Historicising hospitality and tourism consumption: exploring
Orientalist expectations of the Middle East
Derek Bryce; Andrew C. MacLaren; Kevin D. O’Gorman*
Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, 199 Cathedral Street,
Glasgow, Scotland
derek.bryce@strath.ac.uk; a.maclaren@strath.ac.uk; kevin.ogorman@strath.ac.uk;
(Received XX Month Year; final version received XX Month Year)
This article explores ‘Orientalist’ accounts of hospitality to
identify historical antecedents for contemporary Western
demand for hospitality and tourism products in the Middle
East. Scenes of hospitality in the diaries of Richard Burton and
Gertrude Bell are analysed in the context of the authors’
historically locatable, subject positions. The paper finds that
Orientalist expectations of hospitality form an image that is
both culturally self-serving and, to an extent, impenetrable by
the actual experience of the traveller. The durability of this
discourse may still inform Western impressions of the
contemporary Middle East. The development of the Middle
East as a centre for hospitality and tourism innovation is
critical to the continued global success of this industry; thus, by
understanding historical antecedents, contemporary operators
can begin to conceive the rich complexity of consumer
attitudes towards the region. This analysis offers both an
exploration of the inscription of a longstanding discourse of
‘difference’ on contemporary consumer culture and presents a
context for future research into contemporary modes of
hospitality and tourism demand and commercial response in
the Middle East.
Keywords: Orientalism; hospitality; expectations; consumption; historicism
Introduction
Given its rich endowment in cultural and natural attractions, the Middle East
and North Africa region (MENA) attracts fewer international tourists than might be
expected relative to competing destination regions (Henderson 2006). Yet destinations
such as Egypt, Dubai, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Oman are attracting growing
extra-regional tourist arrivals, although the effects of recent popular anti-authoritarian
political uprisings may inhibit this growth in the short term. Dubai, of course, has
constructed an international profile based on the provision of high quality, often
spectacular, hospitality and tourism facilities and Emirates Airlines’ establishment of
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a global aviation hub at Dubai International Airport (Lohmann, Albers, Koch, &
Pavlovich 2009; Mansfield & Winckler 2007). In 2007 the World Tourism
Organisation reported an increase in tourist arrivals in the Middle East of 16.4% from
the previous year, compared to 4.8% in both Europe and North America (UNWTO,
2008). The continued significance of those Western markets as principal zones of
extra-regional demand for hospitality and tourism in the Middle East and North Africa
may yet be acknowledged.
In order to contextualise twenty-first century Western modes of hospitality and
tourism demand and consumption in the Middle East (and for reasons we will
elaborate upon, Turkey), we suggest the utility of adopting a historicist approach
whereby the availability of a variety and combination of textually determined ‘Easts’
becomes a resource for contemporary consumer expectation and, potentially,
commercial response. Bonsu (2009) calls for attentiveness to the historical contexts
within which current discourses of consumption emerge by using the example of
residual colonial imagery in contemporary advertising images of Africa. Here, it is
argued, the tropes of supposed African savagery coupled with untutored benevolence
that ‘justified’ colonial intervention are recycled as effective stimulants for
consumption. Yet, these are disavowed and thereby dehistoricised as discursive
remnants of colonialism. This invites consideration of modes of contemporary
consumption involving the individual experience of historically informed tropes but
decouples them from any cohesive narrative that has troubling associations with past
injustice. Sardar (1998, 176) looks askance at suggestions that dissociation of detail
from framework indicates a concomitant decoupling of Western consumer subject
from complicit location in discourses of inequality. Rather, he sees a renewed
imperialism in Western culture where final victory is vested in the ability of
2
consumers to engage in a ‘new game of old images’ by mixing and matching detail in
a kaleidoscope of dehistoricised images of various ‘others’. The archive of historical
tropes that we will explore in relation to Western images of the Islamic East is
considerably more nuanced than a simple imperial metropole/colony dyad and the
implications for consumer expectation and commercial response are correspondingly
complex. Therefore, framed within Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse,
we offer indicative analyses of two prominent examples of mid-nineteenth and early
twentieth century British travel writing in the Middle East by Richard Burton and
Gertrude Bell. These serve to demonstrate, in the former, an existing awareness of
longstanding Orientalist lore and, in the latter, the material consolidation of that
discourse during the brief inter-war period of Anglo-French colonial rule in much of
the formerly Ottoman Middle East. Framed within a wider discussion of the history of
Western travel writing in the Islamic Orient we hope to outline a set of Western
‘expectations’ of the Orient that, even within a contemporary commercial context like
hospitality and tourism, are remarkably durable.
Certain clarifications and caveats related to spatial nomenclature are
necessary. We use the terms ‘West’; ‘Europe’; ‘East’ and ‘Orient’ in full cognisance
of their empirical inadequacy as signifiers of ‘imagined geographies’ (Said 1978)
proceeding from Eurocentric cultural registers. Hence, ‘Near Orient’ or ‘Middle East’
implies a certain kind of European spatial attitude that places them in relation to the
‘Far East’ of China, Japan, etc. (see, for example, Bryce 2009; Delanty 1995). For
instrumental reasons, we refer often to the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed
much of the territory that constitutes the Middle East, where Burton and Bell’s travels
3
took place, as well as North Africa and south-eastern Europe. (Hathaway 2008;
Özbaran 2009).
Theoretical and contextual frames: Orientalist reception, expectation and Ottoman
historical space
Jameson’s (1992) ‘totalisation’ approach seeks to identify the relationships
between cultural products and the historical conditions in which they are embedded.
Moreover, the notion that popular consumption is a vehicle for wider cultural
expression is longstanding (e.g. Adorno 1991; Arnould & Thompson 2005;
Featherstone 1987 Lash and Lury 2007). In the sphere of tourist motivation, for
example, Shepherd (2003) notes that it is less productive to seek insights from
consumers’ quest for authenticity versus commodified experience, as it is to attend to
the historico-cultural contexts from which such a binary itself emerges.
