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.
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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