Some thoughts on Cultural Appropriation – an existential threat to fun and discovery?

In recent months cultural appropriation has becomes a ubiquitous term in the armoury of a growing band of social justice warriors, determined to sacrifice free speech and politics itself in the pursuit of ‘social justice’. On a small but growing number of US campuses, and tentatively here in the UK too, Halloween costumes, fancy dress, gestures and words have been censured as examples of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is taken to mean the adoption of dress, speech or style from a group without privilege by a group with privilege.

 

Culturally appropriate someone else’s culture and you may find yourself accused. You may not have meant to hurt anyone’s feelings, but that is likely to be considered irrelevant. As American comedian Louis CK asserted with regards to the wave of accusations of cultural appropriation and ‘microaggression’ on US campuses, ‘you don’t get to choose what offends me’.

One notable but not exceptional case in the USA recently is that of Erika Christakis at Yale University. Students called for her resignation after she responded to and questioned the need for advice from the school’s Intercultural Affairs Council about the cultural implications of students' Halloween costumes. Protesters also confronted her husband, Nicholas Christakis, who defended her statement. You can read her original email here. This was far from being the only case where  Halloween was deemed  culturally problematic  on US campuses. Forms of dress, hairstyle, musical style, gesture and even yoga have also been criticised for their complicity in cultural appropriation.

Yale formally encourages students to ‘think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.’ It informs students that ‘the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox’ must be tolerated. ‘When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you.’

Yet if dress and gestures in the spirit of having a good time are censured, or, as happened in more than one case, students have been offered formal official advice on what constitutes an acceptable Halloween costume, where does that leave open debate on race, Palestine-Israel or pretty much anything else? In fact as has been widely reported there is a  growth in speakers being disinvited both in the US and the UK due to offence taking, violation of ‘safe space’.

Some  - too few - have asserted their right to wear what they want and say what they want, and other people’s right to say what they want back.  This used to be (generally) encouraged by radicals and in Universities. In fact struggles for equal rights and against oppression (as opposed to struggles to have Halloween costumes censured and native American style head dresses banned at concerts) have generally sought to extend rights that some have to all people, including speech rights. The ‘right’ to dress as you want was never even an issue!

Cultural appropriation is not a new term, but its usage has expanded. Until relatively recently it was used in relation to physical cultural artefacts from one society displayed in a museum in another country, or the selling on of such artefacts without the originators seeing the economic benefit of this. The Elgin marbles (originating in ancient Greece) and the Benin Bronzes (originating in the Benin kingdom, part of modern day Nigeria) are consider by some to have been appropriated by Britain from their original society and culture.

In a sense the term itself has been appropriated. Now cultural appropriation has been detached from any claim to material ownership of things. The new world of cultural appropriation sees psychic harm to people inflicted by a gesture here, an offending fancy dress outfit there,  a copied figure of speech here or a hairstyle there.

On US campuses the impact of the growing politics of cultural appropriation is having damaging consequences. It contributes to demands for ‘safe spaces’ for people from minority groups, and the growth of accusations of microaggression. Principals have acceded to some of these demands, and some staff support them. To fail to support demands around cultural appropriation or to criticise them itself can be deemed to constitute a microaggression (as Christakis found out to her cost). This is identity politics writ large where people have to be constantly guarded about their behaviour and words, and constantly reflect on where they came from (their identity, their privileged / unprivileged position), rather than what they have to say or who they want to become.

I strongly suspect that cultural appropriation will surface any time soon in geographical, ethical and anthropological studies of tourism. Tourism has long been assumed by many writers to be profoundly problematic with regard to culture. The key ideas adopted by writers on the sociology and anthropology of leisure travel include the demonstration effect, acculturation and staged authenticity. The demonstration effect refers, simply, to people from one culture aping that of another on the basis that the other is associated with things they aspire to. Acculturation is a general term referring to cultural change when two cultures interact. The term staged authenticity originated with Erving Goffman’s 1910 analysis of inter personal interaction, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He argued that society has a metaphorical front stage and back stage. People act for outsiders front stage, but reserve a back stage for themselves and their own community, the latter in a sense authentic.

