands between Tzanelli’s emphasis on media structures and tourist agency and Reijnder’s emphasis on tourist experiences, developed a thesis from Couldy’s (2003) work on media centres and bounded spaces that he applied to his fieldwork in New Zealand. After participant observation of several tours of the Hobbiton attraction and in-depth interviews with visitors and guides, he concluded that attitudes toward and behaviours within this tourist attraction are indicative of an embodied assent to a particular kind of media power. Tourists and tourist hosts in Hobbiton (Matamata) must be examined as actors responding to a repeating discursive structure that, by creating boundaries and sanctifying spaces, canalizes attitudes, behaviour, and movement.

‘Film-induced tourism’ demarcates a narrower subject area than ‘cinematic tourism’. Beeton’s (2005: 5-8) definition refers to the ways historically tourism borrowed from artistic uses of the picturesque (an idea originating in Seaton’s [1998] analysis of visual media and tourism) and contemporary creation of tourist markers for the development of tourism in filmed sites (a comment originating in MacCannell’s [1989] consideration of staged authenticity in tourist settings). Beeton is concerned about the impact of tourism can have on localities. She argues that ‘tourism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction’ (Beeton 2005: 12) because it can lead to environmental degradation and community disintegration. Debating the problem from a destination-marketing point of view, Beeton argues for organized and sustainable development strategies These preliminary observations are also relevant to Tzanelli’s ‘cinematic tourism’ model, but their empirical analyses differ, with Beeton being more geared towards marketing imperatives and less on critical theory. All the same, the study of both concepts is compatible rather than adversarial.

An example of film-induced tourism would be travelling to New Zealand because of the desire to see the movie sets and landscapes featured in The Lord of the Rings movies (Tzanelli 2004; Beeton 2005; Roesch 2009).Though early studies of this phenomenon highlighted the enhancement of memories of location and film experiences through associations with the films’ actors, events and setting (Riley & Van Doren, 1992), scholars did not examine actors and directors as ‘tourists’. Film-induced tourism was defined solely in terms of tourist visits to destination featured on television, video, or films (Beeton, 2005; Hudson & Ritchie, 2006a).  Otherwise put, travellers in search of filmed sights are film-induced tourists (Butler, 1990; Busby & Klug, 2001). Butler (1990) suggested that ‘films can influence the travel preference of those who expose to the destination attributes and create a favourable destination image through their representation’ (Rewtrakunphaiboon, 2009: 2). Hence, film-induced tourism tends to focus on the ways marketing efforts and previous travel influence destination choice by rationalising individual decision-making processes (Iwashita, 2003; Iwashita, 2006). It is not coincidental that film-induced tourism is methodologically connected to social disciplines such as psychology that measure decision-making variables of less importance in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, which focus on collective action.

Impacts, benefits and consequences

There is a stream of film-induced tourism studies that ascertain the impact of cinematic and digital cultures on people’s perceptions of place and culture. For example, O’Connor (2010) argues that since young people spend much of their leisure time watching TV or surfing the Internet, this exposure will have an impact on their perception of certain destinations. Sellgren (2011) also claimed that the movie Lost in Translation led to a positive image of Japan in the minds of the students who had participated in a discussion round about this movie. Such studies connect to earlier media theory that infers consequences from supposed causes (e.g. hypodermic model). In any case, they contribute less to understandings of collective social action and to tourism theory. A more amenable example is provided by Croy’s (2011) investigation of the role of film in broader tourist decision making, and the influence and management of this process. Croy (2011) highlights the use of film images to align potential tourists to the destination’s ideal image. Like others, he argues that films influence activities and routes when at the destination (Macionis and Sparks, 2009). Whereas he claims that films are incidental in the production of tourist industries, they are a tourist activity and contribute to regional economies (Croy and Buchmann, 2009).