Orientalism is “a fairly constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners
dealing with the East’ (Said 1978, 201). The focus of Said’s (1978, 41) attention in
Orientalism is the Islamic Middle East, with the author stating that, for Westerners, ‘it
was in the Near Orient, the lands of the Arab Near East, where Islam was supposed to
define cultural and racial characteristics, that [the Orient was encountered] with the
greatest intensity, familiarity and complexity’. Unlike the deployment of more
generally applicable postcolonial theory (e.g. Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994; Said 1993)
emphasising the counter-discursive agency of the Orient in consumer culture (Cayla
and Eckhardt 2008; Kuehn 2009; Jafari and Goulding 2008; Brace-Govan and de
Burgh-Woodman 2008), we insist upon the specific utility of Said’s Orientalism for
this study given its particular geographical, cultural and historical context.
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Expectations solidified during the colonial period emerge from far older sets
of images and discourses accumulated before ‘Eurocentric diffusionist geography
polarised the world into an all-competent inside (Greater Europe) and empty outside
(Others)’ (Majid 2000, 134; Chakrabarty 2000). The classical antecedents of
Orientalism are perhaps less certain than Said suggests (Llewellyn-Jones and Robson
2009), yet are traceable to the acute judgment of difference between the spheres of
Medieval Latin Christendom and Islam, subsequent systematic academic approaches
in the eighteenth century followed by the actual military-political encroachment from
the early nineteenth (Said 1978, 73-76). It is useful to briefly survey that ‘preOrientalist’ archive since it provides the very basis upon which the diarists discussed
below conceived of the region itself and the modalities of their access to it in both
material and discursive terms.
During the Renaissance, “in a climate of commercial and political
competitiveness, Europeans looked outwards for aesthetic confirmation of who they
were – what defined them as ‘civilised’ – and met the steady returning gaze of the
non-European”. (Jardine and Brotton 2000, 11). Western accounts acknowledged
travel from a cultural and economic periphery into Mamluk and Ottoman polities in
the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean more advanced in these respects than their
own, with excoriation of the East proceeding principally from awareness of religious
difference (Wheatcroft 2004; Çirakman 2005).
Accounts in the 17th and 18th centuries were shaped by an Enlightenment
discourse that valued empiricism and the rendering of complex phenomena into
abstract typologies such as ‘Oriental despotism’ (Çirakman 2005; Grosrichard 1998).
5
Maclean (2004, 134), for example, writes of the seventeenth century Englishman, Sir
Henry Blount’s account, the ‘Voyage to the Levant’, as further “shifting
understanding of the Ottoman Empire from a religious to an empirical frame of
reference”. Western travellers in the Ottoman lands could not proceed with the
armature of subjective and discursive assurance that Said identifies in later, 19th and
twentieth century, visitors (Mather 2009). Yet, their persistence was driven by desire
and their observations contributed to the set of images and expectations carried with
such confidence by later travellers.
Not until Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and subsequent French, British
and Italian occupation after World War I was the Ottoman-Islamic Orient to become a
zone of focused European presence and political power, supplementing existing
aesthetic desire (Jeffreys 2003; Lockman 2004). Drawing on Foucault (1981, 2002a)
Said (1978, 14) observes that Orientalist discourse should be seen as a productive and
not “unilaterally inhibiting force”. Western art, scholarship and imperial practise
constituted a consolidated vision of how colonial subjectivities should be engaged
with (Said 1993). This was the context within which the Orient became, “a favourite
place for Europeans to travel in and write about” but which “always involves being a
consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings.” (Said 1978, 157).
Renda (2005) notes that stabilised relations with the Ottomans required travel
to collect useful information on the imperial court, administration and daily
commercial life. Written and illustrated accounts of Western European diplomatic
visits to the Ottoman Empire (e.g. de Busbeq 2001; Fischer 2009; Montagu 1994), as
well as of ‘insiders’ at the court writing for a Western audience (Popescu-Judetz
6
2007) from the 16th to 18th centuries stimulated not only production of histories of the
Ottoman Empire (Parry 2003) but emerged in spheres of popular consumption
ranging from ceramic production, movements in fashion and interior design and in the
settings and staging of Baroque and Romantic opera (McKendrick 1960; Faroqhi and
Neumann 2004; Wheatcroft 2004; Quataert 2005; Cardini 1999). This indicates an
emerging sense that the Ottoman lands, and the Orient generally, were no longer
threatening, but available as a source of images of fabulous wealth, luxury and sexual
license (Kontje 2004, 61; Quataert 2005, 8-9).
By the nineteenth century, access to the Ottoman lands and the production of
writing about it had moved into the discourse of Orientalism ‘proper’ identified by
Said (1978) wherein access, both covert and ‘touristic’, by Western Europeans was
motivated increasingly by the perception of the region’s status as Oriental and
intellectually and aesthetically ‘other’ (Thompson: xi in Lane 2003; Pardoe 2010). By
the 1870s, this expectation of the Ottoman-Islamic Orient was embedded to such an
extent that its disruption by prosaic reality could elicit expressions of profound
disappointment, such as that of the Italian writer, Edmomdo de Amicis (2005). Where
the aesthetic specifics of one Oriental location did not correspond with reality, artists
and writers might on occasion fill in the gaps with imagined or transposed detail
(Fahim 2001). These, in turn, were ameliorated by counter-discursive moves to
apprehend the Orient in terms of sympathetic identification (Anderson 2004;
Sharafudin 1994; Nash 2005; Jasanoff 2006).
Expanding sea and rail transport stimulated travel by painters anxious to
capture original, authentic and sympathetic detail in their depictions in possible
7
reaction to the more lurid fantasies of the East produced by their contemporaries
(Thornton 1994; Peltre 2004). These paintings, at the height of their popularity, were
exhibited publicly and distributed widely in albums and catalogues, constituting
‘heady discoveries of exoticism by Westerners (Thornton 1994, 5). Here, then, was a
discursive context in which a seductive blend of empirical veracity and heightened
exotic escapism emerged when the industrialisation of hospitality made access to the
Orient increasingly viable.