Very often these terms are invoked in the context of arguments that view cultural encounters between tourist and host as very problematic. As Pete Smith and I have argued, it is quite common for tourism to be associated with cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism or an insidious neoliberalism. Cultural encounters are already heavily problematized and viewed pessimistically. More fundamentally, the predominant mode of thinking about intercultural encounters in tourism geography, tourism studies and human geography in general is cultural relativism. What is taken to define the individual is their membership of a culture, and culture is always plural.

I argued in the Moralisation of Tourism (2003) and elsewhere against  the emphasis on cultural relativism in and the complete absence of humanism in writing about tourism and tourists from sociological and human geographical perspectives. Culture is always viewed in terms of cultural difference, whilst any notion of human culture is missing. Put simply, cultures are too often seen as defined by their differences, with common struggles and aspirations for the future ignored. Presentism is the result – cultures defined by their present relationship to the natural world, with cultural transformation viewed as an external threat.

My prediction is that cultural appropriation will start to feature as a prism through which to view tourism’s cultural impacts. Things that were fun and playful such as wearing imitations of local dress or sporting indigenous headgear will be interpreted as unwitting expressions of neo-colonial arrogance. Also the cultural etiquette encouraged by the need to ‘check your privilege’ in the presence of people of other cultures is just as likely to reinforce culture as a barrier between people, making speech more guarded and reducing the potential for true friendships and real understanding. We may avoid the odd cultural faux pas, but the price for that is to fail to connect with individuals who become viewed as repositories of Culture with a capital ‘C’.

Ultimately, where some of tourism’s cultural critics and the purveyors of the new politics of cultural appropriation get it wrong is failing to see that all culture is appropriated.  To misquote Marx, we were born into cultures not of our own making and we make our own culture in that context. As columnist Patrick West puts it, cultures are ‘… organic and fluid, they mutate over space and time, like people’s personalities, the shape of clouds, or the contours of our coasts’. Better to leave culture as a space for openness, fun and discovery.

Tourism’s Culture War: From Grand Tours to Ethical Tourism

Ethical tourism is mainstream, from the commercial world of tour operators to geography and tourism classrooms in schools and universities. This growth of ethical tourism from the 1990s onwards is also part of a more general trend towards the invocation of ethical consumerism as an important way to assist communities principally in less developed countries, or to “make a difference”.

A political dimension to tourism and lifestyle generally is not new. In Victorian England discussions of tourism reflected changing social forces of class and different cultural reactions to the dramatic transformations wrought by the industrial revolution.  More recently many associate the counterculture of the 1960s as the heyday of radical and experimental lifestyle, including travel. Yet the rise of ethical tourism over the last 30 years is quite distinctive. Nineteenth century  narratives of progress have long since waned, and the political ideologies that influenced  1960s radicalism have lost their purchase on contemporary consciousness in the post-Cold War world.  

As a result  lifestyle has become less overtly political but counter intuitively more central to politics. Whereas in the past leisure lifestyles were associated with class position, social status or with political radicalism, today lifestyles are seen as the end in themselves, the means of acting upon the world. This is what is new and distinct about ethical tourism. It marks the elevation of lifestyle itself as the terrain of morality and human agency. Whereas people never in the past looked to their holidays as a way to act upon the world and strive for social, moral or even political goals, today they are encouraged to do so in the name of ethical tourism.

 

This is a limited and limiting moral terrain. The positive potential in travel would be better served by ditching ethical etiquette in favour of an openness to experience and to the world. Ignoring this etiquette also leaves cultural encounters as open ended and exploratory, hence encouraging the development of individual moral autonomy, the latter a truly moral goal.

