let’s pretend we don’t exist
by kkmeow
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There was a quiet strangeness about studying tourism in the Yucatan while experiencing tourism first hand. Our small group travelled with a tour guide for sixteen days, and most of our class conversations were directed toward finding a humanizing mode of tourism. But even on the last night of the trip, the dialogue drove itself into a dead end. Nothing seemed viable for a sustainable solution to the problems tourism creates.
Because tourism is an impossible equation.
We always returned to this questionː is tourism a newer, gentler form of imperialism? I think the logic here assumes that imperialism is as an isolated chapter in history that could be returned to… But history is a constant flow of action‐responses. Since the word imperialism first entered our language, it has become a part of our shared code for navigating and understanding our relationships. So, I do think tourism is a response to imperialism, and a largely affirmative one… but the aspects of tourism that we criticize are not at all unique to tourism. It is the perpetuation of imperialist ideology in our language. The pervasive idea of culture is created and sustained by media, and is now being packaged and sold as tourism.Culture is a super powerful ideological system because it relies on a fear and fascination with the other, and it has been inextricably linked to language and place. Tourism is dangerous and dehumanizing because it sells an impossible goal—to temporarily stop the chain of interactions that defines our existence. It is a behavioral code of demolishing self‐generation and agency.
I would like to hear more about how you think tourism stops the chain of interactions that defines our existence. Many think that tourism defines our (modern, White) existence, particularly in America. We long for authenticity “away,” “over there” in the places of the Exotic Other. Surely humanization can be found “there” because all we seem to find “here” is alienation and fragmentation.
Thoughts?
Hmmm. I mean “interactions that define our existence” in the Lacanian sense…. that we are constantly acting in response to our surroundings, and from that we gain a sense of self and a sense of reality. Once we learn language, we become a part of a group with this shared code for interactions. And yeah, tourism is all over our language right now, and its the culture of capitalism.. but that doesn’t define me because it is just an idea.. How I act does. To “act out tourism” is sort of an attempt to reverse that… to sell a fixed reality, a fixed self, and a fixed other. So if we were to be completely dedicated tourists and never stray from the directed gaze, and constantly think and do what the guide tells us to, we would be walking advertisements… or robots…. or dolls… We would make no choices…..