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- Convenors:
-
Cameo Dalley
(University of Melbourne)
Victoria Stead (Deakin University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- STB 2, Science Teaching Building
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 4 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
Often thought of as strangers or a special kind of 'other', tourists and relations with them have the potential to transform local forms of relationality. In this panel we are interested in the ways in which tourism facilitates the reimagination of value in local contexts.
Long Abstract:
Often thought of as strangers or a special kind of 'other', tourists and relations with them have the potential to transform local forms of social, political and economic relationality. In this panel we are interested in the ways in which tourism facilitates the reimagination of value in local contexts. What solidarities or tensions between different groups might emerge anew through the lens of tourist encounters? Attentive to the ethnographic contexts in which encounters take place, we are interested in a broad spectrum of tourist ecologies. This include places where tourism plays a central role in structuring development aspirations, and where unexpected alliances sometimes arise out of unequal power relations (Alexeyeff and Taylor 2016). It also includes tourism in colonial and postcolonial contexts, where issues to do with recognition and identity may be at the forefront (Hall and Tucker 2004). We also seek to encompass relations that trouble conventional categories of tourism—like working holiday-maker schemes—or relations that can involve 'tourist-like' elements—including those between anthropologists, their field sites and research participants. We invite papers that explore how expectations of performances of identity or authenticity become an integral part of the tourism landscape (Acciaoli 1985; Henry 2000; Picard 1996), but also seek to move beyond these considerations of 'cultural tourism' to examine the diverse social, political and economic relations in which tourist value is enmeshed. How is value produced, contested, or indeed refused in these and other diverse tourist ecologies, and with what effects?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -Victoria Stead (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
The Kokoda war tourism industry brings Papua New Guineans into complex tourist encounters with Australians. These can yield material benefits for locals, but also compel recognisable performances of deference by those whose livelihoods hinge on the tourist value that is ascribed (or denied) them.
Paper long abstract:
In Papua New Guinea's Oro Province, a war tourism centered on the Kokoda Track brings local Papua New Guineans into encounters with Australians, including with the trekkers who come to 'do' Kokoda, the operators who run the treks, and representatives from various governmental and non-governmental agencies. These encounters unfold against the context of Australia's colonial history in PNG, and are invariably structured by the sharp inequalities of power and economy that endure in the post-Independence era. They both invoke and transform value, as history becomes a resource to be mobilized in the pursuit of development, and as the desires of tourists and trekking companies compel recognizable performances by the Papua New Guineans whose livelihoods hinge on the tourist value that is ascribed (or denied) them. For example, locals working as porters on the trek are frequently valued—within advertising for the industry as well by the individual trekkers whose bags they carry—as the "new generation of Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels", in reference to the Papuans and New Guineans who served as carriers for the Australian army during WWII. Maintaining these positive valuations can yield material benefit—employment, cash tips, other gifts—but also fixes Papua New Guineans in a deferential and radicalised relation to Australians. In this paper, I offer an ethnographic reflection on the making and refiguring of value within Kokoda tourist encounters, opening out from this to think more broadly about the possibilities and limits of recognition, and its enmeshing with redistribution in postcolonial contexts.
Zainab Burton-Tairu (Divine Word University)
Paper short abstract:
The use of culture for the benefit of the tourism industry has generated other debates around a process described as commodification and the lack of authenticity. This paper examines the construction and patterns of values associated with the co-creation of cultural tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Tourists today claim to search for what is real and authentic. But at tourism attractions, cultural expressions, through performances, arts and crafts, village visits, and other aspects of heritage, must necessarily be transformed into commodities to be exchanged and profited from in the heritage tourism industry. This paper examines the construction and patterns of values associated with the co-creation of cultural tourism. I present two case studies: the Sepik River Crocodile Festival, Papua New Guinea, and the Mossman Gorge Centre, Queensland, Australia. The crocodile is central to Sepik culture, with many traditional and beliefs and legends based on this animal. The Crocodile Festival is meant to convey this relationship. The Mossman Gorge Centre is owned and operated by the Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal community north of Cairns, in the Wet Tropics of Queensland, which gained World Heritage status in 1988. In both cases, a form of "authenticity" is created as visitors experience traditional practices of hunting, fishing, and conservation and take part in cultural activities. The construction of authenticity can be seen as a two-way process of exchange for locals to trade cultural products with global societies by making a profit and conserving heritage.
Sarah Webb (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
The diverse values and practices referred to as ecotourism have enjoyed, via association with the term, a kind of benign imaginary. This paper examines these dynamics through an ethnographic focus on domestic 'eco' tourism in the Philippines.