 

The roots of tourism’s lifestyle politics

Leisure travel seems to carry its own ‘tourism culture war’. Criticism of certain types of tourism and lauding of others reflects divisions of ideology and class, and different perspectives on modernity and progress. In this respect there is nothing new in either ethical tourism or the attendant criticisms of the package holidays often in the frame as less than ethical.
 

According to Feiffer, with reference to the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century: ‘In the era of the “lifestyle”, one expressed oneself more at leisure than at work; by one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, one’s tastes. The tour represented all of them’ (1985: 224). These tastes were markers of privilege, the tour a cultural right of passage for the landed aristocracy.

In the 1840s Wordsworth sought to preserve the Lake District from tourists by opposing the building of the Kendall to Windermere railway. He wanted to  preserve not only the beauty of the Lakes, but also something intrinsic to human culture that he thought  was being destroyed by the industrial revolution (Urry, 1996). The Romantic reaction to the industry and urbanisation of the industrial revolution sought a sense of selfhood in tradition and in nature in the midst of fundamental change in the mode of life.

A fear of mass society was often evident. Thomas Cook, pioneer of mass tourism, was held in low regard by those who felt the masses were ill equipped to benefit from travel. The rise of Cook’s seaside tourism in the UK prompted the clergyman and diarist Francis Kilvert to write in the 1870s that, ‘of all noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist’ (Fussell, 1982: 40).

Yet more influential at that time was a positive attachment to the benefits of industrialisation, including leisure travel. Cook’s sentiment was widespread amongst all classes, evidenced by the popularity of his tours. For him travel was:

‘for the millions [who could] o’erleap the bounds of their own narrow circle, rub of rust and prejudice by contact with others, and expand their sales and invigorate their bodies by an exploration of some of nature’s finest scenes.' 

(cited in Withey, 1997: 145)

Cook sold thousands of tickets to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Many of humble means committed their meagre disposable income to travel on the recently established railways to the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, to witness a celebration of science and industry as progress.

The debates about tourism reflect on the one hand modernity and the optimistic spirit of Victorian England, and on the other romanticism and fear and loathing of the masses.

Post war: counterculture and travel

Post World War Two, especially with the onset of mass consumption and new opportunities opened up by technology and economic growth, tourism’s culture war looks somewhat different.   Dean MacCannell’s sociology makes an interesting contribution to understanding  tourism’s association with social and political identities. MacCannell’s seminal The Tourist: a New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) and his later reflections in Empty Meeting Grounds: the Tourism Papers (1992) suggest that in a modern world in which authentic human contact is stymied by the market some tourists seek more human and humane personal and cultural relations through tourism. However, all too often this search for authenticity is destined to be in vein as tourism itself becomes subject to ever greater commercialisation. Nonetheless, he argued that this quest holds out possibilities for greater understanding and a better world.

MacCannell was influenced by the turn of the Left in the early 1970s, from analysing the mode of production and the social relations emerging from this to a focus on consumption and culture.  MacCannell himself shifted his allegiance from the working class as a force for progressive change on the world stage, to cultural encounters and the possibility of new subjects arising from these (1992). In effect, the cultural subject is substituted for the political subject, a development characteristic of much radical thought on the Left (Gitlin, 1997; Heartfield, 1998).

MacCannell considers the encounters between tourist and host and suggests that they can have positive outcomes for cultural understanding leading to progressive social and political consequences. Tourism in this analysis is also a metaphor for society. MacCannell is interested in wider possibilities through intercultural and interpersonal encounter. In this respect his ideas are a basis for the rise, some 15 years after The Tourist was published, of ethical tourism. Much of the writing around ethical travel looks critically, but hopefully, at the potential for it to contribute to a greater level of understanding and empathy, leading to a more progressive politics.

