Tourism in the Global South

1. TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH João Sarmento & Eduardo Brito-Henriques Tourism today Tourism is a powerful mélange of cultural, social, economic, political and spatial phenomena, ceaselessly growing. It carries within itself numerous ambivalences, but it is undoubtedly significant in terms of environmental, socioeconomical, cultural and political implications. Although nothing of this is new, it seems that in the last decades tourism is everywhere and its force in landscape, in identity and development is escalating. Tourism can be seen as a consumer of places and as an active agent in the creative destruction of places (Crang 2004). It occurs in a socially divided and dividing world and it actively contributes to these processes (Kaplan 1998, Williams, Hall and Lew 2004). At the same time, tourism approximates and blends populations and cultures. Through tourism, consumers and producers are put face to face, and places in very different parts of the world see themselves interconnected by new flows of people, goods and ideas. The power of tourism resides in its capacity to transform landscapes, economies, peoples’ lifestyle and cultures, and in shaping identities and behaviors, by establishing new networks of power, forging new ideas and representations, and creating discourses of place and difference. Naturally, the politics of tourism development in the Global South are an extremely fertile ground to observe wider struggles over economic development and political influence (see Hazbun 2008 for Tourism in the global south: landscapes, identities and development. Centre for Geographical Studies, Lisbon, 2013: 1-9. 2 TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH this discussion in relation to the Arab World). While advocates of tourism emphasize its effects on income growing, other authors highlight that the industry’s economic benefits are questionable since tourism can produce new relations of dependency. However, above all tourism is about encounters that happen in place and landscape. Encounters between people, people and space, people as socialized and embodied subjects, with expectations, experience, and desires (Crouch 1999, see in this volume Simoni, Piscitelli, and Saretzki and May). Often these encounters are unbalanced, uneven, destabilizing, resulting in exploitation and abuse. But at times they are productive, creating wealth, and forging alliances between distant people. The Global South Dividing, ordering and categorising space to organize our minds, control and rule is immemorial, and the mental categories of core, periphery and semi-periphery have a long construction history. Often, economic divisions of the world refer to developed, less developed, underdeveloped and lately developing countries. As part of a Cold war legacy, geopolitical views coined the (now obsolete) terms first and second worlds, constructed upon the difference between capitalist, liberal and democratic countries and communist centralized-states. The concept of third world, later referred to as developing countries, was also created, and always equated with poor-countries. More recently the idea of a fourth world emerged, referring to tribal people, and stateless minorities such as refugees. The United Nations, in its development index, the World Bank, and other institutions use other divisions: low-income economies, lowermiddle-income economies, upper-middle-income economies, and high-income economies. Here, we understand the Global South not as a strict geographical categorisation of the world, but one which is based on economic inequalities and power imbalances having a certain cartographic continuity. This category emerged from a North-South distinction discussed in the Brandt report of 1980, where the terms were equated with rich and poor, developed and developing. The Global South includes Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia, mainly regions of the world where poverty, environmental crisis, human and civil rights abuses, and ethnic intolerance are dramatic issues. How tourism faces these questions deserves some reflection. Finally, the use of the Global South concept highlights the fact that both North and South are strained into global processes, and that problems in the TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: INTRODUCTION 3 Global South are enmeshed and also present in other regions of the world. As Appadurai (2000) argues, the new global cultural economy is increasingly a complex, disjunctive order, which cannot be simply understood in terms of a centre-periphery model. When we think of these issues in the context of the Global South, many discussions emerge. In the Global South, encounters between tourists and hosts seem more problematic and complex because tourism puts together people from different economic and cultural contexts, and people who frequently share pasts of atrocity and colonial domination. Naturally, many of the discussions of tourism in the Global South go hand in hand with debates of the unstable pair colonialism/post-colonialism. Although far from a consensual arena, postconialism is grounded on a critique of Western structures of knowledge and power (Bhabha 1994). Nevertheless, postcolonialism itself has been criticised for erasing the complexity and the specificities of peripheral area geographies as they are generalized under the rubric ‘Third World’ (D’ Hautreserre 2004: 236), and often the voices of ‘others’ are not heard (see Zhang on this volume, on the needs to listen and understand people from cross-cultural settings). Just as postcolonialism, tourism is inescapably rooted in colonialism, and in many ways it perpetuates power inequalities, treating the exotic as inferior and reinforcing and at times celebrating colonial myths, narratives and representations. Tourism in the Global South – a locus of