The impact on regional and national economies and cultures is significant. As Tzanelli (2004; 2007: chapter 3; 2013: chapter 2) explains, not only did The Lord of the Rings revamp New Zealand’s cultural profile as the ‘New Middle Earth’ (rather than a peasant country, it also generated urban tourist and media traffic from the U.S. and the U.K. while strengthening the ties between New Zealand’s  artistic leadership (LOTR director Peter Jackson) and other transnational artists (e.g. Guillermo del Toro’s involvement in the Hobbit trilogy) and creative urban centres (e.g. LA acting as a Hobbit media hub). In addition, (hosted) journalists’ reports on filming locations, and the well-known actors and directors prompted to report on their location experiences (Croy, 2011: 162). Generally, film-induced and cinematic tourism can revitalise regional/rural communities and increase tourism to urban centres, with Auckland as an example in point (Beeton 2005). An interest in the nation and its positive image can eventually lead to an actual visit to the country as is the case with the increased Japanese interest in touring the UK (Iwashita, 2006). In addition one may argue that cinematic tourism has become one of the all-weather attractions that counter problems of seasonality in the tourism industry, as is the case with some filmed Australian rural areas (Beeton, 2004).

The environmental benefits and problems connected to cinematic tourism are many. There is no doubt that film can act as a sort of knowledge repository for certain aspects of the country such as nature: the natural beauty of filmed landscapes increases the cultural value for the film location. However, especially protected natural destinations can be damaged by filming or be deemed to be ‘in danger’ of destruction. Whereas such fears are not always true, they can act as activist trigger that obstructs both the development of the filmed region and the reputation of the state to which this belongs. One such example is the film The Beach (2000, director Danny Boyle), which was used by Internet tourist providers for the promotion of Thailand as a travel destination. Various environmentalist groups highlighted that the adaptation became complicit in the advertising of the country as an ‘Edenic destination’ for

Westerners. This was achieved through the organisation of protests when 20th Century Fox

decided to ‘conform’ the area in which the movie was filmed (Phi Phi Leh of Krabi area) to

images of tropical tourist paradises. What was obscured in this case was the problematic political environment in which film industries had to operate: coerced to negotiate with a state that invited foreign capital but paid little attention to local development, not aware of the areas’ racist histories of migration, and assuming the role of stereotypical Western outsiders, resulted in their scapegoating by activists (Tzanelli, 2006). The events seemed to have acted as a learning experience for the artistic contingent, with Boyle especially becoming implicated in beneficial community development projects in the context of his later film, Slumdog Millionaire (2009).

It must be noted that, increasingly, artistic communities become implicated in such projects even independently from – if not against - any tourist imperatives. In search of interesting locales to photograph for the forthcoming film Avatar (2009, director James Cameron), computer generating image professionals stumbled upon the tribes of the Amazonian rainforest whose culture and livelihood face extinction due to a government-backed multibillion project to build the Belo Monte Dam. ‘Director Cameron, producer Jon Landau, and the crew joined forces with anthropologists, tribesmen, regional, and (trans)national activists to cancel these plans. […] Cameron himself appears in one open-access video —promotional of his relevant documentary—confessing that he always wanted to travel to Brazil’s virgin territories (A Message from Pandora, n.d.). Elsewhere, he is depicted amongst indigenous populations like Avatar’s soldier Jake or an ethnographic traveller-investigator, uncovering evidence of coordinated crimes against localities. Avatar actor Sigourney Weaver’s video adopts a humanitarian style (Amazon Watch, 2011), prompting viewers to sympathize with the cause.’ (Tzanelli 2013b: 2). Such initiatives clash with tourist growth of regions in the name of humanitarian or environmental causes – only this time, the architects are not the localities but artistic leaders.