Sometimes presented in contrast to MacCannell’s thesis is historian Daniel Boorstin’s critique of inauthentic travel in his 1962 collection of essays, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America  (1992 – originally published 1962). The essays were a response to what Boorstin saw as the superficial consumption based culture in post 1945 America. MacCannell’s radical search for agency is sometimes contrasted to Boorstin’s conservative bemoaning of America’s loss of authenticity. The coincidence of conservative and radical thinking here over the emptiness of modern mass consumer society is itself notable.

The countercultural character of the tourists described by MacCannell (although they would have identified themselves as travellers and baulked at the notion that they were tourists) is reflected in sociologist Erik Cohen’s categorisation of leisure travellers. Cohen sees a section of tourists as looking for a ‘spiritual centre’, either at home or in another society, and classifies them in this way (1979). Cohen’s spiritual centre is a place where the individual finds meaning to their life, and where they feel part of something authentic. He identifies, amongst other categories, ‘experiential tourists’  and ‘existential tourists’, both alienated from and critical of their home culture, both seeking meaning through travel in places and relationships deemed more authentic, more human. Cohen identifies these ‘alternative’ tourists with the counterculture (ibid.).

Perhaps, though, whilst experiential tourists sought meaning in other societies and other cultures, these are really the backdrop for a search for an authentic self (Wang, 2000).  Christopher Lasch had already argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that radical thought in particular was shifting from a  social critique to a psychological one, that there was a shift from focusing on the public, political world to the private self. That the answer lies within and is expressed in part through how you live out your own life, including how you travel, was certainly a part of the experimental travel trends of the late 1960s and 1970s (albeit only a small section of often quite privileged youth every made it along the Hippy Trail).

MacCannel’s thesis, and Cohen’s discussion of the search for a spiritual centre, mirror influential political analyses of the times. Most notably Marcuse, in his One Dimensional Man (1964), sets out a radical cultural critique of mass consumption, technological rationality and the bureaucracy of modern capitalism. These are sentiments that prefigure the critique of mass consumption so influential today and evident in the advocacy of ethical tourism niches such as community ecotourism, albeit the latter lacking the radical political perspective of Marcuse.

For Wolin: ‘The 1960s was a period of acute disenchantment with western modernity’. Opposition, such as the revolts in Paris in May 1968 ‘targeted impersonal, bureaucratic and highly formalised modes of socialisation’ that operated ‘without regard for persons’ (2012: 11).  A number of prominent French intellectuals were at the forefront of developing poststructuralism as a key reference point in the social sciences. Rather than capitalism as a system that held back historical progress, it was rationalism and progress itself – the legacy of the Enlightenment – that was increasingly the target of poststructuralist analyses.  

Bell, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, had already described the cultural mood and its relationship to the economic system and its values:              

‘The social structure today is ruled by an economic principle of rationality, defined in terms of efficiency in the allocation of resources; the culture, in contrast, is prodigal, promiscuous, dominated by an antirational, anti-intellectual temper.’

(1964: 432-433).

Given the diagnosis of society’s ills as emanating in the realm of consumption and lived experience in a modern, soulless bureaucratic society, it is unsurprising that the reaction to this took a cultural form, through lifestyles associated with the counterculture.  This disillusionment with modernity meant the alternatives eschewed technology and rationality (in tourism in the form of the Fordist tourism system and the modern resort). Plus ça change.

The protests of May 1968 in Paris threw up an example of tourism’s culture wars. Situationist inspired protestors smashed the windows of Club Med’s offices in Paris and wrote ‘Club Med: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’ in the street. The bourgeois lifestyle, characterised by affluence and luxury, was the target for these protestors (their graffiti later reprised by punk band The Sex Pistols, in the 1978 hit Holiday in the Sun). Club Med epitomized despised bourgeois culture and the protesters represented the counterculture.

Others expressed their countercultural opposition to ‘the system’ in the spirit of the phrase ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’, popularised by hippie icon Timothy Leary. The hippie trail to India and Nepal of the 1960s and 1970s, in reality practiced by few, led young critics of the system to seek alternative ways to live through cannabis, mysticism and a rejection of authority. Separating one’s self from the mainstream, spiritually and materially, was characteristic of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Kerouac, an icon to a generation of travellers, refused to buy in to the American dream, and lived and wrote on the margins, seeking an alternative consciousness to that of mainstream America. Kerouac  epitomises Sartre’s phrase; ‘condemned to be free’.