contradictions, juxtapositions and intersections – is eagerly organised for the Western tourist. Western tourists carry to the Global South certain values, attitudes and routines that end up being dominant, hegemonic, or determinant in their own actions, in the everyday ‘petty’ actions of companies and corporations in the travel trade (Hollinshead 2004). Postcolonial interrogation takes for granted the argument that the forces that established the Western form of colonialism and imperialism continue to operate, often in altered forms, through mutations in local circumstances, and through different apparatuses, to constitute what Mbembe (2001) has called the postcolony. Tourism has a strong relevance in the ways in which the past is represented. Certainly tourism has the ability to contest postcolonial representations that stem from old/colonial narratives and promote new and bright counter narratives and textualities. But numerous authors have illustrated how past colonial discourses are still manifested in the colonial present in heritage sites, museums and others (Ghandi 1998, Mowforth and Munt 1998, Sarmento 2011, Selwyn 1996). Yet, in certain contexts, as Marshall (2004) argues in the case of South Africa, 4 TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH the celebration and even commodification of cultural heritage can be perceived by ordinary people as empowering, since it represents a form of validation and acknowldegement of their own culture and history. Development, tourism and the Global South Contemporary notions of development have their roots in the redefinition of foreign policy during the Cold War, as Western policymakers reassessed their positions relative to newly independent states in the ‘Third World’ (Peet and Hartwick 2009) and to the communist bloc. Since the 1960s there have been various debates upon the strength of tourism in regional development and in creating economic growth and employment, and to whether tourism could break the remaining power and dependency structures. During the 1970s several authors were quite critical of tourism development, stressing that the industry was dominated by outside interests who retained most of the benefits while the host destinations were left with the costs (e.g. Turner and Ash 1975, MacCannell 1976, De Kadt 1979). It is within postcolonialism, framed in a wider poststructural and postmodern criticism of social theory that a questioning of the key concepts of development and progress has emerged. During the 1980s, poststructuralist theory led to a questioning of progress, improvement and development, by equating these processes with powerful, controlling, and often, detrimental ideas. Furthermore, interrogating who development served, who determined what beneficial was, and why did beneficial assumed that life is progress, led to a powerful reexamination of development (see Peet and Hartwick 2009). Development became one of the languages of power, and as Sachs (1992: 1) pointed, ‘the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape’. Post-development thinkers defend local thinking and local acting, using human scale institutions and technologies, and ecological and spiritual simple living (see Peet and Hartwick 2009). In the Global South, Pro-poor tourism, which can be defined as tourism which generates net benefits for the poor (Ashley, Roe and Goodwin 2001), assumes a critical importance. While any form of tourism can be pro-poor, benefits to the poor from tourism are not simple to occur. Employment or total spending on goods and services produced by the informal sector may increase with the growth of the tourism industry, but that may not be sufficient for poor people to register a sufficient increase in their household income (Goodwin TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: INTRODUCTION 5 2007). Developing processes should be re-centred within the lived experiences and consciousness of the people exposed to development and to their active agency. Processes should focus in capacity building (see Rowan in this volume). Nevertheless, in the past decades, despite various successful attempts to mitigate tourism negative impacts in the host communities, and situations that emphasize the positive gains of tourism development, such as community-based approaches (Murphy 1985), ecotourism activities (Fennell 1999, Weaver 2001) and sustainable approaches (Sofield 2003), structural imbalances in tourism development flourishes (Butler and Hinch 2007, Goodwin 2007). Heritage and Identity Heritage is a powerful means by which people define themselves and construct a relational framework of values. As many authors have emphasized, very often heritage is less about tangible material artefacts or other intangible forms of the past, than about its implications and representations (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge 2000, Graham and Howard 2008). It is the values that people ascribe to certain places, buildings or events that are important, and not so much their intrinsic value. These values change with time, with gender (Smith 2008), with institutions, and political settings, so heritage is a dynamic and living process. Also identity is fluid, and from understandings of identity with an emphasis on sameness we have moved to meanings related to recognition, which is partially a result of the augmented scale of mobility in which we presently live (Oakes and Price 2008). Tourism, with its practices and by putting millions of different people in contact, plays a critical role in people’s identity: in hosts as well as in tourists. Many have shown how tourism transforms and influences local identity in the Global South (Edenson 2004, Hilary du Cross 2004, Sarmento 2010, Tucker 2003); others have investigated how tourists alter their identities by travelling to the Global South (Desforges 2000, Teo and Leong 2006, Cohen 2010). Producing culture for tourist consumption and consuming culture as a tourist is a highly politicised process, and certainly the commodification of heritage and of invented traditions for tourism purposes is one of the means to interfere with identity. 