I have also written a longer version of the same argument - less journalistic, more academic - below. Comments welcome to my email: jim.butcher@canterbury.ac.uk
White Saviour Barbies?
Opportunities to travel to try to make the world a better place are now commonplace at university freshers’ fayres. Advertisments for so called volunteer tourism and similar niches feature across the campuses. Numerous companies and NGOs offer the chance to help build schools, teach children and conserve nature, all as a part of a travel experience.
But the exciting chance to travel and laudable impulse to care for others are increasingly viewed through a dark lens, associated with colonial arrogance and an imperialist mentality.
Earlier this year Scottish actress Louise Linton faced the wrath of critics following the publication of her memoir In Congo’s Shadow recounting her experiences as a 19 year old volunteer tourist ‘helping some of the world’s poorest people’. She claims to have fled armed rebels in Zambia – a claim contested by her detractors. They accuse her of placing herself and her privilege at the centre of her memoir. They argue that as a result she falls back on and reinforces colonial assumptions.
It is hard to disagree that her book relies on cliché and that it is devoid of serious and deep analysis of central Africa. She recalls: ‘I try to remember a smiling, gap toothed child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of coca-cola.’ Linton was subject to a vicious trial by twitter, accompanied by hashtags such as #LintonLies and #WhitePrivilege. The story snowballed globally. Faced with a barrage of insults and condemnation, Linton apologised for hurting feelings, had the book removed from sale and deleted her on-line accounts.
Linton’s account may be clichéd, but for many of the critics the real crime is that it is penned by a white woman in Africa, who unashamedly puts herself at the centre of her travel memoir: colonialism in the form of ‘white privilege’ in black Africa.
The sort of volunteer travel Linton undertook has attracted a great deal of criticism. Again earlier this year, the satirical Instagram account White Saviour Barbie was set up. It features posed Barbie dolls alongside the objects of their care, most often African orphans. The accompanying captions present the tourists as naïve, self obsessed and indulging neo-colonial fantasies: 'It’s not about me... but it kind of is'. White Saviour Barbie quickly gained international notoriety, having been featured in widely the media across the world – the BBC news referred to it as ‘a modern version of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden.’
The accusation that tourists constitute some sort of colonialism was in the past directed as a casual insult against package holidaymakers. Now the misanthropy lying behind that charge has caught up with those partaking of the new ethical niches, niches that ironically often validated their ethical credentials by comparison to supposedly damaging and thoughtless package holidays. Now all leisure travel, from a week bronzing on the beech to a “holiday with a mission” helping a community to paint a school, is in the frame.
It is tempting to go along with the criticism of volunteer tourists, especially given the way some of the marketing and advocacy of this niche has labelled holidaymakers as unthinking and unethical. Some of the criticisms hit home, too. There is certainly a point to be made about the elevation of western care over the ability of people in the developing world to build their own schools and dig their own latrines.
However, accusations that tourism is some sort of colonialism, or even imperialism, are very wrong, and often carry their own patronising and limiting assumptions.
‘Tourism is colonialism’
There is a long tradition amongst social scientists examining tourism of accusing tourism of colonialism and imperialism.
Jost Krippendorf’s influential The Holiday Makers: the Impacts of Leisure Travel regards it as having a colonial character ‘everywhere and without exception’ (1987: 56). Turner and Ash label tourism a ‘new form of colonialism’ in their often cited The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1975: 1). Sociologist Erik Cohen asserts that tourism is ‘always and everywhere, colonialism’ (1972: 82) and that ‘[t]he easy going tourist of our era might well complete the work of his predecessors, also travellers from the West – the conqueror and colonialist’ (ibid.). Lozanski argues that independent travel is ‘embedded in the implicit hierarchies of colonialism that persist in a neocolonial setting’ (2011: 446).
Dennison Nash, grandee of the anthropology of tourism, has asserted that ‘[t]he North American vacationer who insists on fast food hamburgers, coffee with his meal, hot running water in his bedroom and the use of the English language’ is part of the systematic domination of the third world (Nash, 1989: 39).
A recent exposition of this view is human geographer Steven Flusty’s essay, Rime of the Frequent Flyer (2011). He argues that tourism is complicit in the inequalities and oppression, past and present, that he encounters as he travels. For Flusty, tourism is ‘inextricably rooted in conquest’ (2011: 99), a view supported elsewhere through references to colonialism. He goes further in suggesting that there is a culpability in all tourism – our leisure depends on their subjugation.
Suggestions of tourism’s colonial or imperialist character feature in popular commentaries and texts. In The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays the UK Guardian’s lifestyle correspondent, Leo Hickman, likens Tallin’s budget airline tourists to Estonia’s previous Nazi and Soviet invaders (2007: 313). The popular university introductory text Tourism: A Modern Synthesis, suggests tourists have ‘superseded the armies of the colonial powers’ (Page et al, 2001: 397).