The Lonely Planet Guide books were originally associated with a countercultural rejection of mainstream society and carried a similar radical caché for a while in the 1970s. The first official guide to the hippie trail, published in 1974, included advice on cannabis use and how to obtain fake identification. It followed the success of a makeshift stapled together edition designed to raise cash to enable its writers, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, to get home. Hippies on the trail were trying to free their minds, and whilst the revolution remained in their heads, there was an association with societal as well as personal change.

The relationship of this countercultural rejection of bourgeois values, and often Enlightenment values, to political ideology is key. There is much truth in Bell’s argument in The End of Ideology (1960) that the ideologies that had defined the preceding 150 years were exhausted and unlikely to define the post-World War Two period. Two world wars fought amongst the developed powers and the failed attempt at radical social change in the USSR made grand ideologies less tenable. Also, relative stability and economic growth after the war opened up possibilities for some to embrace culture as a realm within which they could experiment and promote alternatives to bourgeois norms (Furedi, 2014).   

Lifestyle nonetheless retained a connection to experimentation and radical social change, and this clearly sets it apart from modern ethical lifestyles. The 1960s in particular is closely associated with radicalism and cultural experimentation (Markwick, 1999), and trends in tourism lifestyle reflected that.  The politics of Left and Right, reflecting competing social and economic systems, continued to animate politics. The existence of an alternative system in the USSR (albeit one that had degenerated and lost any claim to be a higher form of society in the eyes of most people), the post-World War Two growth of the state vis-a-vis the market, relatively strong class allegiances through political parties and trade unions in many countries, and the demands for freedom from national liberation struggles all sustained a belief in societal change in radical thought. Countercultural lifestyle retained a future orientation – radical and utopian visions of how society could and should be were in evidence (ibid.).

A sizeable rebellious section of principally middle class youth in this period exhibited not just their disdain for bourgeois culture as they saw it, but also sought to develop a political consciousness that could challenge the system  (ibid). Whilst the Hippies were well on the road to rejecting modern society and progress, their icon, Jack Kerouac, had already written: ‘I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page, and I could do anything I wanted’ (Dharma Bums, 1958). There was a sense of possibility, freedom and experimentation outside of the mainstream that contrasts sharply with the over-prepared , CV oriented, safety first, citizenship linked travel of today.

Anarchist green thinker Murray Bookchin’s ideas are indicative of how lifestyle was seen by some as intimately linked to social change, even revolution, in the 1970s. He argued the following:

[T]he revolutionary movement is profoundly concerned with lifestyle. It must try to live the revolution in all its totality, not only participate in it. It must be deeply concerned with the way the revolutionist lives, his relations with the surrounding environment, and his degree of self-emancipation.

                                                                                                               (1986: 67, (original 1971))

For Bookchin the ‘personal is political’ in that it was linked to distinctly political movements for substantial or even revolutionary change. This is in stark contrast to today, when the idea of societal change and a movement to bring it about are neither on the agenda nor on the horizon. Green lifestyles today would be more closely associated with shopping for organic food, utilising solar panels, and perhaps looking to make your holiday an ethical one. Personal behaviour and consumption are linked to ethical imperatives, but not social change of any sort.
 

From lifestyle politics to lifestyle in place of politics

Published eleven years after McCannell’s The Tourist: a New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) was a further influential book addressing tourism and lifestyle, Jost Krippendorf’s The Holiday Makers: The Impacts of Leisure and Travel (1987).  Krippendorf pioneered the now more widely developed and popular critique of mass tourism. For Krippendorf mass tourism has become a ‘restless activity that has taken hold of the once sedentary human society’ (ibid: xiii) and results in damage to host communities and the local environment as mass migration encounters social and environmental limits. Krippendorf’s study, along with Turner and Ash’s prescient The Golden Hordes (1972)  published fifteen years earlier,  set the tone for the academic critiques of mass tourism that now add up to a significant body of work across a range of related disciplines, today constituting an orthodoxy (Butcher, 2003).