A consequence of this normalisation of consumption was what Behdad (1994,
54), calls a sense of melancholic ‘belatedness’ in which the “search for a ‘counterexperience’ in the Other turns out to be a discovery of its loss”, foreshadowing the
‘loss of discovery’ Eldem (2007) identifies amongst current consumers of tourism in
the region. Therefore, if longstanding images and tropes of the Orient are recycled
and redeployed in new touristic contexts of promotion and consumption then perhaps
the same can be said of the circuit of Western desire for, domestication and mastery
of, regret at the loss of original discovery in and, finally, search for new forms of
authentic escape to and in the perennially ‘re-imaginable’ Orient.
Costa (1998, 306) notes that in ‘paradisal-based tourism [escape to a tropical
idyll] … a particular local identity is created and/or reinforced by tourist perceptions
and expectations and by marketing practices’. Yet, whereas Costa’s work is situated
within a tradition of taking up Said’s ideas as a general theoretical method for the
analysis of the representational politics of ‘othering’ in a metropole/periphery dyad,
we focus on the quite specific historico-geographical binary explored in Orientalism
8
and its potential legacy in contemporary modes of hospitality and tourism
consumption.
Hospitality and tourism consumption in the Islamic Orient – historical and
theoretical contexts
Focusing on Egypt, Gregory (1999, 2001) invokes Said’s notion of the Orient
as an imaginative geography; a theatrical space appended to Europe, to identify
scripted performances of contemporary tourism within spaces of constructed
visibility. He notes nostalgia for colonial modes of transport, such as the Nile cruise,
which is catered for by tour operators offering products explicitly evoking that period
for ‘Western’ visitors. Antecedents for contemporary tourism images are identified by
Burns’ (2004) analysis of how idées reçues from formal academic Orientalism
emerged in the discourse of popular consumption in staged ethnographic images of
Oriental types, including veiled women, in early twentieth century postcards. In a
subsequent study, Al Mahadin and Burns (2007) highlight the durability, and we must
presume utility, of Orientalism in the continued presence of veiled women in Western
generated tourism imagery as signifiers of the East’s supposed perennial dialectic
between exotic, mysterious allure and pre-modern backwardness. Echtner and Prasad
(2003) argue that Western tour operators are commercially driven to proffer fantasies
of the mystical and unchanging East, while Bryce (2007) explores the invocation of
Orientalist tropes by the travel industry, placing tourists in the subject positions of
eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans in relation to Turkey and Egypt.
The phenomenon in modern tourism of ‘Western’ or ‘Orientalist’ forms of
representation and consumption in Turkey and the Middle East are now of sufficient
duration to allow thematic shifts to be identified historically. Nance (2007, 1072)
9
notes that tourism services for Western visitors in the Ottoman Empire prior to the
1870s was largely provided by imperial subjects themselves who ‘develop[ed] sights
and practices specific to their [tourists’] interests’. Western based tour operators such
as Thomas Cook, therefore, entered an existing ‘industry’ but the recognisable brand
name and European staff Cook provided made the company’s services preferable to
many Western tourists.
Eldem (2007, 263) argues that, prior to the 1960s and 1970s, promotional
materials ‘paid due respect for the expectations of oriental(ist) tropes (emphasis
added)’ where natural signifiers such as desert and palm trees were usually associated
with cultural markers such as ‘typical’ modes of architecture and dress. Eldem (ibid)
goes on to suggest that ‘the arrival of mass tourism seems to have reduced the cultural
content of this package, to the advantage of the basic ingredients of leisure and
holiday: sun, sea and sand’. This has, in some destinations where ‘modernity’ and
‘westernisation’ (or at least, standardisation) is perhaps most apparent, such as Dubai
and beach-resort areas of Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey, resulted in a sense amongst
consumers that the ‘discovery’ of the ‘genuine’ Orient had been lost (ibid). Tourism
providers, to compensate for this perceived ‘loss’, have recreated elements of Oriental
exoticism in, for example, newly built ‘souks’ in cities such as Amman and Dubai to
evoke the historic bazaars of Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus (Bryce, 2010).
Oman explicitly recognises its advantages in possessing abundant and original
built heritage sites in comparison with neighbours such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai and
has aligned this with its endowment of natural attractions to build an upscale tourism
industry emphasising ‘authentic’ eco and cultural tourism experiences alongside a
10
discreetly luxurious Arabian themed hospitality sector (Winckler 2007). Eldem (2007,
263), meanwhile, notes a further development in Turkish tourism promotion where a
return to the dyad of Oriental nature-culture where ‘typically’ dressed exotic but
distant inhabitants are replaced with smiling hosts, communing directly with potential
consumers ‘in what seems to be a new form of exoticism, that of the traditional values
of yore, lost to the modern world’. This, then, is not simply the representation of
commodified culture but the physical recreation of it to facilitate expected modes of
‘orientalist’ consumption. Wherever one places real or potential tourists in terms of
their desire to experience and consume ‘culture’ on what McKercher and du Cros
(2002, 32) propose is a continuum from purposeful to incidental, deep to shallow,
their expectations surely come from some accretion of images of and subjective
responses to the destination. In the case of Western based promotion of the Middle
East and Turkey, Bryce (2007) suggests, a familiar archive of Orientalist images are
used by the commercial sector and readily received by consumers.
The influence of this discursive archive is increasingly recognised in recent
developments both in Western markets for hospitality and tourism and ‘Oriental’
zones of supply. Orientalist genre painting of the nineteenth century, for example, has
emerged from its unfashionable twentieth century position to act as a lens into historic
and contemporary cultures of travel. While Germaner and İnankur (2002, 40) argue
that, with the advent of photography and mass tourism, such art lost its significance
for Western consumers. Eldem (2007) demonstrates how such images provided the
inspiration for tourist brochures, comic art and advertisements for products ranging
from soap to coffee to tobacco where a visual link with the Orient was intended to
stimulate consumption. Recently, individuals and institutions in Turkey and the
11
Middle East have become serious collectors of nineteenth century Orientalist painting
with exhibitions exploring the cultures of travel depicted therein mounted in London,
Istanbul, Lisbon and Doha. These explored links between historical and contemporary
Western engagement with, and consumption of, the Islamic East. In the cases of
Turkish and Qatari institutional collections, Orientalist art is valued as an important
lens into the history and possible present inflection of Western attitudes towards the
Islamic Near East (see, for example, Yapı Kredi 2007; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
2007; Tate Britain 2008; Pera Museum 2008; Museum of Islamic Art Doha 2010).