Film tourism is a medium that communicates a wide range of cultural meanings and values tied to filmed lands and venerated national artefacts. There is no doubt that heritage sites serving as film locations gain popularity after the film (Busby & Klug, 2001). However, once a heritage site becomes part of the cinematic and tourist imaginary, conflicts may arise. ‘Heritage sites’ incorporated in films, include both tangible (architecture, monuments and museum artefacts) and intangible tokens (histories, literatures and ideas). Again, both localities and nation-states may react to such cultural ‘intrusions’ in varied ways. For example, the cinematic adaptation (2001) of Captain Corelli’sMandolin, a novel by Louis de Bernières, was met with various responses in the filmed places of the Greek island of Kefalonia (Tzanelli 2003; Tzanelli 2007/2010: chapter 4). Like the novel, the film was set against the historical background of the Greece’s Axis Occupation, ‘the operation of Greek Resistance, and civil strife between the Greek communist fighters of EAM/ELAS (National Liberation Front/Greek People’s Liberation Army) and anti-communist forces’ (Tzanelli 2003: 220). While generating instant tourist traffic, with Hollywood fans flocking in to see the filming and the actors, and also subsequent tourist visits to its beaches, its natural areas and the Second World War Memorial to the fallen Italian soldiers, local communist veterans felt offended by this commercialisation and the town of Sami responded negatively to the culture industry with protests and supplications to human rights institutions to ban this ‘plundering’ of heritage (also Tzanelli 2007/2010: chapter 4).

The response was different when My Life in Ruins/Driving Aphrodite (2009, director Donald Petrie) was shot in the Acropolis. ‘The idea of “hard bargaining” defined the actions of Greece’s powerful Archaeological Council (KAS) in 2006-7, when Greek-Canadian actress Vardalos managed to obtain permission to shoot her new comedy […] Since the 1960s, when the The Guns of Navarone and Zorba the Greek used Rhodes and Crete as backdrops, no major film was shot in the country. The fact that recent Hollywood blockbusters Troy, Alexander the Great and 300 (all related to Hellenic history) were filmed elsewhere has to do with Greek anti-Americanism dating back to the junta (1967-74) and the lack of tax alleviations the government was prepared to give to filmmakers. Yet, […] despite Greek warnings that no ancient stone should be moved and no cinematic enhancement should be made to the archaeological site, Vardalos’ enterprise was supported by the Ministers of Culture and Tourism and the Greek Film Centre whose website today proudly hosts photos of the shooting (see H.F.C.O. website)’ (Tzanelli, 2008; Tzanelli, 2013a: chapter 4).

The uses of tangible and intangible heritage in films that induce tourism inevitably tap on questions of propriety or even public morality, as is the case with The Da Vinci Code cinematic adaptation (2006, director Ron Howard) of Dan Brown’s novel. The film came to operate as a ‘node’ for European capitalist networks of corporeal and virtual travel, assisting in the production of a new type of commercialised ‘pilgrim’ that democratised tourism to old heritage sites in Europe (Tzanelli, 2010). There were however reactions to such trends both by the French public and even Catholic constituencies that objected to the uses of religion in the story (Tzanelli, 2013a: 63-93). Therefore, careful planning is necessary both for the selection of projected filmed landscapes and the granting of permissions to film them. The same caution applies to tourism business that capitalises on sich commercialised pilgrimages: for example, an ethnographic study of James Bond tourism by Reijnders (2010) suggests that such consumptions of cinematic plots might become interwoven with patriarchal notions of masculinity, as visiting filmed sites allows fans to embody glamorised understandings of manliness.

Sociological and anthropological studies of this intersection between tourism and cinema are work in progress. Graml (2004) has shown for example that the budding Sound of Music tourism in Austria in places such as Salzburg is treated with suspicion by locals who dissuade visitors from joining independent tours to filmed locations when in America Austrianness is defined by such films. While most Austrians presumably concede that Sound of Music tourism is important for the country’s GDP, they consider the film to be a typical product of Hollywood cinema that, unfortunately, manages to drown out the real Austrian heritage embodied by Mozart. In the Greek island of Skiathos that served together with the neighbouring Skopelos as the cinematic stage for the musical Mama Mia! (2008), there is an uneasy coexistence of local and national traditions and the tourism that is attached to them on the one hand, and postmodern simulations of the musical’s story on the other. Tzanelli (2011) suggests that this informs generational dissonance (with younger entrepreneurs more amenable to cinematic tourism) but also the ubiquitous disconnection of peripheral areas from the national centre that for structural reasons fails to support local development, allowing regional rivalries to grow. In this respect, ‘cinematic tourism’ is never limited to academic and scholarly scrutiny but informs practices and policies of national and transnational institutions such as UNESCO.

