Book: THE NEW TOURIST: WAKING UP TO THE POWER AND PERILS OF TRAVEL
Author: Paige McClanahan
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Price: Rs 855
With the airline industry being deregulated and god-like technology in our hands, travel has gone through cataclysmic shifts. Glimpsing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or a roaring lion against the scenic backdrop of the Kilimanjaro is just a plane ride away. Travel books, maps, and compasses have been made redundant by the ubiquity of the internet and Instagram. In the sea of viral travel reels or blog posts about dos and don’ts for your next trip to Iceland, is it possible to feel the rush of finding a new place, or, rarer still, get transformed by it? Is it possible to travel without “precipitating a chain of change in the host community”, as argued in Host and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism? Paige McClanahan’s new book of essays jostles with these questions and many more.
Once gatekept for the rich man, White in colour and aristocratic in his manners, tourism has now opened its arms for large swathes of tourists. So much so that almost a million visitors travelled across countries in 2023, contributing to nearly 10% of the world’s GDP. But this democratic access has also allowed the boorish traveller to trample upon the moss at Iceland, spit, sh**, and pee in Amsterdam’s erotic, kitschy red-light district, and scribble lovers’ names, complete with an arrow through the heart, on the walls of the Colosseum.
Agnes Callard, in her contested essay in The New Yorker, “The Case Against Travel”, considers travel as a boomerang, a dehumaniser. She defines a traveller, with her characteristic, bone-dry humour, as an unchanged changer: one who believes — almost desperately — that he/she has changed but hasn’t. McClanahan, while agreeing with Callard’s criticisms — and Fernando Pessoa’s, G.K. Chesterton’s, and Immanuel Kant’s anti-travel sentiments — goes a little further. She looks at travel from the lens of social change, apart from the hedonistic or capitalist perspective that Callard employs. “[W]e tourists see ourselves as unthinking pleasure-seekers and consumerist cogs in an industrial machine. We’d forgotten about the power we hold as contributors — however unwitting — to a vast and potential social force.”
She further elaborates on the social aspect of tourism as well as the image-building exercise that it facilitates. A general perception about a particular country dictates a tourist’s decision to travel, live there, or do business. McClanahan takes the example of Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is pumping millions of dollars to bolster an ‘inviting’ image of the country. Or how the efforts of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, to revitalise the economy and improve Spain’s image overseas used the dance form of flamenco, which till now predominates the tourism symbol.
McClanahan concedes the fact that while tourism boosts development, calling it “visitor economy” — more than half of the locals were being employed in tourism in a Kerala village that McClanahan samples — its distribution remains erratic. Like in the case of Spain, where the grand spectre of flamenco overshadowed other indigenous dance forms, the native communities don’t receive a share of the pie of the economic benefits. In fact, in some cases, they are being pushed out of their natural homes to create more space for tourists or prune any aesthetic discomfort that might arise. This aesthetic discomfort derives from the ‘fantastical imagination’ with which we imbue these places based on social media accounts, hearsay, and advertisement campaigns.
This is also the genesis of tourist traps, coined by the travel writer, Graham Greene, who felt that tourists, despite inhabiting the same country, “lived in a different world”. Such places of concentrated, sanitised, gentrified beauty can perpetuate stereotyped ideas about a place. They can create an illusion of a dumbed-down and falsified version of reality. It is this lack of the “comfort and the ease of the familiar”, as pointed out by Greene, that can cause the tourist to feel dejected and dissatisfied. It can further force countries to embellish the falsification.
The ‘Tourists Go Home’ placards raised by the Spanish or unsuspecting tourists being shot at with water pistols notwithstanding, McClanahan believes that the positive impacts of tourism outweigh its negative impacts. She ends her Epilogue on a positive note, such as the innovative intervention on the beaches of Hawaii where educational measures have led to significant behavioural change. She also creates a sharp distinction between the old and the newtourist, the latter allowing the place to take precedence over himself/herself,which, one would believe,allows a fuller immersion in the place and alters one’srelationship with it.