This awareness of the power of Orientalist imagery, and those of Ottoman luxury in
particular, now find lavish commercial expression in hotel developments such as
Dubai’s new Jumeirah Zabeel Saray, which, according to its owners, ‘will deliver
unrivalled luxury with an imperial touch … to conjure up the magnificence of the
Ottoman Empire’ (Jumeirah Group 2010). It is clear, therefore, that embedding modes
of Western demand and consumption for hospitality and tourism in the Middle East in
a wider historical frame is of contemporary significance and value and is perceived as
such within the so-called Orient itself.
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Methodological approach
According to Hills (2005), cultural theory can itself adopt a narrative form
while alighting upon individual narratives as units of analysis. Drawing on Stern
(1995, 167) we apply narrative analysis in a dual sense ‘to ascertain plots and values’
shaping both the diaries introduced below, as well as suggesting how the discourse
articulated therein in turn emerges in the ‘emplotting’ of current consumer discourse
in relation to the Islamic Orient. In doing so, we adopt a historicist approach to the
texts analysed, both at the time of their production and in their contribution to a
discursive archive that has commercial utility today. Munslow (2006, 12), argues that,
‘because history is written by historians, it is best understood as a cultural product
existing within society … rather than an objective methodology and commentary
outside of society’. In other words, ‘the representability of a particular aspect of the
past has its own history’ (Rigney 2001, 94).
This is contingent upon the politico-cultural epistemic conditions that texts
making use of historical reference points, are situated within. Davies (2006, 138-139)
speaks of the assimilation of ‘personal and local memories to more comprehensive,
historically verified, regional, national and cultural structures of meaning’ that are
themselves historically specific. These are discursive and material events in history
not simply as points on a linear sequence, dependent upon and referring principally to
immediate antecedents and successors, but as contingencies made possible by lateral
and oblique relations to other events (Foucault 2002a; Flynn 1994, 29-34). Therefore,
our critical focus here is the potential uses that may be made of the past in extradisciplinary spheres of cultural production. We accept the notion that any particular
representation of the past is an available resource that may be drawn upon today.
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This historicist attitude towards the texts finds expression in a narrative
interpretivist approach, as with previous studies conducted by O'Gorman (2007) and
Morrison and O’Gorman (2008). Reissner (2005) introduces the idea of sensemaking,
a concept considered broader than cognitive development but one that supports the
views of Rhodes and Brown (2005) in saying that narrative analysis is the only thing
that can bridge the gap between cognition and context. Narrative analysis embeds the
insights and observations of a given author within a certain ‘emplotted’ and
‘historicised’ context. Black (2006, 319) underlines the utility of the interpretivist
paradigm to illustrate the, “complexity and meaning of situations” and discusses the
process of stripping back the various layers of meaning contained within a research
subject.
Despite the notion that motivations towards compiling narrative accounts can
infect data with bias and contrived focus, unsolicited diaries offer an insight into the
interpretations and most intimate opinions of individuals in contexts that can be of
interest to researchers (Jacelon and Imperio 2005; Elliot 2006). We cannot expect
diarists’ reflection to be sustained enough to yield a concentration of ‘findings’
specifically related to contexts of hospitality consumption in the late and postOttoman Middle East (Allport 1947). Yet, we can use them to place the texts within
‘emplotted’ historical contexts where the observations on hospitality exist in
‘archaeological’ (Foucault 2002b) relation to wider cultural and political phenomena.
We therefore adopt the historicist approach to narrative suggested by Burke (2005,
25) in which ‘comparative analyses … are neither evolutionist nor static’ but provide
genealogical conditions of possibility and discursive resources for later forms and
contexts of cultural production.
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Units of analysis: the diaries of Sir Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell.
The diaries of Sir Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell are used to offer
contrasting illustrations of the hospitality that was experienced, and expected, at key
moments of transition in ‘Western’ engagement in, and penetration of, the Islamic
Orient. The clandestine and overt nature of their respective presence in the Orient
reflects this and in turn, emerges in the modes in which hospitality was received and
described by them.
Sir Richard Francis Burton is heralded as one of the great explorers of the
nineteenth century; his well-documented travels taking him to India, Africa and the
Near East (Burton, 1987, 1991, 2001). Highly educated with a celebrated proficiency
in 29 languages (Burton, 1893), his undercover pilgrimages to Meccah and AlMadinah are famed as being the most detailed account of the Hajj from a Western
perspective. Before embarking on his journey Burton assumed the identity of an
Arabic speaking Muslim for nine months so as not to arouse suspicion, achieving a
unique insight into the customs of this milieu, albeit filtered through a Western
perspective. While current critiques on the ethics of covert ethnography (e.g. Duranti
1993; Herrera 1999) cannot be retrospectively applied, we may yet acknowledge the
additional insights yielded by such an account where those Burton observed were
unaware of being ‘researched’ while also considering that only his subjectivity
‘speaks’ to the reader in a comparatively unmediated sense.
Gertrude Bell’s Arabian Diaries 1913-1914 (Bell 2000) documents the
experiences of one of the most prolific and influential travellers in the Near East at the
turn of the twentieth century (Goodman 1985). Bell’s ability to influence political
agendas in this part of the world grew as her breadth of knowledge and contacts
15
widened and was, alongside T.E. Lawrence, influential in the post WWI formation of
Iraq. Unlike Burton, Bell acted overtly as a political agent for the British Empire. Her
political role and immersion in the Near Eastern world at that time makes her Arabian
Diaries considerably useful.
