CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS IN TOURISM

Introduction:

This article briefly describes the power and place of cultural representations in tourism. At times it has been suggested to me that cultural tourism is a field of study that is somehow of secondary importance to the larger concerns of tourism’s economic contributions and to its sustainability. There have also been remarks to the effect that somehow, the research in cultural tourism has not been proceeding with the same methodological rigor as other areas (refer to the myth of the ‘non-quantitative’ science oxymoron).

The focus of this paper is to introduce the authority of representations and their power to form a social reality that is perceived and believed to exist outside the normal social worlds of guest or host. In this third, interstitial reality, representations have the power to form a destination image, a sense of place and a social reality that can influence the perceptions, motivations and buying decision of tourists who would otherwise never be interested in visiting a destination. Representations form the basis of exchange that the tourism industry is built upon and their study is rooted deeply in a century of European ethnographic science.

The Authority of Representations

The power of representation has been of great interest to many tourism researchers (Selwyn 1996; Mellinger 1994, Edwards 1992a, Dann, 1988; Sontag 1979). In tourism, cultural representations seem real because they are perceived by the immediacy of the senses – and so they have become real. The accompanying discourse interiorizes the experience as nothing more than an event within the social consciousness of the visitor, as something that is already owned by the tourist by the nature of the experience itself. Cultural difference is not perceived as the property of the Other, but as part of the territory of ‘us’. Representation in tourism succeeds in “presenting the world in a new experience” (Dewey 1989: 89), reinforcing a symbolic system already in place within the social cosmology of the viewer. The representation is irresistible because it is vast and limitless. The tourist gazes on landscapes, townscapes, ethnic groups, lifestyles, historical artifacts, bases of recreation and ‘sand, sun and sea’ (Urry 1990: 57), and this ‘tourist gaze’ is structured around “culturally specific notions of what is extraordinary and therefore worth viewing” (66).

The language of tourism (Dann 1996) is a powerful discourse of representations that confines its participants (both host and guest) to a familiar and thus ‘real’ set of words and symbols that describe the touristic event. It is too powerful to resist. The difference between that synthetic ‘other’ framed by language and an actual Other encountered through experience is made indeterminate (Nagel, 1986:112). Representations exist because it is highly unlikely that anyone can grasp “so vast a thing as an entire way of life and (find) the words to describe it” (Geertz 1995:43). Language confines its subjects to a metaphor of reality; it does not reveal reality; it inevitably “structures one’s own experience of reality as well as the experience of those to whom one communicates” (Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1988:455). Identity is a set of representations contrived by comparisons and distinguished by references to difference (Lanfant 1995:36; Aune, 1990:256), as Kenneth Burke said, “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing” (Burke 1935: 70).

The tourist wants to ‘see’ or ‘feel’ differently (Kaplan 1996: 59), but according to a set way that is scripted and commercially available. Representations are commodities (Aramberri 2001: 743; Laxon 1991: 380; Marx 1972) and the tourist is said to be “culturally drenched by commodity fetishism” (Selwyn 1996, 14). A myth of otherness, the destination image is purchased before arrival, a text that has been received and read and believed to be a true representation of an experience to be attained through travel. That text is a static marker of culture and experience (McGregor 2000: 29). The image promises the realization of a ritual journey from the ordinary to an Other realm for a finite time (Edwards 1996: 201) using monolithic and timeless visions of culture. The immediacy of the image makes us believe in the experience that we have not yet had and motivates us to realize it through a set of carefully contrived events at certain attractions. The gaze is contained by desire and shaped by the image. In the image, time and space are compressed (Urry 1990: 21-23), and fragments cohere into an apparent wholeness, an irreducible truth

Heritage of Ethnography in Tourism Studies

The mechanism of representations, learned through the accounts made in ethnography has become institutionalized as the dramaturgical event, sites, attractions, museums and exhibitions that make up modern tourism. The brochure and the postcard and the tourist’s camera viewfinder make up the operational format of the spectacle, forming a hermeneutic circle of the seen and the to be seen (Ryan 2002). Places are made into experience (Relph, 1976). The tourist, like the ethnographer who went before, visits and returns, remaining culturally and existentially unchanged. The tourist browses a surface of appearances where representations supercede the problem of experience. Tourism emphasizes a frozen ‘ethnographic subject’ (Albers and James 1988; Edwards 1992b, 1996), display (Lanfant, Allcock & Bruner, 1995:ix, imagery (Selwyn 1996; Dann 1988) and depiction (Sontag 1979). For tourism, culture is not something tangible, something ‘out there’. It is a dramaturgical event, subjects and objects performing and expecting performance in return. (Hunter 1999: 47). Experience is reduced to image, where “every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else” (Baudrillard 1996:85). A simulated experience replaces the ‘real’. For tourism there is a real without origin or reality, a hyperreal where image replaces meaning. The tourist, during that brief sojourn abroad, is trapped in an invisible glass cage, able only to gaze out at the ‘other’s’ body, an indecipherable text, a confusing, foreign combination of signifiers. To eliminate this polarizing mechanism of difference would be to endanger the whole social identity of the tourist (Torgovnick 1990:167).

