How Does Tourism Change People and Places?
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00:00
Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
My research question is how has tourism changed the world? How does tourism impact on particular environments and on people and on places and how does it do so beyond the conventional understanding and
00:22
associations that we have towards tourism and which are linked to the famous 5s of sea, sun, sand, sex and surgery. So then the challenge in such an attempt to go beyond conventional understandings of tourism, also to go beyond the idea that the tourist is not supposed to leave anything
00:46
except for footprints and not to take anything except for photographs. The challenge is to really identify all these dimensions involved in tourism, to try and see the world and the tourism industry as
01:02
something that is not separate, but actually to understand how tourism is not only business, not only something that adds economic value, but actually something that has substantial and really sustaining lasting impact on a place and
01:24
to look at the different areas like the political, the environmental, the cultural sphere and how tourism plays out in those and how it actually brings those together as well. The approach I'm using is that of an anthropologist.
01:47
So what I do is I do the anthropology of tourism, which means first of all as an anthropologist you go somewhere for a considerable amount of time, you do field work, you do participant observation.
02:02
So I would arrive in in my case usually a tropical or subtropical place like Mauritius, Reunion Island where I've been or Australia and I get out of the airport and the first thing of course I take in the place, I experience the heat,
02:22
the different smell, the different environment that's there and I'm tired. So I go to the hotel, I sleep and try to get some rest. Then I get the breakfast, maybe a tourist breakfast, maybe something with particular the tasty fruits that I only get in this particular place. And then I go to a meeting that I have organized
02:46
from back in Germany before going to the place and in that meeting I would meet a person that is somehow relevant for the tourism industry, that is somehow involved in the tourism industry. It could be a
03:01
hotel manager, it could be a politician, it could also be a musician or another artist that earns a living from tourism. Could also be a meeting that is not organized. It could be a person that I meet in the hotel that works at the hotel bar and that starts to tell me an interesting story, that starts to tell me about something that is really relevant and important for them at the moment or a concern,
03:27
concern with a global economic downturn, a concern that not enough tourists arrive because of that. And from that person I'm directed to different topics and I'm directed to other people. So it's like a snowball that kind of grows a little bit bigger and bigger and
03:44
that gives me hints at what could be relevant particularly relevant for this period that I'm there in that area. And then I choose certain topics and try to reduce the snowball again, kind of make it more dense and
04:02
come to this one particular issue or maybe two that will kind of lead and guide me through the next month of fieldwork in that area. My key finding is that tourism is not just a global industry.
04:21
Tourism is a globe making activity. It is actively changing the world on various levels. Let me give you three examples. One in regards to the environment, one in regards to people and one in regards to heritage and tradition.
04:41
In regards to the environment, there is a beautiful lagoon on an island called Rodrique where I did fieldwork. And this lagoon has recently been declared a marine protected area. Previously this lagoon could be used by fishermen for their daily fishing activities. Now as a marine protected area
05:02
this has been heavily restricted. Instead the lagoon is now a kite surfing resort. The new income for the local population, for hotels, for local businesses, for new bars and clubs that open up is strongly motivated by this kite surfing resort tourism activity.
05:25
So not only in that sense the environment is transformed from a fishing spot into a kite surfing resort. It also transforms the activities and livelihoods of the very people that live there.
05:40
That brings me to my second example how tourism can impact on the relationships between people. Of course you can say that the tourist books the holiday somewhere, goes somewhere for a couple of weeks and then returns relaxed but has not really engaged with other people. But that is rarely the case.
06:02
Most of the time there are forms of tourism that last for a much longer period and that have a much more lasting impact on the lives of people. On people that might meet their future partners somewhere in a foreign place. On people that are not just going there for a couple of weeks
06:22
but that do something like work and travel and spend months in a different environment and have experiences that will completely transform their own lives that might be impacting on the way in which they will design their whole life course in the future, the job decisions they might make.
06:44
The last example would be heritage. Think for example about a place that used to be an industrialized area and that now becomes a music festival space or a space for cultural events. Big towns
07:01
that used to be working towns like Liverpool, for example, that become all of a sudden cultural capitals that become in that sense attractive for tourists to visit for completely new reasons that again generate different livelihoods and transform the very
07:22
ways in which we perceive these places. The relevance of my findings lies in the fact that they show that you cannot consider tourism as something isolated from other
07:40
things in the world. You cannot consider tourism only as an industry. You have to consider tourism as something that fundamentally impacts on the ways in which not only how we perceive the world, but actually on the ways in which the world is constructed around us.
08:01
How it is shaped by us. How its heritage, its traditions, its landscapes, its infrastructures, its cities, its engagements also in the world of people and amongst each other. How tourism has a
08:21
significant impact on all of this and how this in a way leads us to further towards understanding the globe in more nuanced and more complex ways than we have done previously.
08:41
The next step on this journey into anthropology of tourism would be first of all on a methodological level. I would try and look at the experience of the different places that people visit from a more multi-sensory
09:03
perspective. I would not only look at political issues or cultural issues, but also at the experience of tastes. For example, an anthropology of food would be relevant here. How do you transmit the exotic through the different tastes that you experience?
09:23
Another question could be the impact that tourist movements from the global south have nowadays in the north. How do we deal with rising numbers of tourists from China, from India, from Russia? How do they shape our northern hemisphere or
09:43
do we even want this? What do the people here perceive these new tourists arriving and how do they engage with each other? Do they also transform sustainably our environments? And then maybe as a third example,
10:03
what I would look at would be the rising conflicts that we see in cities like Barcelona, in cities like Berlin, in a place like Venice, where there is a clear rejection against tourism development, where people are forming, building
10:21
groups and political agendas and developing policies against tourism impact, in a place where you would think that it doesn't have much more economic possibilities than to develop its tourism and rely on its tourism for the future. What kind of alternative futures are they imagining then after tourism?