Paper long abstract:
The diverse values and practices which might be referred to as ecotourism have enjoyed, via association with the term, a kind of benign imaginary. The assumption that ecotourism will be beneficial for people and places often conceals the value-laden politics of measuring its impacts and alternatives. This paper uses an ethnographic focus on domestic 'eco' branded tourism in the Philippines to examine how the labelling of products as such acts to obscure, rather than necessarily articulate, the potential values of ecotourism. The supposed, vague good of ecotourism becomes a rich field for anthropologists to understand how value is being reproduced by a range of social actors with both shared and divergent understandings of what it means to live sustainably. Specifically I examine a context on Palawan Island where ecotourism is regularly and powerfully presented as capable of both transforming the livelihoods of those Tagbanua families who reside in this highly valued forest region, and providing broader benefits for the Philippine nation. Ecotourism dynamics are shaped by a fantasy that Tagbanua possess a precolonial, innately Filipino relationship with nature which can be appropriated by middle class Filipinos even as environmental and economic good is generated through their presence as tourists. This fantasy is sustained through a suggestion that Tagbanua require external interventions like ecotourism ventures to provide an alternative to livelihood activities long considered 'primitive' and an environmentally destructive threat to ecotourism.
Anthea Snowsill (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
Using the case study of 'environmental crisis' in Inle Lake Myanmar, this paper explores the ways in which tourism and its affiliated discourses become mobilized as tools for development and consequently shape the co-production of knowledge and political order. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
Inle Lake in Myanmar's southern Shan state holds status as one of Myanmar's primary tourist destinations. However, in recent years it has become characterized as an ecosystem facing environmental threats to survival. Popular environmental narratives draw on fears surrounding climate change, pollution, silt accumulation, and the widespread use of agrochemicals on farms in and around the lake. Regional discourses of tourism subsequently situate these environmental challenges within a developmentalist framework that prioritizes the continued enhancement of Inle Lake as a tourism destination.
Much discussion about Inle Lake's environmental situation becomes structured around actionable cause-and-effect "problems" that prohibit the ongoing ability of the environment to sustain its current tourism economy. These narratives are further strengthened by drawing on emotionally laden and symbolic imagery of the lake's people's and traditional ways of life which draw tourist populations to the region.
This has led to the development of oversimplified narratives of environmental crisis. In defining and outlining environmental problems in this simplified format, regulatory interventions by development experts, institutions and government bodies that claim stewardship over land and resources they do not own are legitimized (Forsyth and Walker, 2008: 23). With an uneven division of political and economic power amongst the ethnic groups that neighbor one another in the areas surrounding Inle Lake, the construction of environmental narratives and the knowledge and policies that develop out of them necessarily take on a political dimension. Tourism discourse consequently plays an instrumental role in the coproduction of environmental knowledge and political order.
Nanxi Kang (Beijing Normal University)
Paper short abstract:
When students getting into an unfamiliar country to study for a short period of time, one of the most difficult things is how to get relations with local forms. Within tourist encounters, they got reimagination of value which will guide their actions.
Paper long abstract:
In spite of a number of drivers for change in the pursuit of values in studying tour in higher education, the feelings of students themselves are still remain discussed not enough. Through an ethnographic study of the effectiveness of short-term visit tours among several participated students, this paper shows what they gain from the collision and fusion process of various cultures and societies. Students living in campus with almost same resources and knowledge but they are influenced by teachers, friends and families. According to formal and informal activities, academic and social interactions, students in "specific field" completed the transformation of their own values by recognizing and identifying numerous events and conversations. Students' attitude toward the consequent could be identified into two dimensions: tourists and learners. Tourists, who focus mainly at local living habits, enjoy structures of ancient buildings and bustling vegetable markets. They feel value from citizens. Learners, who ask complicated questions in foreign professors' lecture, get pleasure from sharing ideas and exchange useful information which will inspire further research. And thus comes to a combination in tourist ecologies, not only the two aspects, but also an understanding of local cultures. Tracing the virtue of visit tours, this paper calls for a methodical perspective on trip outcomes that are purposeful, good for future living, and benefit students themselves.
Cameo Dalley (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
Many tourists who visit the remote East Kimberley town of Wyndham in Northern Australia have personal connections to men that once worked there. These tourists often lament the end of a time when a particular set of working-class values dominated the colonial frontier.