Since the times of early ethnography and continued into the tourism of today, surfaces (inscribed with imagery) have been favored over content. This may be related to “the extremely problematic character of any attempt to get beneath the surface” (Stocking 1992: 224). There is no fixed location inhabited by the Other and so tourism players like the ethnographers before them employ mechanisms to fix an image, “to mummify culture, to concretize ethnicity, and to solidify visions of race to their own advantage (Hollinshead 1998: 146). Geertz (1973:20) had attempted to describe ethnology as the interpretive process of rescuing the ‘said’ of social discourse and “fixing it in perusable terms” (for the sake of the interpreter’s readership). This is the original act of representation and it has since been described as reflective, intentional or constructionist (Hall 1997). Reflecting culture as if it could be viewed as it is, captured on the surface of a mirror was an idea known to the Greeks as mimesis. This mythical possibility usually disguises the actuality of intentional representations where the author (in ethnography) or the consumer (in tourism) imposes a unique meaning on the object or event in the real world in a way that conforms to their already existing cognitive and social systems. Of course the hosts of most tourist destinations who enjoy the economic benefits of tourism are more than eager enough to collaborate by conforming to representations that are more easily recognized and accepted by their guests.

The limitations of language required representation to replace mimesis as the protocol of ethnographic research. This ontological gap was preserved in both the Boasian anthropological tradition (that claimed ‘facts’ as reality) as well as that of the historians of religion (who considered the Other’s ‘reality’ to be nothing more than a collection of myths) between the reality of ‘our’ culture and the reality of ‘their’ culture. Both schools conform to the unspoken and ethnocentric rules of a seamless and continuous non-normative and extra-cultural perspective of ‘civilization’, normatively neutral and value free, and in this they both conform to the representation as reality, regardless of whether it be considered ‘true’ or ‘contrived’. In either case, the result is a representational distortion and embeddedness reinforced with the false mimesis of language and other signifying systems.

Text and image-based research in general has been inherited by tourism studies, using the three directions identified through ethnography: the extrinsic direction (representation versus reality), the intrinsic direction (messages contained and the styles of the images themselves), and the dynamic direction (“the power of texts and images to influence tourist experiences, ways of seeing and perceptions of place” (McGregor 2000: 29)). But through an extensive literature search (available from the author by request) research regarding representations collapses all into the intrinsic direction. Reality (the extrinsic direction) is invisible to any cognitive system other than the one that ‘created’ it; and the dynamic (causal) direction is fraught with the problems of identifying populations, sampling, experimental design and control, motivations, perceptions and a general ‘dilettante’ approach that replaces the inevitable tedium of rooting out destination image perception by population, context and a myriad other conditions. Instead, many researchers accept the authority of the representation, employing ‘Le Regard’ or “the gaze”(Foucault, 1980; Urry, 1990) to understand the photograph, the video, the souvenir, postcards, travel brochures, known itineraries, and even Dean MacCannell’s sites.

Aspects of Culture and Representation in Tourism Studies

Some argue that cultural representations in tourism cause ‘real’ culture to lose its ‘intrinsic’ meanings (Cohen, 1988), but whatever ‘real’ and ‘intrinsic’ really mean is never fully identified in tourism studies. It is just referred to as a shadowy figure of concern identified always, at least partially as the problem of authenticity. Authenticity is a highly suspect theoretical direction in tourism studies, lacking empirical support and laden with conceptual problems and recognized as a “perennial source of misconceptions to be cast aside,” and as a “cold trail” (Aramberri, 2001:740), and as a “red herring” (Bruner 1991:240). What actually happens in tourism is that the visitor engages in rituals of sightseeing, shopping and photography, striving to collect the representations already purchased as a destination image and a desired travel experience. Representations are the traces of that experience (Stewart 1984) to be seen, verified and collected, to be brought home as the trophies gained through travel. Tourists do not travel to ‘preserve’ culture; they travel to consume the experience of its representations.