As Said demonstrates, there is a vast discursive archive of writing on and
images of the Orient for the specialist academic or political interest as well as the
popular imagination (and its commercial handmaiden) to draw upon. Diverging from
his broad Foucauldian framework, Said (1978, 23) notes ‘the determining imprint of
individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting
a discursive formation like Orientalism’. He argues that the discourse acted as a
framework wherein authors, popular as well as academic, drew upon one another as
authorities ‘whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking about the
Orient’. Moreover, Said (ibid, 224) specifically singles out non-academics like Burton
and Bell as being of particular importance as travellers who did not simply represent
the East from afar but developed praxes for effective access to, movement within and
management of Oriental difference in-situ. Burton, alongside other traveller-writers in
the East was a resource drawn upon and added to by Bell in later years. These
accounts, in turn, were disseminated and enjoyed popular reception in Britain and
other Western countries alongside similar accounts. So, while the selection of the
diaries of Burton and Bell does not indicate their singular status as forerunners of
contemporary expectation of the Islamic East we argue that their importance lies in
their particular historical situatedness as works that, respectively, offered up and drew
upon a textually ‘managed’ East at key moments of Western encroachment on the
Islamic Orient. Their importance therefore, is as key points of punctuation in the
16
solidification of a popularly received discourse that has assembled and temporally
flattened moments of Orientalist discourse.
Said (1978, 157) subdivides travel writers into three intentional categories. These are:
(1) The writer who intends to use his residence for the specific task of providing
professional Orientalism with scientific material, who considers his residence
a form of scientific observation.
(2) The writer who intends the same purpose but is less willing to sacrifice the
eccentricity and style of his individual consciousness to impersonal Orientalist
definitions. These later do appear in his work, but they are disentangled from
the personal vagaries of style only with difficulty.
(3) The writer for whom a real or metaphorical trip to the Orient is the fulfilment
of some deeply felt and urgent project. His text therefore is built on a personal
aesthetic, fed and informed by the project.
Said (ibid, 158) places the work of Burton in the second category. While not
explicitly locating Bell within the framework above, for the purposes of this paper she
is also considered to be in the same section, since she neither writes in an academic
form nor tries to fulfil some metaphorical dream.
A further refinement is offered by recent scholarship that examines the agency
of women, both Western and Oriental, in undermining the structures and assumptions
of a male-centred, nineteenth century, Orientalist gaze (Lewis 2004; Roberts 2002,
2005). These analyses draw upon Mary Wortley Montagu’s earlier eighteenth century
accounts for inspiration and similarly speak of women travellers’, writers’ and artists’
access to and reception of hospitality from elite Oriental women.
The history of travel writing among women is discussed by Nittel (2001) within the
context explored by Von Marthels (1994, 18),
“Travel writing seems unlimited in its form of expression…It ranges from
indisputable examples such as guidebooks, itineraries and routes and perhaps
also maps to less restricted accounts of journeys overland or by water, or just
descriptions of experiences abroad.”
17
According to Birkett (1989) Victorian women travel writers tended to display
the determination and pioneering qualities of men but retained the observational
perceptiveness often associated with women. It is said by Strobel (1991, 37) that
women tended to produce, “odysseys” whereas men, “more commonly wrote questromances or tragedies,”. Such styles are compared by Strobel (1991, 37) with the
following example,
“Male writers quested after a goal or confronted a dangerous continent-often
perceived as feminine-which must be dominated by the force of their will. In
contrast women travellers developed strategies of accommodation, not
confrontation or domination, and wrote rich, loosely structured narratives.”
Such a dichotomy, in Bell’s case certainly, is perhaps of limited utility given
her explicit role as an agent of empire. More generally, Yeğenoğlu (1998, 89-90)
cautions against relying too heavily on gender difference as an explanatory tool
underwriting ‘negative’ and ‘sympathetic’ accounts. After all, she reminds the reader,
‘the power of Orientalism does not stem from the “distortion” of the “reality” of the
Orient … but from its power to construct the very object it speaks about’. Some
women travel writers may have beheld the East in benign terms, but beholding it as
the Orient, they were engaged in the same regime of truth as their male counterparts.
Therefore, Burton and Bell’s diaries, their training, background, temporal
location and audience all place certain statements within a coherent discursive
archive. Burton arrived in the Near East in the 1850s, decades before actual direct
colonial rule in the Near East took hold, but with a sense of Britain’s potential in the
region conditioned by its already established presence in India (Said 1978, 196-197).
Bell, by contrast, arrived in the region as an explicit agent of empire in the early
decades of the twentieth century and helped to oversee the British assumption of
Mandates in former Ottoman provinces in Palestine and Mesopotamia. What we
suggest is that these two ‘moments’ of Western engagement with the Orient, Burton’s
18
penetration of Oriental mystery and Bell’s mastery of Oriental political ‘reality’, have
formed part of a discursive archive that is an available resource upon which
contemporary inflections of representation, commodification and consumption may
draw.
Analysing hospitality scenes in the diaries of Burton and Bell
Burton and Bell’s dairies show that there are a total of 158 scenes where
hospitality is proffered in the home or consumed in commercial terms. That Bell
records no instances of engaging with commercial hospitality highlights the difference
in the way she and Burton travelled and consumed hospitality. Burton moved in a
more independent manner, whereas Bell was often the guest of dignitaries or
statesmen because of her diplomatic role in the post-Ottoman Orient.
Consuming the hospitality received in the Orient
The analysis and discussion now focuses on the inherent behaviours that
related to the expectation of being received in the Orient. Both diarists observe the
customary and time-honoured context within which hospitality was provided. A
typical example is taken from (Burton 1855, 56)
“The very essence of Oriental hospitality, however is the family style of reception, which
costs your host neither coin nor trouble. I speak of the rare tracts in which the old barbarous
hospitality still lingers. You make one more at his eating tray, and an additional mattress
appears in the sleeping room. When you depart, you leave if you like a little present, merely
for memorial, with your entertainer; he would be offended if you offered him openly a
remuneration, and you give some trifling sums to the servants. Thus you will be welcomed
wherever you go”.