These writers, in different ways, present tourism as a part of a colonial and imperialist culture.
But is this the case? Modernity is a key point of reference for Flusty. He asserts that ‘those who do not subject themselves to modernity’s relentless and shifting winds are forever in danger of finding themselves subject to those who have’ (ibid.). One could equally argue that those who desperately want more of the benefits of modernity are denied this due to being subject to the macroeconomic and political relationships that prevail.
For all the sympathies with the poor and oppressed, emphasising modernity (a general state) rather than capitalism (a specific set of social and power relations) ends up conflating all modern human activities (such as tourism) with the failings of capitalist societies historically and today. For Flusty, we are all ‘playing Elgin’ (ibid.) – the humble tourist is linked to British colonialism and the theft of others’ property and culture. All things modern become complicit and suspect.
If this logic were to be accepted, how could one argue that others should have the opportunities enjoyed by many in wealthy nations, such as to travel widely for leisure? Anticolonialism used to be a demand for freedom from subjection by powerful nations, not from tourists’ unenlightened attitudes. If colonialism is held to be implicit in modernity, then anticolonial demands for a share in the benefits of modern societies are not likely to gain a hearing.
The assertions that tourism has anything to do with colonialism at best rely on superficial descriptions of inequality – the wealthy foreigner stepping out onto a private beach in the developing world, served by local people who have little immediate prospect of attaining the privileges of their guest. This is less colonialism and more simply the reality of capitalist society everywhere – rich people can afford nice things and others are employed to provide them. Subjective assertions about colonialism such as this, whilst radical in tone, rob it of meaning.
Nash’s suggestion that the American vacationer has, in effect, an imperialist lifestyle, can only be argued if one takes this subjective and limited view of imperialism. In the past imperialism was viewed as an extension of a nation’s interests abroad on the basis of claimed moral authority or as a result of capitalist crisis (Lenin, 1996; Hobson, 2011). Nash and others substitute colonialism as a set of attitudes and behaviours for colonialism and imperialism as a result of political systems and economic structures. In doing so they relativise the horrors of real colonialism by suggesting a moral and political continuum running from holiday making to the oppression of populations.
Why are holidays in the frame?
The equating of tourism with colonialism is exemplary of a number of trends.
The politicisation of even fairly banal (in political terms) human activities such as tourism is indicative of the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences. The cultural turn broadly refers to the apparent opening up of culture and everyday life as an arena in which power is exercised, and in which it can be contested. Some date the turn to the early 1970s, when ‘the personal is political’ became a popular outlook on the left, and when sociologists such as those at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK pioneered the study of cultural forms as key battlegrounds of power and politics. Others emphasise the Frankfurt school, who viewed modern soulless culture based on consumerism and instrumental reason as the barrier to social and political progress.
But perhaps key in the modern dominance of culture in politics, is the exhaustion of the political narratives of Left and Right that constituted Politics (with a capital P) in the past. Whilst cultural radicals in the 1970s readily linked the personal to a contestation of the future and to wider narratives of social change, those narratives (or any to replace them), and the future orientation they facilitated, have been conspicuously absent since the 1980s.
Yet whilst the exhaustion of the grand narratives, transcendental of this or that individual experience, was brought into relief in the post Cold War period, it was subject to a much longer decline. The collapse of ‘communism’ and the end of the Cold War may have pulled the rug from under both left and right political identities, but in reality the capacity of these ideas to frame the political imagination had been in much longer terms decline. Furedi, in his First World War: Still No End In Site, looks at a longer drawn out decline of ideology from when first world war seemed to question the moral value of liberalism and nationalism. Daniel Bell in the End Of Ideology (1960) saw the post World War Two period as characterised by the decline of ideology in the public sphere and the rise of culture in its place in what proved to be a prescient analysis.
The decline of transcendental ideologies has increasingly left private experience as the basis on which the world is constructed in the public imagination. Shorn of political roots, inequality and poverty are reinterpreted as cultural problems. Individual attitudes and behaviour are in the frame: where you shop, how you live, the language you use, how you travel. The notion of holidaymaker as colonialist is one unfortunate result.
Decolonising travel?
The way that tourism is being associated with colonialism is changing. The privilege exhibited by Nash’s stereotypical American is no longer a question of relative wealth or class. It is increasingly being essentialised as ‘white privilege’ as indicated by the reception for White Saviour Barbie and the twitter storm focused on Louise Linton.