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Wither ‘race’?

There is an issue I set aside last time for reflection: does the race of belly dancers matter? How does it affect the genre’s mobility in global consumption domains?

I think it does, albeit in a less straightforward, if not reverse, way. The Euro-Oriental pop teachings of famous dancers, such as Isadora Duncan, who introduced a hips-free, torso-and-head dominated choreography, blended alleged Grecian with alleged Egyptian movements to make an alien dance palatable to Westerners. Victorian antics had their global equivalents back then. Since shaking any part of the body that connected to domains of reproduction (hips, breast) in front of spectators was de facto indecorous, Duncan’s whiteness should retain its bodily relationship with ‘civility’ in some other way. Though never dissociated from the budding 1920s femme fatale cinematic persona, Grecian stylistics could at least cast an alien genre in archaic European culture’s familiar colours and ‘pass’ as the female dare-nots’ fashion.   

Orientalism redoux

Duncan’s innovations barely reached the folk terrain of the true ‘Orients’ that they cannibalised to generate the aura of professional respectability in the European and transatlantic West. As I explained before, in these contexts, danse du vetre or raqs sharki continued to be associated with prostitution and other forms of generous female mobility. Its subsequent romanticisation in Western pop domains either ignores its twin Orientalist and sexist associations or stresses them to the point that it shunts its artistic uniqueness aside in favour of some bizarre activist discourse. There is, to be sure, ample truth in the twin racist and sexist crux of the dance style’s histories. But its contemporary global commoditisation requires a different approach that allows space for an investigation of new hybridisation, new border-crossings and exchanges between ‘East’ and ‘West’ – if there ever were such uniform geopolitical spaces.

Image R. Tzanelli, 'Helena Bellydancer (Leeds, UK)'

Appearances

I grew up in a country proudly advertising its own feminine poetics through a version of belly dancing called tsifteteli (literally, ‘of two strings’ to refer to the musical instrument that accompanies the music). Feminist politics abound, the style’s history is sieved through several chapters of persecution, migration and dictatorship moralism (Stavrou Karayanni 2004). However, now that I do not partake in its rituals any more (being an Anglicised migrant myself and living at the other end of Europe where is also ‘home’), I am struck by the significance of ‘appearances’ in the dance’s execution back then. By this I refer to the spectators’ expectation that the dancer (amateur or professional) looks the part phenotypically: that she is a brunette, with long luscious hair and a brown complexion. Belly dancing beauties (conventionally koúkles, dolls) had to be domesticated versions of the Oriental imaginary, for their performance to acquire verisimilitude. This paradoxical expectation is not dissimilar from that which English professionals encounter, as I recently found out. It is as if their Northern whiteness robs them of their bodily skills, their ability to communicate art to students or even be attractive enough to neo-Orientalist consumers (more correctly, ‘attractiveness’ may be dissociated from skill, thus degenerating into harassment).

It seems then, that there is still a politics of race at work in belly dancing discourse, only it is a politics of reversal: the white subject appears to ‘lack’ in essence, in need of providing ‘proof’ (professional credentials) to be granted ‘passing’. In the same context female ‘blackness’ transforms into a phenomenological standard only as ‘surface’, ready to be voraciously consumed by audiences. Entertainment aside, the politics and poetics of belly dancing are to be treated seriously – for their surface is depth in need of investigating in the social sciences. 

        

REFERENCES

Stavrou Karayanni, S. (2004) Dancing Fear and Desire. Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...

Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...: Profession or social practice? It is probably common knowledge amongst sociologists of art that belly dancing as a social practice is bas...

Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile cultures

Profession or social practice?

It is probably common knowledge amongst sociologists of art that belly dancing as a social practice is based on more than meets the eye and the ear in terms of historical development. By discussing it as ‘social practice’ I refuse to consider it solely as a monetised activity (to dance and be remunerated for it by clients), thus allowing some space to reflect on the ways its performance in public enabled human interaction. Once the profession of migrant working-class women in Eastern urban cultures and in the emerging economic centres of the West alike (raqs sharqi and hootchie-cootchie as the sensation of the first nineteenth-century Expos and the nomadic groups of circus caravans; danse du vetre as the past time of French colonisers in Algeria and Tunisia), this hybrid form of embodied art or craft allowed its performers to acquire some sort of social presence.

We could, of course, connect the histories of belly dancing to the socio-cultural standing of its historic performers: as moving people, invariably female and less frequently male artists from the urban metropoles of the East, Spain and Northern Africa, ‘belly dancers’ were differentiated from the local aristocracy and the emerging middle classes, who progressively became their consumers/clients. But this is history; I am more interested in discerning how a different sort of differentiation and social exclusion would eventually develop in postmodern contexts into a technique of dialogue between gazers (consumers) and performers (professional dancers); and how performance itself is, today, a form of power over those who gaze, thus balancing a once unequal exchange.

Image: Velvet Peacock Designs

Diachronic looks: belly-dancing as disenfranchised mobility

Note that at least until the nineteenth century (inclusive), in Eastern and North African urban consumption sites the so-called Ghaziyah (female dancers bearing the stigma of mobile invaders/outsiders, as the term denotes; or that of prostitution, as the term’s root in ghawa or enamoured means) would not be seen as reputable citizens. Their very movement and theatrical performance (though not presented in bikini attire but in costumes covering the whole body) was the negative equivalent of that of much-respected awalim (literally the educated women), the female story-teller or poet, singer and musician who could safely entertain an audience without risking accusations of obscenity (Buonaventura 2010). This phenomenon, which conforms to a hidden ‘aristocracy of the senses’ (hearing vs seeing, aurality/orality vs. visuality-with-kinaesthetic performance), is not what happens today in most developed contexts.

Image R. Tzanelli, 'Helena Bellydancer (Leeds, UK)'

Synchronic observations: beyond the trap of ‘professionalism’

I watch belly dancing these days and note how the professional dancer uses her body (around the midriff, the swinging hands and lifted legs) and her face (smiling, smirking, inviting or teasing) to tell a story; how people respond in various ways to the immediacy of her gaze and movement (exhilaration, pleasure, embarrassment or even lust); but, above all, how she commands a dialogue with her ‘clients’ that redirects their gaze and ear from any (wrongly perceived as) sexual innuendos to what truly matters: the skill. The focus on ‘skill’ both connects the dancer’s embodied movement and intellectual knowledge into one complex, which gazers cannot access or comprehend without effort. This is why many professional dancers are also teachers/instructors these days.

And then there is the question of what audiences get out of watching other dance. I would argue that what I primarily consume, amongst other people, is not a narrative of female sexual emancipation, but a demonstration of control over the means of communicating with strangers (or friends in the crowd). The Ghaziyah of old (or those still using belly dancing as a professional feminist statement against female oppression) would develop with the help of artistic movement a ‘speech situation’ conforming to what Spivak calls ‘answerability’ (Spivak 1988; Landry and MacLean 1996; Inoue 2006). Simply and contextually put, embodied story-telling would establish a connection with those watching the performance, alerting them morally to the presence of the dancer as a human being in the flesh, not different from them (for contemporary dance genres see Wieschiolek 2003; Keft-Kennedy 2005). 