The lack of expected reciprocation for hospitality is associated with religious
devotion “Human nature feels kindness is displayed to return it in kind. But Easterns
19
do not carry out the idea of such obligations as we do.” (Burton 1855, 40). He goes
further to express the difference from Oriental culture and his own by stating,
“It is true that if you save a man’s life, he naturally asks you for the means of preserving
it. Moreover, in none of the Eastern languages with which I am acquainted is there a
single term conveying the meaning of our ‘gratitude’” (Burton 1855, 40)
Burton’s latent Orientalist (Said 1978) gaze emerges as a result of the perceived
difference in the nature of the hospitality ‘expected’ of the East. Commercial
hospitality was a prevalent characteristic in the region yet, for Burton, the ‘essence’ of
Oriental hospitality is ‘pre-commercial’ or ‘barbarous’ and indeed outside of
mainstream ‘human nature’. Said (1978, 195) argues, that for Burton access to this
essence was enabled by his diligent survey of the Islamic Orient as a ‘system of
information, behaviour and belief’ and his status as a ‘consciousness aware … and
able to steer a narrative course through them [emphasis added]’ based on his access to
the existing archive of Western knowledge we have outlined above. Burton, therefore,
articulates an expectation of hospitality that constitutes an intellectual and aesthetic,
but not yet political, mastery over the Orient. The East retains the outline of autonomy
and impenetrability. The pleasure for Western travellers is to, first, objectify the
mystery and, second, to know in advance they have the tools to penetrate it.
20
Cultural traditions of hospitality
Both texts display a similar quantity of occurrences of hospitality underpinned
by a strong connection to religion and honourable tradition. Further, sustenance and
the emergence of hospitality codes from the influence of the landscape and
environment are prominent throughout the texts, a typical example is:
“They are men these hosts of mine; tall and broad and deep voiced, ready to square all the
difficulties which cross their path, exactions of the government and the exactions of the Arabs.
They kill a sheep every night for those who claim their hospitality; they heap up the enormous
rice dish, and fill the mangers with corn – I asked them how rural economy bore the strain of
such hospitality and they answered with all simplicity: “Where is the inn in this wilderness?”
… They have provided me with camel drivers, for the Agilat whom I brought with me from
Damascus, have returned for Ziza, fearing the risks of the “accursed road” before us; and they
have sent with me two rafiqs, whom they have bound over, by all that any man can call
sacred, to see that not a hair of my head suffers injury”. (Bell 2000, 44)
Here, however, this deeply culturally and religiously embedded mode of
hospitality is offered to a traveller armed not only with the archive of knowledge
enjoyed by Burton but with the assurance that the Orient will provide hospitality in
full cognisance of, and in specific response to Bell’s status as an overt agent of
empire. The mystery, therefore, has been penetrated and must now comply.
Both accounts describe hospitality being provided in order to ensure the
survival of guests in the, to the diarists, often harsh conditions of the region.
Hospitality seems to be less socially and more physiologically orientated. This relates
to a theme identified in both texts where Near Eastern customs seem to evolve from
the environment, as the reliance on sustenance from hosts indicates. However, despite
this reliance on their hosts, Burton (1855, 22) shows a sense of elevated superiority in
his writing, ‘the traveller will learn to follow the example, remembering that ‘nature is
founder of customs in savage countries’.”
21
Here, Burton, for all his linguistic and cultural competence and ability to
‘pass’ as an Oriental, still dismisses his hosts as savages. The Orientalist gaze can
function as a mechanism by which a Westerner can justify his or her perceived
superiority by purposefully applying bias and taking surroundings out of context. The
context of the above statement sees Burton experiencing a refreshment stop at a desert
tea tent. His remark concerning customs refers to the stall set-up in the desert to cater
for travellers. What his comment serves to do is to dehistoricise the socio-cultural and
economic context within which modes of hospitality occur. Such circumstances may
be assumed to exist in Europe, but in the ‘savage’ East, such ‘customs’ are assumed to
emerge from a population barely distinguishable from its natural surroundings.
Bell also illustrates a degree of imagination being allowed to inform her
impression of the East. She often recounts tales she has heard, to which she
contributes her judgment and interpretation. Despite Bell’s knowledge of the East and
her diplomatic relationship with many dignitaries in the region, she still shows a
genuine Orientalist fascination with the region. Perhaps she relished tales that
reinforced her Orientalist gaze and yearning for counter-experience that fulfilled
travellers’ (Behdad 1994) expectations of otherness and intrigue, stating that
“...my own slaves sit and tell me tales of raid and foray in the stirring days of ‘Abd al
Aziz...In Hayyil murder is like the spilling of milk and not one of the Shaikhs but feel his
head sitting unsteadily on his shoulders.” (Bell2000, 81)
Yet, Bell’s judgment is in evidence where she firstly allows artistic interpretation to
charge her impression of murder in the Orient, serving to show her civilised Europe in
stark relief to the savage Orient. Yet, despite the frisson of danger embodied by the
East that Bell articulates, she nonetheless assumes her ultimate safety is assured by
her position as Western with recourse to an associated security apparatus. Such
assumptions may emerge from the discursive archive in current modes of tourist
22
consumption with, as Bryce (2007) suggests, a temporary excursion from Western
‘reason’ into Oriental ‘unreason’ with a return to reassuring embrace of the former.
Issues and observations concerning gender differences are made by Bell
(2000, 200), however, she demonstrates a marked sense of subjective detachment,
distinguishing between women of the East and herself. She relates how the head of
the Iraqi council, ‘receives no women but your humble servant’ (Bell 2000, 101). This
simultaneously illustrates Bell’s observation of the treatment of women and her own
rather unique position as a woman in the East.
Gender does not emerge as a divisive element between the two accounts.
Perhaps Bell is the pivotal author in this sense as, notwithstanding her gender, she was
working on behalf of the British government in a particular cultural and political
environment. Thus, by her very presence in the East, Bell was privileged with
autonomy that was not shared by her Oriental sisters. Her character and skills may
have endeared her to her hosts and one might reductively assume they treated her as
an ‘honorary’ man. Yet, as we have pointed out above, this would be to ignore that
the Western subject position she proceeded from, in the already gendered ontology of
Orientalist discourse, was the masculine component of that dyad in relation to what
Said (1978, 206) calls the Orient’s ‘feminine penetrability’. In other words, the
construction of ‘colonised woman’ as what Spivak (1988, 94) calls an ‘object of
protection from her own kind’ renders ‘masculine’ the Western interlocutor,
regardless of individual gender. If the literature on gender perspectives in travel
writing were to be considered it could be said that the combination of Bell and
Burton’s accounts provided ‘male’ and ‘female’ perspectives yet within ritually
cognate contexts of reception.