Krippendorf not only criticised mass tourism, he also suggested that consumption is an area where individuals can adopt lifestyle patterns that are more favourable both to host communities and the wider environment. His view was that consciousness of consumption can lead to a more aware and ethical individual thus humanizing travel (1987). In making this argument he draws a clear link between tourists’ consumption and development outcomes for their hosts. This sentiment is a key element of the advocacy of ethical tourism today.

In spite of commonalities – both are critical of mass consumption and advocates of a sort of lifestyle politics - the shift from McCannell (1974) to Krippendorf (1987) is important. McCannell writes in the context of the Cold War and the end of the post war boom (the Oil Crisis of 1973 is often cited as an event that marked the end of the post war ‘golden years’ of consistent economic growth and optimism). By the 1980s, however, the belief in the state to reform society was far less tenable, and the USSR from being a symbol of another system being possible came to represent the impossibility and undesirability of attempts at social change on a grand scale, a view brought vividly into relief by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (Giddens, 1994, 2000; Jacoby, 1999). The influence of class had waned, with its political expression in unions and parties of the left greatly diminished. Capitalism’s erstwhile critics accepted and even embraced market forces as ‘no one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism’ (Giddens, 1998: 43).

Yet the collapse of alternatives did not vindicate capitalism and the market. Anticommunism had proved important in cohering conservative and social democratic elites who were able to present their politics favourably vis-a-vis their Cold War opponents. For Laidi (1998) the end of the Cold War precipitated a far reaching ‘crisis of meaning’. Similarly Judt notes that in Europe ‘after 1989 there was no ideological project of Left or Right on offer’ (2005, 33). There are no longer narratives based competing ideologies and positive visions of the future that connect the individual to their society. Moreover, new political narratives have not emerged. Consequently the market has taken on the appearance of an eternal reality in political and social debates (Heartfield, 2002). Fukuyama’s End of History thesis (1992), following soon after the end of the Cold War, presenting a contemporary world in which all the big ideological issues have been settled, is emblematic of the sense of closure of grand politics.

Hence by the late 1980s  - when Krippendorf’s assertions on the theme of ethical holidays start to become mainstream - the scene was set for lifestyle to become in one sense less, and in another more, political. In contrast to the radicalism and political conflict of the 1960s, by the late 1980s there are few pretensions to radical social change. Today’s ethical lifestyle tourists articulate their aspirations in terms of care, awareness and helping rather than reform or revolution. In this respect tourist lifestyles are far less political, and in fact are expressed in terms of ethics rather than politics. This bears out the view of political theorist Chantal Mouffe who argues that moral issues have become central to contemporary political life and the struggle between ‘right and wrong’ has replaced the struggle between ‘right and left’ (2005: 5). The common portrayal of ecotourism, volunteer tourism and other niches as ‘ethical’ (and also mass tourism as unethical) is indicative of this.

Yet at the same time, the demise of erstwhile narratives of the Left and of the Right mean that today ethical lifestyle has come to define public life in a way not evident in the past. Volunteer tourists, gappers with a mission and the patrons of many new niches and brands, and along with Fairtrade shoppers and ethical consumers generally, try to make their mark on the world directly through lifestyle. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s lifestyle was linked to political ideologies, today lifestyle itself comprises an ethical intervention into issues held dear. Ethics is the new politics, from ‘ethical’ foreign policies and 'humanitarian' military missions to ethical consumption and travel.

