i told you i would melt
by kkmeow
“We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”
~Milan Kundera
By the end of our trip, all of my nights ended tequila drunk and a thousand feet deep in a philosophical shit‐shooting session. It makes sense. You cannot talk about tourism for long before you have to start laying down some serious theoretical definitions.
I don’t think tourism can be fixed within its own terms, because tourism is rooted in bad faith. It must go. What are we touring other than power and control? In practice, to “be a tourist” is to surrender one’s agency. After about a week in the Yucatan, I started to feel extremely hostile and restless, like I couldn’t breathe. I was losing interest in the sites and I strayed from the group as much as possible, just to look at something no one told me to look at. I didn’t understand what my problem was, because wanderlust runs through my veins. I travel whenever the opportunity presents itself, because travelling has always made me feel so free. I wasn’t feeling free. I was feeling like a puppet… Then I realized that I had traveled before, but I had never been a tourist. I had never been on a trip with a tour guide. A tour guide, however well meaning, defines the group against their surroundings and constantly directs their gaze. The experience is mediated and implicitly ineffectual. I had been existing vicariously through a guide. But once I grasped that underlying conceptual framework of tourism, I regained my agency. I had the freedom to choose how I would operate within the situation. So, tourism is crippling by design… and I don’t know how to demolish such a powerful industry. But it seems that tour guides are the symbolic prophets of tourism, so maybe the model could at least be decentralized.
I know I have criticized the tour guide model a lot, but I just want to clarify that I don’t think tour guides themselves are dehumanizing or evil people… and the same for tourists. Getting to know our tour guide, Miguel, was one of the best parts of this trip. He understands people so well. When I would get lost in my head thinking about all those ideas up there^, he would always notice and tell me to stop worrying. He taught me so much, really. So much. Namaste & gracias mille, Miguel!
Other thoughts lingering from the trip~
1. Sometimes you wake up to a viper by your hammock and that’s ok.
2. I keep collecting clues even though I still don’t know the mystery.
3. There is nothing we can learn from hatred.
4. yolo
5. When you tell someone you don’t believe in the self, be prepared to eat your words.
6. My childhood wish came true— to see the flamingos take flight
Excellent blog posts, Kristen.
I do wonder if your distinction between tourists and traveler is quite fair to the tourists. Are not both mediated in some way, structured, directed, etc.? It seems that this is a matter of degree, not that one is directed and the other is night.
For example, the fact that you have the freedom to wander in some travel experiences is predicated on the constructed desire to wander. Where you wander is predicated on symbolic, linguistic exchange that creates certain desires for places, people and experiences, right?
So, if that is true, is your agency really just a perception of freedom that is, in fact, in some ways as determined as the tourist’s gaze?
(I’m busting your chops here a bit since I agree in a a form of agency, but not an unfettered one, that is, not an agency free of cultural constraint.)
no. tourism is a situation that limits agency just like the media that is everywhere….. but what i meant in this post when i said i regained my agency is that i understood the situation that was limiting it. and i mean, i think most tourists resist the directed gaze at some level, just like we resist certain media messages while still living under their influence.
i think traveling and the desire to wander is to try to escape the limitations of our situation completely…i’m not saying that getting out of the matrix of constructions that try to define us is even possible, but resisting and re-imagining them is liberating in itself.
and you gotta do that by exploring and discovering and getting lost and trusting strangers because you have no one else.
not by sitting on a bus hearing your own language
Everything limits agency.
Also, you seem to be suggesting that the only way to agency is “getting lost,” which would mean a) that once you were “found,” you would be alienated again and b) that you can never experience (authentically) in places and with people that are familiar.
Why can’t you be liberated on a bus with people speaking your own language?
We mustn’t romanticize another culture, as if authenticity can be be found “there.” Those cultures are as dysfunctional, full of power, and mediated as the next culture typically.
Where does that leave us with this whole liberation thing?
I mean, you can be… But why would you need to do that in a foreign country?
Anything that limits agency is something that can be overcome, but not being able to recognize our limitations is what makes them most effective. Trying to get by without a safety net of language is what makes traveling so constructive…..?
Whatever Dr. Fat head. I leave you the first sentance of Peter Panː
“Once you are two, you know. Two is the beginning of the end.”