23
Commercial hospitality
Although there is an inherent duty to provide hospitality, the Orient’s existing,
long developed commercial hospitality ‘industry’ is recognised. This is a
characteristic notable more in Burton’s account and, as the nature of his journey was
more typical for travel within the region than in Bell’s account, it can be deduced that
commercial hospitality was commonplace. Commercial hospitality was a product of
the busy trade routes in the region stimulating growth in commercial hospitality. A
broad range of commercial operations such as wakalahs, caravanserai, teahouses,
guesthouses and hostels existed to support a longstanding ‘capitalist’ economy
stretching across the Islamic lands from Morocco to Central Asia (Rodinson 2007).
Moreover, coffee houses in the Ottoman Empire had developed as a forum for the
articulation of trangressive political and ethical identities in relation to the state
(Karababa and Ger 2010). This range of operations justifies commercial provision as
a characteristic of Oriental hospitality linked of course to the religious and cultural
conditions it was embedded within with, for example, meals being served around
prayer times.
Prosaic evidence of dealings with an established commercial industry
frequently occurs in the texts. Burton (1855, 35) explicitly describes being angered by
having to pay a particularly high rate for his stay in a wakalah, accommodation
similar to caravanserai.
“(I got) possession of two most comfortless rooms, which I afterwards learned were
celebrated for making travellers ill; and I had to pay eighteen piastres for the key and
eighteen ditto per mensem for rent, besides five piastres to the man who swept and
washed the place. So that for this month my house-hire amounted to nearly four pence a
day.”
24
This quote also infers the idea of a diversified industry as Burton finds this particular
inn expensive, suggesting that the industry catered for a range of markets. Burton also
devotes an entire chapter to describing the layout and operational aspects of a
wakalah,
“The wakalah combines the offices of hotel, lodging house and store. A massive pile of
buildings surround a quadrangular ‘Hosh’ or courtyard. A roofless gallery...into which all
the apartments open runs around the first and sometimes the second storey. The latter,
however, is usually exposed to the sun and the wind.” (Burton 1855, 35)
As well as this, the relationships amongst shops within the wakalah show that
the industry had developed an infrastructure to support the functioning of individual
businesses and to ease the transport of goods across long distances, “On the ground
floor are rooms like caverns for merchandise, and shops of different kinds: tailors,
cobblers, bakers, tobacconists, fruiterers, and others.” (Burton 1855, 35)
The image created by Burton, in particular, suggests that travellers could not
move too far, even in the desert, without coming across some form of commercial
hospitality. He even points out the “fashionable” clientele at hospitality
establishments, likening them to the people that socialised in Covent Garden in
London at that time. Given the widely dispersed imagery of Ottoman luxury that
Burton would have been familiar with, we can hardly suggest his ‘surprise’ at
encountering such, even in the empire’s hinterlands. Moving within such commercial
contexts would, after all, have simply required his implementation of but one aspect
of the codified knowledge of the East he come pre-armed with. It is the aesthetic and
experiential differentiation of such settings and services from their corollaries at home
that indicates their reformulation through an Orientalist referential grid.
25
Discussion
The rapidity with which the discourse inhabited by Burton became inscribed
on organised modes of commercial consumption is manifested by the fact that, by the
mid nineteenth century, the Orient had been opened up to early forms of commercial
tourism, with Thomas Cook’s Egyptian excursions proving particularly popular
(Withey 1997). Expectations of hospitality began to be determined by and catered
towards the tastes of Western markets, specifically expecting to consume a version of
an already scripted Orient (Behdad 1994). As discussed earlier, in the popular
nineteenth century European genre of Orientalist painting, there was a visual corollary
of the tension amongst abstract, pejorative and sympathetically accurate renderings of
the East in scenes of brutality, sensuality and daily, prosaic, life. Hospitality settings
are recurrent including the caravanserai, reception within the home and the Turkish
coffee house (e.g Peltre 2004). By the time of Bell’s writing, this commercial
discourse of reception in the East was so recognisable that the post-Ottoman
hegemony of Anglo-French political power in the Levant could be linked explicitly to
it. Said (1978) after all, relates how for Bell the post World War I settlement had
eased the path of Western tourists to and within destinations such as Damascus.
Again, we emphasise the point that Bell and Burton’s diaries are not presented
as direct linear precursors of current Western tourism and hospitality consumption in
the Middle East. Rather, we suggest that they form part of the conditions of possibility
for a culture of consumption in which a palimpsest of ‘historical’ modes of
engagement with ‘other’ cultures is temporally flattened and itself becomes a tourism
and hospitality product.
We may roughly hang this contemporary mode of Orientalist consumption,
insofar as it is inscribed upon hospitality and tourism, on a tripartite framework
26
consisting of, first, the historical accretion of an archive of images and discursive
tropes leading to certain modes of consumer expectation; second, the use made of
confirmatory heritage or cultural evidence of or commercial responses to those
expectations encountered at the destination; and, third, the transnational geographies
of demand and supply upon which these are inscribed.
As Costa (1998) has argued, contemporary rendering of ‘non-Western’
destinations as sites of unproblematic privileged access, escape to and refuge in the
subordinate ‘other’ relies on a popular consumer imagination saturated with historical
exposure to a range of textual sources that confirm the naturalness of such a binary.
We have returned to the original historico-geographical context of that Saidian
argument to demonstrate that close attention to the specificities of such historical
binaries can shed detailed light on the particular forms such expectations may take in
given demand-supply contexts.
Lest we over-determine such relations, we draw upon Brown et al (2001, 71)
who conceive of ‘post-modern’ consumers making use of ‘historical’ narratives and
heritage in a ‘pick and mix’ style to make their own self-narratives adhere. In the
context concerning us here, this may be a manifestation of what Sardar (2006)
suggests is a new consumer dynamic in which the Orient is still made to exist by and
for a Western subject in such a way that abandons coherent narrative in favour of a
bank of images that are available to be deployed and repositioned temporally and
spatially, at will. This consumer engagement with the idea of the Orient is, of course,
only one of a potential range of historically informed varieties with given
destinations. The Orientalist consumer of hospitality and tourism may be a contingent
27
manifestation of what Mouffe (1993, 71) has called ‘an ensemble of subject positions,
constructed within specific discourses and always precariously and temporarily
sutured at the intersection of those subject positions’. This type of consumer may,
therefore, may be a receptive and complicit participant in various forms of its own
interpellation (Althusser 2008).