Paper long abstract:
Self-drive tourists, including the somewhat infamous Grey Nomads, inch their way around outback Australia, stopping in towns and caravan parks. The small East Kimberley town of Wyndham is one such destination that sits at a dead end in the Great Northern Highway. Many tourists that make their way there have connections to the town through brothers, fathers, uncles and grandfathers who worked at an abattoir which operated in the town from 1919 to 1985. This paper explores the experiences of these tourists, who often describe feeling saddened by what they see as the diminishment of the town, provoking nostalgia for the dominance of a particular set of working-class values about labour on the colonial frontier. Though this 'nostalgic workerism' (Ferguson 2013) imbued with particular gendered and racial ideations is unlikely to have been a reality in a workforce that included women, ethnic minorities and Aboriginal people, it is nonetheless a pervasive discourse among tourists. Nostalgia is actively cultivated by Wyndham residents and business operators who see this particular kind of tourist, often described as a 'visitor', as one of few possible (and desirable) revenue streams for the town. Ethnographic reflections in this paper consider 'tourism at the end of the road' as doubly constructed - Wyndham's location, and the supposed end of the road for white masculinities of working-class labour in Australia.
Karen Hansen (Rio Tinto)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider the way that modern surf culture, in many ways a particularly hypermasculine enterprise, provides an avenue for local Philippine surfers to contest colonial and touristic processes of feminisation and marginalisation.
Paper long abstract:
Cloud 9 is a challenging and increasingly popular surfbreak located off an island in central Philippines. The early 1990s saw Australian and American surf tourists begin travelling to the remote island to surf this wave, kicking-off what was to become, by 2016, a highly-centralised, vibrant and burgeoning surf tourism destination complete with an eclectic Western lifestyle migrant community, increasing numbers of domestic and foreign tourist arrivals, and a flourishing local surf community. In post-colonial contexts of tropical tourism, such the Philippines, colonial/touristic processes of feminisation work to emasculate or render invisible local male populations, while concurrently imagining local women as hypersexual yet passive 'objects' for the visual pleasure or 'consumption' of tourists. This paper will consider the way that modern surf culture, in many ways a particularly hypermasculine enterprise, provides an avenue for local male surfers to contest colonial and touristic processes of feminisation and marginalisation. Rejection of passive, subservient 'feminine' roles is not, however, limited to Philippine men: Filipinas who surf constitute changing gender norms in local society, as they too exhibit 'masculine' characteristics through dominant, active and engaged behaviours in the surf zone.
Alex Gearin (Xiamen University )
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the indigenous encounter with tourists in a Shipibo ayahuasca healing lodge in Pucallpa involves the making of boundaries of otherness aimed at containing and vitalizing healing potencies associated with a primitivist approach.
Paper long abstract:
Many ayahuasca tourist lodges in Peru heavily restrict tourist interactions with the indigenous healers that conduct the main elements of the service. Engaging Rupert Stasch's notion of "dramas of otherness", this paper examines how the indigenous encounter with tourists in a Shipibo ayahuasca healing lodge in Pucallpa involves the making of boundaries of otherness aimed at containing and vitalizing healing potencies associated with a primitivist approach. The tourist perspective makes little space for notions of sorcery, moral ambiguities, and the exchange theories of health, illness, and personhood that have constituted indigenous Amazonian approaches to drinking ayahuasca. Considering ceremonial practices in the lodge that mediate tourist perceptions of the familiar and the strange, the paper examines how the Shipibo healers value tourist understandings of the healthy body and the inebriated senses.
Christian Ritter (Karlstad University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a mixed-method approach combining long-term fieldwork in tourist places and data scraping from the application programming interfaces of Twitter and Instagram, this paper examines the media practices of travel vloggers and tourism professionals during influencer campaigns in Estonia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the media practices of travel vloggers and tourism professionals during influencer campaigns in Estonia. Committed to a mixed-method approach (Born and Haworth, 2017), the aim of this investigation is to gain a better understanding of the valorisation of cultural media content about travel destinations in the increasingly globalised tourism industry. Based on long-term fieldwork in tourist places and data scraping from the application programming interfaces of Twitter and Instagram, the story of travel vloggers in Estonia indicates how digital media are reshuffling power relations within the global assemblages of tourism. On the one hand, tourism organisations aim to influence the circulation of posts on digital media platforms. On the other hand, travel vloggers seek to produce authentic stories about travel destinations.
The Estonian tourism board organised `influencer campaigns` in 2018 and 2019, inviting travellers with influential digital media profiles to Tallinn. All the travel influencers were offered free transportation to and accommodation in the Estonian capital. The campaign organisers demanded in turn that the travel influencers took part in daily shootings and posted messages on their accounts during the stay. The influencers, who came from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia and Turkey, visited major tourist attractions in Tallinn. Re-appropriating digital media platforms, travel vloggers engage in self-portraiture within a newly evolving attention economy (Marwick, 2015). In this paper, I will assess the different forms of value exchange during influencer events and the current transformations of the tourism ecology in Tallinn.