Culture, tourism and social topology: Moebius and intercultural processes among European residents in the Costa Blanca (Alicante-Spain)

Author(s): Antonio Miguel Nogués Pedregal 

Abstract

Once the principle of territoriality has vanished (mobility: transnationalism, tourism) and the social structures that produced meaning and that offered the frame for the interpretation of the old and new places has weakened (Touraine's cultural paradigm) or dissapeared (Bauman's liquid life), how do the different collectives that resides in multicultural settings make their world intelligible, and specifically how do this the foreigners that have settled in the tourism environment of the Costa Blanca (Alicante-Spain)? Though a research in progress, the answer is analised from a perspective that considers 'culture' as a dimension that refers more to the processes of differentiation rather than to any compound of distintive features owned by a concrete collective. The paper focus on three main aspects of the topic: the transformation of the tourists resorts into places, the wish for getting away from government control, and 'ruralism'.

Exile in paradise: a literary history of Sanary-sur-Mer

Author(s): Frank Estelmann 

Abstract

The commonsense opposition between the country of origin and the country of reception has become increasingly problematic in recent exile studies. Many critics have fastened upon ideas of displacement or deterritorialization to abandon modernist tropes of exile and modern practices of exile central to Western culture's narratives of political formation and cultural identity (Caren Kaplan). What is at stake is a nuanced interpretation of exile as a symbolic formation, moving beyond current mystifications of the lived experience, expatriation and irreparable loss. Exile can also be represented in a historically and culturally analyses of the social and literary practices produced in a situation of temporary mobility. To question exile, then, is to inquire into the ideological function of exile being one of the most important ‚places' of cultural production since the beginning of the 19th century. Associated with sea side tourism, the small village of Sanary-sur-Mer in Southern France has been one of the most popular places for German artists fleeing from the Hitler Regime in 1933 and later (Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht and many others have been and have lived in Sanary-sur-Mer). Its history in the 1930's offers a unique reference for mapping exile communities, it helps us to track more specifically the production of modernism in literary articulations of exile, and it proposes historical paths of enquiry into emigration comparing it to other, similar and overlapping forms of mobility.

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Mediterrania

Author(s): Andreas Mayer 

Abstract

While there is a wide discussion about the east expansion of the EC, the same happens almost unnoticed and inofficial at the south border, where it is first of all tourism that changes the whole social field of the Mediterranian.

Dealing with a huge migration to Europe, we find European moving especially to the south where within the last decade a new unnoticed city has been growing: "Mediterrania". It is not a city in the classical sense, but following the applicants dissertation "touristic-landscapes", 2001, we see a "linear - knot - city" (following "punkt und Linie zu Fläche", W.Kandinsky, 1926): first- and second-row settlements for touristic / domestic use with knots as a) historic centers and b) airports.

It uses the existing as a scenery for its event ("un paysage d´evénements", Paul Virilio, Galilée, Paris 1996), but in the same time the infrastructure to para-site the location.

While the European coast (including the Turkish coastline) widely is urbanised in this sense, the "race" at the North African seaside has just been started.

http://www.spaceunit.net/presse/mediterrania.pdf

Paris Syndrome: reverse homesickness?

Author(s): Janima Nam 

Abstract

A strange illness called "Paris Syndrome" was recently identified in which Japanese tourists/expatriates in Paris develop a kind of exaggerated form of culture shock, requiring medical/psychological assistance and sometimes winding up repatriated. Apparently, the disillusionment that Japanese tourists experience upon arriving in Paris, stemming from the disappointment of their somewhat romanticized expectations, is enough to require in some cases medical assistance. What reasons lie behind this strange condition? To what extent doe the Japanese temperament contribute to this inability to adjust? To what extent the Parisian urban climate? Is it due to a particular incompatibility between these two radically opposed cultures? Is it the eternal clash between east and west? Or is it simply representative of the universal modern experience of mis-/dis-placed individuals?

Voluntary expatriation is becoming more and more commonplace in an increasingly mobile and transient world. What is interesting about the Paris Syndrome is not necessarily the stereotypes it may confirm about said tourists and said natives. What is more notable is the insistence on the part of the hospitalized visitors on staying put where they are. Serial relocation as a necessity for modern identity formation seems to be shedding new light on the motivation for mobility, on the need to become "citizens of the globe". As the endless search for our identities and our increasingly rootless backgrounds overlap, we are still seeking to define ourselves somehow by "choosing" our "homes", "paths", and "destinations", or at least insisting on our choice to let such terms remain open and fluid. The Paris Syndrome gives new meaning to the old saying: "Wherever you go, there you are," especially when the "wherever" and the "you" are no longer on the map.