Taking up Cyala and Giana’s (2008) notion of a future-oriented shared
transnational subjectivity, we may posit that a Western, Orientalist subjectivity,
available for interpellation, constitutes just such a transnationality that draws upon the
past to construct a narrative for consumption today. Moreover, we may suggest that
Said’s (1978) notion of an undifferentiated Oriental ‘there’ constitutes a collective
self that is externally projected as a set of consumer expectations to which the East is
expected to conform. Whether catering to this constitutes a re-enactment of colonial
subordination or simple commercial good sense in relation to one given market is,
perhaps, best answered by our suggestion that the position of Western consumer
culture and the colonial legacy that it allegedly perpetuates may be progressively
decentred in years to come.
This paper has explored historical accounts of Orientalist reception of
hospitality to identify antecedents for contemporary Western demand in the Middle
East. This serves to contextualise twenty-first century ‘Western’ consumer
preconceptions of Middle Eastern hospitality and to contribute to the call for
attentiveness to historicity when examining the subject positions of discrete consumer
groups.
28
A notable difference between the two diarists is that Burton’s writing infers a
sense of curiosity and fascination with a region that is different and culturally far
removed from his own, where the otherness and difference of the Orient is constantly
presenting itself and being measured against preconceived images. In contrast, Bell’s
diaries are reflective of the period in which they are written and a heightened
familiarity with the traditions and culture of the region suggest less dissonance
between preconceived ideas and reality: the abstract and the actual. However, Bell’s
writing still infers a degree of latent superiority that illustrates the inescapable bias of
the Orientalist gaze.
The perceived ‘nature’ of Oriental hospitality seemed to perpetuate the
Orientalist gaze because of its subservient and non-reciprocal nature. This further
inflated the sense of cultural elevation from the westerners’ perspective and,
consequently, further subjugated Oriental hosts. The potential for this legacy to linger
in the attitudes of contemporary Western visitors to the Middle East is an area that
requires further research. With a continuing military operation in parts of the Middle
East and political tensions associated with Western influence still manifest, the effect
such expectations of the Orient can have on the intercultural exchanges that take place
can be significant and need to be understood by commercial operators. Furthermore,
Western tour operators’ invitation to their customers to occupy an abstract Orientalist
subjectivity in relation to Near Eastern destinations is as much an ‘attraction’ (albeit
in the abstract) as the region’s material cultural heritage (Bryce 2007). While this
might be deplored on humanist grounds, its durable commercial utility may yet be
acknowledged.
29
The diaries of Burton and Bell could have simply been interpreted to paint a
picture of the hospitality that they received, however, that would disregard the subject
position that is inscribed within their writing. More importantly, and at a deeper level,
Burton and Bell travelled to, were received within, and experienced hospitality during
the period within which the discourse of Orientalism was consolidated. For all their
deep knowledge of the Orient their attitude towards and sense of potential, then
realised propriety over it, was irreducibly conditioned by a certain kind of elevated,
sovereign Western bias.
Lest this be confused with the truism that any traveller is likely to encounter
the culturally unfamiliar along with a certain sense of dislocation, the Orientalist
attitude proceeds from a certain set of contingent historical circumstances that both
elevates European enlightenment and modernity to that of supposedly universal
metaphysical norms yet, also, restores their provenance in geographically and
culturally specific terms. The self-assigned ‘genius’ of the West is proclaimed when
the Orient makes claims to parity or, at least, symmetry. It is not our suggestion that
current hospitality and tourism consumption in the Middle East is a simple
continuation of such modes of engagement but that, to deploy one of the truisms of
so-called postmodernity, it involves the consumption of an ironic briccolage of an
array of available (to a self-constituted Western subjectivity) historically locatable,
yet temporally flattened, ‘Orientalism’.
The temporal distance between the twin expectations of penetration of the
unknown and unproblematic reception as sovereign subject may collapse in current
consumption of the region. Migration from the temporal specifics of textual
production to widespread reception and reutilisation has taken place because of an
30
industrialised reproduction and dissemination that yet ‘hails’ consumers as particular
kinds of historicised subjects (Drummond 2006; Schroeder and Borgerson 2002).
Thus to understand hospitality and tourism in the region today is to acknowledge the
discursive accretion of previous encounters in a temporally ‘flattened’ form as a
condensed ‘product’. The analysis of Burton and Bell’s writing is offered as an
illustration of key moments of Western access to and ‘mastery’ over the East. The
subjectivity manifest within the diaries may help to outline the discursive archive
underpinning contemporary ‘Western’ views of the Islamic East and the hospitality
expected therein. As the region continues to develop as a centre for hospitality and
tourism growth and innovation, undoubtedly critical to the continued global
development of the industry, understanding these historical antecedents of ‘Western’
demand may enable today’s industry professionals to respond to the rich complexity
of perceptions of the region.
31
Short biographical notes on all contributors
Dr Derek Bryce teaches in Hospitality and Tourism Management at Strathclyde
Business School. His research interests lie in the representation of ‘history’ and
cultural identities in tourism products and the relationships between discretionary
consumption and wider cultural and political discourses. His particular focus is on the
representation of Islam within ‘Western’ commercial and media spheres. His is
currently researching ‘post 9/11’ representations of Islam in UK museums as well as
the development of Ottoman heritage in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Andrew C MacLaren is a PhD Scholar in the Department of Management, Strathclyde
Business School, Glasgow. His areas of interest include hospitality in the Near East,
on which he has also contributed to research for The Royal Geographical Society in
London; the empowerment of women in the hospitality industry; and settlement
development through commercial hospitality in frontier America. His Doctoral
research is a longitudinal, historical analysis of the internationalisation of the
contemporary hotel industry.
Dr Kevin D O’Gorman is the Associate Dean of the Strathclyde Business School and
a Senior Lecturer in Management and Business History. His doctorate is in the history
and philosophy of hospitality in the Greco-Roman world of classical antiquity. His
current research interests have a dual focus: Origins, history and cultural practices of
hospitality, and philosophical, ethical and cultural underpinnings of contemporary
management practices.
32
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