6 TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Book proposal and outline This book intends to discuss new research ideas on the tourism impacts in the Global South, focusing namely on the construction and transformation of landscapes through tourism, on issues of identity friction and cultural change, and on the responsibility of tourism on poverty reduction and sustainable development. A proper analysis of tourism impacts always needs an interdisciplinary approach. Geography can conduct a stimulating job since it relates culture and nature, society and environment, space, economy and politics, but a single discipline cannot push our understanding very far without intersecting it with other realms of knowledge. So, this is a book that aims at a multidisciplinary debate, celebrating the diversity of disciplinary boundaries, which includes texts and people from a range of different backgrounds such as Geography, Tourism, Anthropology, Architecture, Cultural Studies, Linguistics and Economics. While the contributors of the following chapters share certain approaches and concerns, they have also different theoretical and methodological orientations. We have opted to make no internal divisions, although a certain geographical orientation leads the order of the chapters. Thus, we start with landlocked Armenia, move to Africa (Mauritania, Madagascar, South Africa), then the Americas (New Mexico, Cuba and Brazil), and finally to Asia (India, Malaysia and China). After this introductory chapter, Marianna Cappucci & Luca Zarrilli discuss the relationship of tourism, nation, identity, and diaspora in Armenia. They examine in particular the Armenian cultural landscape that is the whole system of symbols, signs and values produced by the historical sedimentation of this land. Joana Lucas pays attention to the texts of tourism, and analyses how literary production contributed towards a discourse of advertising and promoting Mauritania. By setting normative agendas, these texts help to shape notions of the destination. Anja Saretzki & Carola May discuss the ways in which World Heritage Sites may constitute places for intercultural dialogue and are open to new cultural possibilities. By looking in particular at Ambohimanga, Madagascar, they explore Heritage Sites as transdifferential spaces, where interdependency, interference and mutual crossing of boundaries occurs. Bradley Rink engages with a series of ephemeral editions of the Pink Map and its narratives, to discuss South Africa’s Cape Town, queer urban landscapes, the tourist gaze and new modes of consumption. He TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: INTRODUCTION 7 examines how the Pink Map brought to the fore pink elements of the landscape to the exclusion of all others and how this is only one way of viewing the city. Přemysl Mácha argues that tourism can be a miseen-scene for struggles that go beyond tourism, and by conducting an ethnography of relationships between ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’, defending a performative and processual view of tourism landscapes, Přemysl discusses identity, landscape and resistance in New Mexico. Valerio Simoni focuses on the intrinsic and instrumental value of tourist encounters in Cuba, highlighting the ambiguity of touristic encounters, which ultimately will enable an engagement with a ‘politics of value’. Adriana Piscitelli explores the connections between love, interest and morality, and in particular the shifting fluidity between sexual and romantic female tourists in two tourism destination beaches of Northeast Brazil. To do so, she engages in a detailed ethnographical analysis of twenty foreign women who maintained relationships with ‘native’ local men. Jane Rowan discusses how to build community capacity development for tourism, analysing the project ‘Art for Livelihood’, which aims at revitalising and promoting oral traditions and performing art as a means of encouraging sustainable livelihoods in six districts of West Bengal, India. Ema Pires analysis the intersection of space, power and tourism on the production, appropriation and re-appropriation of the Portuguese Settlement in Malacca, Malaysia, both in colonial as well as in postcolonial times. Jasmine Zhang explores the notion of ‘worldmaking’ and uses political ecology to analyse how the culture/nature division can be better understood in tourism. Grounded on fieldwork conducted in Shangri-La, in Southwest China Himalayas, she investigates how environmental justice and social justice should not be perceived as separate entities. Apoorva Pal & Sucheta Mehru discuss eco-friendly forms of tourism and the Built Environment using the case study of Spiti Valley, also in the Indian Himalayas, where they were called to design a traditional Guest House. Finally, FU Jia & Ralph Wahnschafft examine eco-certification and eco-labelling programs in the Chinese Hotel industry, in the context of the profound changes of the country in the last years, namely in its tourism industry. 8 TOURISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH References Appadurai, A (2000) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In Brydon, D (ed.) Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts. Routledge, London: 1801–1823. Ashley, C, Roe, D and Goodwin, H (2001) Pro-Poor Tourism Strategies: Making Tourism Work for the Poor. A Review of Experience. Pro-Poor Tourism, London. Bhabha, H K (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge, London. Butler, R Hinch, T (eds.) (2007) Tourism and Indigenous Peoples: Issues and Implications. Elsevier, London. 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