Bridging social distance through the immediacy of performance, Ghaziyah’s ‘answerability’ would create an imagined togetherness, even though in reality the dancer would be treated as of a ‘lower breed’ (Ong 1982; Bakhtin 1990:32). Contemporary professionals move beyond this limited objective: not only are they de facto humans, they substitute in consumption contexts the old awalim: because they possess the techniques of artistic mobility, appropriate ornamentation and athleticism, their story-telling is a priori that of an empowered subject.

Much can be said about the conditions of consuming the body per se, the site this takes place and the objectification of female dancers – especially, but not exclusively those who are not white. But race and gender hierarchies open up a new chapter, which does not provide straightforward answers to social representation and inequality, so I reserve such analysis for another time.

References

Bakhtin M.M. (1990) Art and Answerability, edited by M. Holquist, translated by V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Buonaventura, W. (2010) Serpent of the Nile. London: Saqi.

Inoue, M. (2006) Vicarious Language. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keft-Kennedy, V. (2005) ‘How does she do that?' Belly dancing and the horror of a flexible woman’, Women's Studies, 34(3): 279-300.

Landry, D. and G. MacLean (1996) ‘Introduction’, in D. Landry and G. MacLean (eds) The Spivak Reader. London: Routledge.

Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wieschiolek, K. (2003) ‘Ladies, just follow his lead! Salsa, gender and identity’, in N. Dyck and E. Archetti (eds) Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities. New York: Berg.

Auto-biography: losing your tools in the digital age

From Photocosmos, Facebook

Interconnections between biography and travel are many in published scholarly fora, but they usually do not endeavour to discuss the burden of such projects’ execution in too much detail. The ‘details’ I am mostly concerned with are not slides of pen and intimate revelations, but epistemologically ingrained omissions during and after different forms of fieldwork – including both terrestrial and virtual ethnographic journeys.

First things first: the so-called ‘ethnographic tourist’ (Graburn 2002) is, today a venerated subject area in anthropological and tourism theory. But today we also deal with cyber-ethnographic imaginaries, which are not as well represented in tourism research (e.g. Germann Molz 2012; Tzanelli 2013). As a result, there is little mention of the traveller’s progressive reliance on technological tools to convey their mobile discourse to the public (e.g. D’Andrea 2006). These tools (cameras, mobile phones and tape recorders) tend to figure as supplementary of the traveller’s hermeneutics rather than as centrepieces of their mobile show. There is still some prejudice over actor-network theory approaches, probably because they tend to consider ‘networks’ as inanimate formations. As a result, travel autobiography does not always take seriously its ‘auto’ prefix, focusing instead on the grammar of the traveller’s mobile articulations – that is, the art of re-presenting their trajectory in space and time. But what happens to the tools used in such articulations in the digital age? Do we have to habitually discard them for their alleged instrumental value – or should we examine their validity as travelling connectors per se?  

There is certainly a danger in such a move, when certain semiotechnologies (Langlois 2012) are prioritised over other ones. Hermeneutic uses of camera-work tend to focus on the technology’s ocular capital, turning for example auditory signs/messages into auxiliary ‘things’ in the travel narrative. Phenomenologically, it seems, so to speak, that such selectivity follows the original script of ethnographic mediation, which articulates our humanity on the basis of our ocular capital. It is difficult to refute that the ethics of travelling are, methodologically and epistemologically, connected to our attitude towards coordinated sensory-as-aesthetic input and output while we are on the move.  

References

D’Andrea, A. (2006) ‘Neo-nomadism: a theory of post-identarian mobility in the global age’, Mobilities, 1 (1): 95-119.

Germann Molz, J. (2012) Travel Connections. London: Routledge.

Graburn, N.H.H. (2002) ‘The ethnographic tourist’, In G.M.S. Dann (ed) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, Wallingford: CABI.

Langlois, G. (2012)’Meaning, semiotechnologies and participatory media’, Culture Machine, 12: unpaginated. Available at: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/437/467.

Tzanelli, R. (2013b) Heritage in the Digital Era: Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause. London: Routledge.

The hero and the plot of mobility

Photo: Inner Journey by Hartwig HKD
(Flickr/Creative Commons)

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.