Also it is notable that when compared to the 1960s and early 1970s – the frame of reference of MacCannell and Cohen’s original ideas - lifestyle in the last 30 years has lost much of its critical and experimental character.  In the earlier period alternative travel was aligned to a counterculture, to an implied critique of the prevailing norms and values of society. Kerouac inspired and Lonely Planet guided travellers stood outside of the contemporary modes of citizenship. From the 1990s onwards – the period in which Krippendorf’s  The Holiday Makers has found resonance in academic writing and popular culture – alternative tourism is applauded and even sponsored by governments, industry, school and university as a route to responsible global citizenship.

The ethical content of leisure travel

What passes as ‘political’ is clearly fluid. Lifestyle is today political in that it fills the space vacated by the retreat of politics as previously understood.  The collapse of the political identities of the past has paralleled a pervasive rise of the politics of the inter-personal. Backed up by neo-Foucauldian notions of dispersed power and feminist inspired concepts of care, erstwhile private concerns (shopping, behaviour, holiday choices) now colonise the public sphere.

Influential thinkers in sociology (e.g. Giddens) and human geography (e.g. Barnett) have theorized the focus on lifestyle. Whilst accepting consumption in and of itself may be limited as a form of politics, they see its potential in a wider remoralization of political life spurred through a recognition of a lack of fairness in trade. Some see it as prefiguring a wider shift in political consciousness well beyond lifestyle (Barnett et al, 2011). A similar case is made in relation to ethical niches such as volunteer tourism by, amongst others, Wearing (2001) and Higgins-Desboilles (2008).

Yet the often well-meant moralisation of behaviour and consumption that ethical tourism represents is profoundly anti-political and not particularly moral. It stymies the positive cultural potential that exists in travel. It assigns universal ethical value to particular political outlook, and hence rules out of court the clash of opposing views – the very stuff of politics. In too many classrooms, guidebooks, debates and commentaries the etiquette of ethical tourism precludes an open ended examination of what may be good and what not so good about different development options or different cultural encounters.  All too often the question has been answered for you before it has been asked – what is ‘ethical’ is deemed small scale, eschews economic  and social transformation, promotes localism and conserves wildlife and the cultures that have coevolved through a close relationship to nature’s rhythms. In this way ethical tourism circumvents thought and moral autonomy. It shortcuts what can be great about travel – the imperative to think for oneself about new places and people.

Better to drop the moralistic etiquette about ethical tourism, Fairtrade and ethical consumption generally. You are then forced to say what is actually good about this or that development option, and how you judge it to be good. Better we have more Socratic dialogue and less deference to moral, or moralistic, codes.

In Dharma Bums Kerouac’s character says ‘I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page, and I could do anything I wanted’. The rapid growth of leisure travel that made this closer to a reality for some was facilitated not by eco niches but by Fordism, back to back charters, busy resorts (‘concrete jungles’), jet technology and trade unions’ hard won increases in wages and holidays. This mass tourism boom, and the freedom it brought, is regarded with a high degree of circumspection by critics in the Universities. Given his iconic ‘traveller’ status, it is ironic that Kerouac’s sentiment, if articulated today, would be regarded as rather arrogant by ethical travel’s many advocates.

In the aftermath of the recent Paris terrorist attacks journalist Jennie Bristow wrote: ‘The cosmopolitanism with which the so-called millennials grew up, the diversity of their own communities, and their access to direct and indirect experiences of other countries at the click of a mouse or the purchase of a cheap airline ticket, stands as one of the most Inspiring developments of the twentieth century […] How great it would be if the response [to the Paris attacks] was a new determination to claim the world as a truly open space, in which freedom and commitment became the rallying cries for the battle against nihilism and fear.’ To aspire to greater freedom for oneself, and others too, is a truly ethical stance. It is unlikely find favour with the ethical tourism lobby.

 

(note: the essay is in part adapted from a section of the book Volunteer Tourism: the Lifestyle Politics of International Development (2015), co-written with Pete Smith. My talk at the Royal Anthropological Institute of 7th December 2015 was based on the essay).

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