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Saison opening: cultural transfer along east German-Alpine routes of migration

Author(s): Michael Zinganel 
Michael Hieslmair 

Abstract

Since 1999/2000 when private German job agencies, in collaboration with the Austrian employment services centre, began an aggressive campaign in Germany's new federal states to recruit personnel for the winter season in Austria, more and more Germans are rushing to the Alps: no longer as holiday-makers but as seasonal personnel, working where other people go on vacation.

For this project a fictitious shrinking city in eastern Germany – a source region of tourists as well as seasonal labour – and a real booming major tourist centre in the mountains of the Tyrol are contrasted associatively with one another like vessels that alternately empty and fill.

The project is based on interviews with people looking for work, employment agencies and employers in eastern Germany and the Tyrol. For our projections, their real micro-political visions were temporally and spatially compressed and exaggerated to the point where they culminated in an optimistic outlook on the range of available personal options: the transfer of cultural know-how, capital accumulated during seasonal work, social skills and the use of the trans-national social networks that emerge from tourism's subcultures are able to complement each other productively; as well as how people's heterogeneous experience of tourism can offer unexpected opportunities for self-empowerment…

e-paper 'Hotel Royal': tourist accommodation and detention camp

Author(s): Ramona Lenz 

Abstract

'The hotel' has been used as a chronotope for a certain modern lifestyle in the urban centres of the Old World (e.g. Clifford 1997), contrasted by 'the motel' as metaphor for a rather postmodern way of life (e.g. Löfgren 1995). Both metaphors have been criticized because of their biased presentation of travel that does not reflect class, race and gender inequalities, and ethnographic interest has turned to women, servants, and hotel staff (e.g. Adler/Adler 2004) in order to compensate for the predominant travel historiography.

If we turn to the external borders of the European Union in the Mediterranean now, we are confronted with the result of the tremendous tourism development of the last decades and at the same time we may follow the implementation of the European border regime with its consequences for migrants on their way to Europe. Located in this context, 'the hotel' becomes important beyond its metaphorical meaning for a certain lifestyle and its material relevance as working environment.

At the example of one hotel on the Greek island of Crete, this paper localizes different mobility projects that significantly shape the contemporary European landscape. The selected hotel serves as a tourist accommodation for deprived Greek citizens from the North of Greek in summer, and is frequently converted into a detention camp for illegalized immigrants in winter. The author argues that neither the distinction between forced and voluntary mobility (or immobility) nor conventional typologies of tourists as opposed to migrants help to understand the transformative dynamics of mobility in contemporary Europe.

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e-paper On labels: tourists, migrants and others

Author(s): Raluca Nagy 

Abstract

The recent paradigm shift in social sciences and anthropology has not spared studies concerning mobility. Tourism and migration are placed at the two extremes of an otherwise varied spectrum, and need, if not new concepts and labels, at least a redefinition and recycling of old ones. The "continuum" (Williams and Hall, 2002) that reaches between one end of this spectrum, tourism, all the way to the other, migration, can be well illustrated with the amalgam of perceptions that these phenomena bring about in the case of Northern Romania.

Migrants returning home who come under the looking-glass of an uninformed observer will often be perceived, and hence described, as tourists. The migrant will receive all the familiar labels pertaining to tourists, with often little noticeable differentiation between the two categories. Reaching beyond this forced caricature, migrants and tourists share a complexity of positions in the mobility continuum. There is a category of migrants who use their foreign experience to mark and translate to foreigners overt differences and « exotic » details, avoid misunderstandings, and facilitate cultural communication with locals. Consequently, they play the role of cultural brokers, perceiving themselves as carriers of modernity as well as guides to the local "tradition". On the other hand, some of the most "radical" post-modern tourists spend up to a whole summer in a village. They try to learn the language and participate in household activities in order to better understand, taste and integrate within local life.

If the migrant becomes tourist or cultural broker and the tourist becomes anthropologist or local, where does this leave the original local himself?

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