Brooklyn based travel writer Bani Amor espouses the emergent identity politics of tourism. She runs a popular blog called Everywhere all the time, seeking to ‘decolonise travel’, to challenge what she sees as a colonial narrative at the heart of modern travel.
Amor argues that travel often employs a time honoured colonial narrative: ‘The sad state of the savage Other necessitates civilising via white / western intervention, which maintains dominion over resources that sometimes trickle down to the needy via acts of charity’. This attitude ‘validates supremacy’, as ‘assuming the role of the saviour is also a show of power’.
She provides a list of points for privileged prospective travellers to reflect upon. Conspicuous luxury is out: ‘All-inclusive resorts, slum tours, and white-savior cruise ships (yes, this is a thing) are just some examples of practices with noted records of colonial fuckery.’ Arguments that tourism is just about fun and freedom are condemned: ‘But when we deny its [tourism’s] political implications, we re-establish it as a tool of coloniality and become complicit in its oppressive chain.’
Amor’s way of looking at travel – rapidly becoming influential across human geographies of tourism and ‘critical tourism studies’ - is far from radical. Its premises are profoundly conservative, and also diminish the potential in travel for real enlightenment, not to mention fun.
For Amor the traveller and the host are defined by their respective cultural identity. That identity in turn is tied to colour and background. It is not a political identity, a take on the world and its problems to be argued over – but an essential and cultural one, rooted in blood (‘white’) and soil (‘western’).
This same view of the individual is applied to the hosts too, albeit with sympathy as they are viewed as the victims of cultural colonialism. Geography and ancestry determine how you see the world, and in the case of poorer communities mark you out as ‘vulnerable’.
The obsession with cultures, always plural, as fundamentally different and defining of the individual, has a lot more in common with the justifications for colonialism from the past than any clichéd travel blog or conspicuous show of wealth. Anti-colonialism of the past was premised on the universal importance of rights, wealth and opportunity for all. Today it celebrates cultural difference not simply as lived experience, but as a rooted identity.
The politics or decolonising travel present human freedom as a zero sum game. The freedom of the tourist is the unfreedom of their host. Amor asserts that tourism ‘grants some of us the privilege of leisure, but it does so at the expense of other, more vulnerable communities, cultures, and environments.’ Radicalism of the past aspired to expand freedom, so that the wealth and opportunity of some could be enjoyed my many more. From a call for more freedom, to a demand that those who have it ‘check their privilege’ and back off, is hardly progress.
For the traveller, the potential lies precisely in the free, open interaction of individuals who can experiment, judge, be judged, make friends, make mistakes and experience new things free from the mea culpa politics of guilt by colonial association. The politics of decolonising travel is effectively an impulse to police boundaries of the imagination, neatly subsuming the individual within a Culture (with a capital C) from which, try as they might, they can’t escape. Having given up on changing the world, some radicals seem to want to change the people in it through policing behaviour.
Tourism should not be decolonised because it has not colonised in the first place. People travelling and meeting others, for fun, enlightenment or as volunteers, have nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism. The conflation of everyday cultural encounters with colonialism relativises and trivialises the latter, and restricts the potential in the former to promote reflection, judgement and moral autonomy.
Bell, D. (1960) The End of Ideology, Free Press, New York.
Cohen, E. (1972) Towards a sociology of international tourism, Social Research, 39, 179-201.
Flusty, S. (2011) Rime of the Frequent Flyer. Or, What the Elephant has got in his Trunk, in Real Tourism: Practice, Care, and Politics in Contemporary Travel Culture, (Eds) C. Minca and. & T. Oakes, Routledge, London.
Furedi, F. (2014) World War 1: Still No End in Sight, Bloomsbury, London.
Hickman, L. (2006) The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays, Eden Project, London.
Hobson, J.A. (2011) Imperialism: A Study, Spokesman Books. London (originally published 1902).
Jacoby, R. (1999) The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Basic Books, New York.
Krippendorf, J. (1987) The Holidaymakers: Understanding the Impact of Leisure and Travel, Butterworth-Heinemann, London.
Laidi, Z. (1998) A World Without Meaning. The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, Routledge, Abingdon.
Lenin, V.I. (1996) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Pluto Press, London. Originally published 1916.
Lozanski, K. (2011) Independent travel: Colonialism, liberalism and the self, Critical Sociology, 37 (4), 465-482.
MacCannell, D. (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, Routledge, London.
Nash, D. (1989) Tourism and Colonialism, chapter in Host and Guests (Eds) D. Nash, D and V. Smith, pp. 37-53.
Page, S.J., Brunt, P., Busby, G. and Connell, J. (2001) Tourism: A Modern Synthesis, Thomson Learning, London.
Turner, L and Ash, J. (1975) The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery,
