Arthur Asa Berger Tourism and Popular Culture
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Tourism and Popular Culture
Arthur Asa Berger
arthurasaberger@gmail.com
San Francisco State University
World Count: 1512
Tourism is now the largest industry in the world, and as such, it has
increasingly become of interest to scholars in a number of academic
disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, semiotics, and
marketing. It also the subject of analyses using interdisciplinary approaches
such as leisure studies, feminist studies and cultural studies. Tourism studies
have moved from being a relatively marginal aspect of the academy to one of
considerable importance and there are now departments devoted to studying
tourism and many scholarly journals devoted to the subject.
Tourism scholars pay a great deal of attention to marketing and to
different kinds of tourists and what the tourists are seeking when they travel.
The tendency is to focus on sociological topics involving tourism
demographics and statistical portraits of tourists. There is also an
anthropological approach to tourism that considers tourism as a cultural
phenomenon. In recent years, a broader approach, involving a number of
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disciplines, has become important and one finds, for example,
psychoanalytic-semiotic studies being made.
Several years ago, more than eight hundred million people made trips
out of their home country to another country, and while some of those trips
might have involved traveling to a neighboring country or one nearby, a huge
number of people traveled to distant lands. Traveling abroad is nothing new,
of course. For as long as we have recorded history, people have wandered
over the face of the earth—in search of food, lost cultures and civilizations,
adventure, on religious pilgrimages, and trying to escape from the routines of
their everyday lives in search of that which is different or exotic. But the
scope of international tourism is unprecedented and calls for serious
investigation.
At one time, foreign travel was reserved for elites who had the time
and money to be able to take “the grand tour” and see the world. In recent
decades, as a result of the development of relatively inexpensive means of
travel, such as airplanes, and new modes of tourism, such as cruise lines and
package tours, more and more people are traveling further and further and
tourism has become a mass market phenomenon.
The term tourism comes from the Greek word tornos, which means
circle. Tourism is generally understood to mean travel, for pleasure, to
distant lands and then returning to one’s home city, making, in effect, a circle.
The World Tourism Organization defines tourism as follows:
It comprises the activities of personal traveling to and staying
in places outside their usual environment for not more than one
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consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not
related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the
place visited.
This definition is much too broad and doesn’t consider other important
aspects of tourism, such as the notion that it is voluntary, it is done for
pleasure and amusement, it is part of our consumer culture, and it involves
tourists returning to their point of origin after their travels. Sometimes it is
difficult to differentiate between tourism and business travel, for a person
who is traveling someplace on business, which is the main reason for the trip,
may spend some time as a tourist, and tourists may occasionally conduct
some business while on their trips. For our purposes, tourism and travel will
be considered as the same thing.
Tourism may now be seen as part of our consumer culture and,
because it is so widespread, as a kind of mass culture or popular culture. One
finds advertisements for cruises, foreign tours, flights to exotic destinations
in our magazines and newspapers. In most newspapers, there are special
sections in the Sunday editions that deal with travel—both foreign and
domestic. There are a number of magazines, such as National Geographic
Traveler and Travel + Leisure that are popular.
There are n enormous number of web sites that deal with every aspect
of tourism, from finding flights to booking cruises and tours. In addition,
there are sites where travelers can send back reports about their visits to
various cities or countries. For example, on the Frommer’s web site, you can
find hundreds of discussions on sites devoted to particular cities and
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countries. People planning visits to a certain city or country can ask
questions and receive answers from others and many people write involved
descriptions of their adventures. There are radio and television shows devoted
to travel and there is a very large travel guide publishing industry.
When tourists visit other places, especially foreign lands, one of the
things they do is shop for souvenirs and local products, so tourism is
intimately connected with the everyday lives and popular culture of people in
sites that are visited. In addition to shopping, tourists visit places to enjoy the
food and entertainments found in them, since tourists are in search of that
which is different. This can range from visiting countries where the
differences are not great to countries where there are very great differences.
Thus, for example, a person from the United States who visits Western
European countries would find different cultures (and a person from Western
Europe would find the United States different) but it wouldn’t be as great as
visiting a country such as India, where there are enormous differences in
languages, foods, religion, architecture and dress.
X
X
The Everyday
The Different
X
The Exotic
We can suggest that there is a continuum between two polar
opposites—the everyday and the exotic. The everyday, at one extreme,
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represents one’s culture. In the middle there is the “different,” which
represents cultures that are different but not in radical ways. And the exotic
represents cultures that are distant from ours in most every way. If we take
the United States as representing one pole, the everyday day, we can see that
England, France, Italy, and other Western European countries are different in
many respects, but not radically different from America—especially in their
popular culture. Thailand, Bali and India, would represent the other pole, the
exotic, where most aspects of everyday life are much different from life in
America.
When people travel, they tend to spend most of their time involved
with the popular culture and everyday life of the places they visit. Popular
culture can be defined for our purposes as all that which is not elite culture—
opera, classical music, great works of art and so on. Many tourists do sample
elite culture when they are in distant lands—they may go to an opera, visit
museums, or attend concerts--but much of their time is spent shopping, sight
seeing, visiting places of touristic interest with good photo opportunities,
sampling popular entertainments and dining where they can sample the local
cuisine.
The growth of the Internet and the development of mass media means
that the exotic is now becoming more and more familiar to people and many
people now can see how people in other cultures live when they watch
television or go to films. One important matter for tourism scholars to
investigate is the impact of tourism and First World popular culture on Third
World foreign cultures. Is First World popular culture destroying popular
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culture found in Third World lands or have they learned how to adapt it to
their own needs? It would be useful to have case studies dealing with this
problem.
Some theorists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, have suggested that the world is
becoming a “monoculture,” that as the world fills up with McDonalds and
other fast food outlets, that which is distinctive in foreign lands, whether
different or exotic, will diminish or disappear.
This is an important question for tourism scholars to investigate for if
tourists are in search of that which is different (and authentically different),
if the world becomes a monoculture, there will be no reason to travel.
Tourism scholars face the problem of determining to what degree cultures are
losing their identities and if now, how they are dealing with the impact of the
mass media. There is also the question of what impact tourists have on the
places they visit. Many scholars have been interested in the effect mass
tourism has had on Bali, for example, and there is a good deal of debate
about whether tourism has been good for Bali or bad for Bali.
Related to this matter is the question of authenticity and the
development of what might be called “tourist traps,” namely fake or
imitations of authentic cultural practices. There is also the broader question
of the importance of simulations in life and the impact these simulations are
having on tourism and everyday life.
Scholars studying the impact of tourism and popular culture on other
lands need to be familiar with the popular culture and everyday life of the
cultures being studied and find ways of assessing how cultures change and
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the degree to which they change. These are methodological problems of
considerable importance—problems that call for a multidisciplinary
perspective and a broader approach to tourism studies than tends to be the
norm at this point in time.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Berger, A. (2004). Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on
Tourism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Berger, A. (2005). Vietnam Tourism. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Hospitality
Press.
Berger, A. (2007). Thailand Tourism. Binghamton, NY: Haworth
Hospitality & Tourism Press.
Arthur Asa Berger is emeritus professor of Broadcast & Electronic
Communication Arts at San Francisco State University. He has published
more than one hundred articles and sixty books on media, humor, popular
culture and tourism.