Tourism thrives on “the arrestive presentation of the culture, the ethnicity, and the race of Other” (Hollinshead 1998: 149). Even the landscape becomes “a form of representation and not an empirical object” (Rose 1993: 89). In tourism, “sites, attractions, landmarks, destinations and landscapes” become a bricolage of images encountered through the tourist gaze, viewed “through a frame” (Ryan 2002: 953; Urry 1990: 100). The tourist “goes not to see things but the images of things; the sight reduced to a sign or a signal” (Dann 1996a: 83). Tourism is a collection of projected images (Papson 1981), the production and consumption of signs (Urry 1990). The language of the tourist text (brochures, tour advertising and travel writings) (Dann, 1996b; Bruner 1991) is a discourse that has the power to “fix the Other in a timeless present” (Pratt 1985:120; Fabian 1983, Lyotard 1979, Said 1978). The brochure and the postcard replace the nation (Bhabha 1994) and reality (Selwyn, 1996). Photographs, postcards, brochures, travel guides, and all interpretive signs employed on location combine to form an impenetrable discourse that “directs expectations, influences perceptions and thereby provides a preconceived landscape for the tourist to ‘discover’” (Weightman 1987: 230). The “directed landscape becomes the real landscape” (Pritchard & Morgan 2001:168).

In tourism, representation is reality. The Kodak Hula Show (Buck 1993: 1) positioned Hawaii “an exotic spectacle” and reconstructed a Hawaiian past, unique and staged (MacCannell, 1976). The Tasaday were created, made into a sign by the media, by science and by politics, to represent “the permanent performance of a living and eternal Filipino folklore” (Dumont 1988: 265). Living history is one that exactly simulates or re-creates a particular place, scene, or event from the past” (Handler & Saxton 1988:243). Blacks are represented where ‘primitivism’ (culture) and ‘blackness’ (nature) has become interchangeable Hall (1997). And where, at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, ‘indigenous’ or “native peoples” represented “not only an earlier primitive stage of civilization, but a world of nature as well, a simpler world in which people were comfortable with their bodies” (Breitbart 1997:56). Native Americans are described historically as diseased and impoverished and today as ‘artistic’ and ‘professional’ (Williams 1992:39) while their ceremonial activities are turned into ‘show’ Laxon (1991: 370). They act out parodies of the stereotype tourists have come to expect (Evans-Pritchard 1989:95). Successful tourism stages its representations as spectacle in order to ritualize the encounter and to keep the stage set out of one’s own home (Richter 1989:188).

In tourism, especially here in Pacific Asia, scholars and professionals should be diligent in recognizing that cultural representations have a life of their own as a construction that is neither the property of the visitor’s nor the host’s normative social reality. Its power to exist – autonomous and authoritative – is based on its universal applications: to the performance and simulation of living culture such as rituals and social life; to the display and simulation of inanimate objects such as historical artifacts; and to the framing, reproduction and commodification of the landscape and its inhabitants complete with their social behavior, regalia and implements – and even their myths. From the original racial and cultural stereotype, we can see the way that difference – the regalia, the feathered headdress – has become a universally recognized stereotype. The aboriginal (high mountain tribes) of Taiwan and their ritualized dancing and costumes is a highly prized cultural ‘resource’ for the central government and the bureau of tourism. Likewise the Jeju Jamsu (women divers). Relics from times long past such as the Jeju Dolhareubang (standing stones) and the Kinmen Islands’ Feng Shr Yeh (Wind Stone Lions) as well as the Sword Lions of Tainan, Taiwan still exist and are treasured as spiritual and economic resources (Hunter 2004). Even those with nothing can, at least provide a token of otherness, offering themselves, totally visible in their original dwellings and lifestyle and ‘pristine’ landscapes as primal to the nation or country that has claimed their representations as public cultural ‘property’.

Conclusion

Gaining a better understanding of representations, their power to effect a reality that is frozen, continuous and ready for commercial exchange will enable scholars and policy makers alike to make better-informed inquiries and decisions related to the tourism industry here in Pacific Asia as well as worldwide. Cultural representations capture the inanimate artifact as well as the living people and incorporate them into the ideology of a ‘destination’. A powerful combination of words and images contextualize the otherwise baffling complexity of lived experience, ‘reality’, reducing culture to its most basic element, exchange value. If not fully understood, the commoditization of cultural representations can have serious negative effects for the tourism industry in terms of gravely miscalculating tourist perceptions, motivations and satisfaction as well as yielding negative consequences for the people and heritage being exploited.

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