Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

TOURISM

Meanings and motivations

‘Tourism’ has been anthropologically classified according to a range of types (cf. Cohen 1979): domestic, international, resort-focused, religious, adventure, ethnic, off-the-beaten-track, educational; ‘tourists’ likewise: from bourgeois FITs (free independent travellers), to working-class package-junkies, to latter-day hippies. What links this range, however, is the sense that tourists and tourism are concerned with a time and place beyond the ordinary and everyday: with travel, even ‘pilgrimage’, beyond the site of working practices and relationships. Drawing on Turnerian ideas of the way human beings organize their lives in terms of regular oscillations between periods of structure and ‘liminoidal’ periods of our non-structure or anti-structure (Turner 1982a), anthropologists have therefore explored the meaning of tourism as pertaining to the division of social life into periods of work and play (cf. Graburn 1983a). Tourism signals a ritual departure from the workaday world and its routinizations. One quits adult obligations, perhaps, in an experiential bubble, or ‘package’, where everything is provided. One plays like a child again, except with adult capacities; one enjoys extra-marital sex, nude sunbathing and drug-taking, perhaps, in a socio-cultural milieu where one knows these things are foreign. On holiday, one is a foreigner from oneself.

Combined here with the liminoidal idea of the inversion or reversal of the everyday, and an overriding of everyday distinctions and categorizations (child/adult, improper/proper) is the theme of pilgrimage; one is on holiday (etymologically, ‘holy day’) in spiritual quest of ultimate goods: love, oneself, one’s past, one’s future, the body beautiful, health, music, art, and so on (Smith 1992). Through ‘play’, a temporarily ‘free sphere of activity’ with its own distinct, captivating rhythms, which can engender the sense of the limited accomplishment of a perfect space and world (Huizinga 1980), one self-consciously quests for recreation and renewal. Relieved and rejuvenated by the experience, the performance, the tourist returns to the workaday world a new person.

Not that tourism and the annual or regular holiday is without its tensions and stresses. Not to ‘go away somewhere’, to ‘stay home’ and simply ‘do nothing’, must be explained by other non-routine events: the end of a relationship, a crippling overdraft. Once away, there is the pressure to ‘have a good time’, amid the uncertainties of weather, foreign food and germs, and the possibly unwelcome attentions of other holiday-makers, and locals.

The expectations and motivations of locals in interaction with tourists, and the pressures they feel, will be equally complex and

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varied. Anthropological work has explored how the tourist is locally categorized and known: from ‘tourist’ heard and understood as ‘tous riches’ in the Seychelles, to the Trobriand Isles where the most suitable local category for the invaders was felt to be ‘soldiers’. In the Simbu province of New Guinea, meanwhile (Peach 1997), the Keri speakers employed the new pidgin word, ‘turis’, to imply a new form of locally created wealth. In the same way that people were traditionally responsible for the axes or the salt or the pigs which they locally made or grew, so now they were proud of ‘their’ tourists.These were people whom they ‘made’ to come and partake in social relations: a form of wealth which gave onto further, intrinsically local, exchanges. For the Keri, frustration arises from the fleeting nature of the tourist presence, rather than tourists as such; the difficulty is in engendering long-term relations based on reciprocity and exchange, and so maintaining those relationships’ inherent value.

European tourism

It might be thought from the above account of anthropological work that tourism entails exclusively the visitation of the West upon the Rest, the more wealthy upon the less, and with mostly unfortunate consequences. This, however, is not the case. Europe remains the world centre of international tourism, in terms of tourists’ destinations as well as their origins; most tourist money is spent there and most crossing of international boundaries (cf. Bouquet and Winter 1987). Furthermore, a thriving trade in domestic tourism can be found in Japan (Hendry 1996); while traditions of ‘voluntary and temporary visits to foreign places beyond workaday worlds’ are probably universal. Graburn (1983b) thus discusses the difficulties of distinguishing between modern tourism and the traditions of ‘temporary and voluntary movement’ as pilgrimage which have characterized milieux as seemingly distinct as Australia, Arabia and Ireland for centuries.

Perhaps tourism, in this way, calls attention to the limitations of ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’, First World and Third, as categories. At best, with the ubiquity of contemporary global movement of which tourism is such an important part, these terms can only possess metaphoric (and not geographic) referentiality. Great Britain is now the Third World, therefore, with its theme parks and the trinketization of its ‘heritage’, where (Conservative) politicians describe the Notting Hill Carnival, run predominantly by London’s West Indian émigré communities, as ‘Britain’s foremost cultural festival’ (cf. Cohen 1993). It is European seasides and beauty spots, likewise, which seek to accommodate

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themselves, economically and socio-culturally, to the wealth of the visiting hordes (cf. McDonald 1990; Rapport 1993a).

Tourism has been described as one of the keys to our consciousness of the modern world (Pollock 1994); something equivalent to past religiosity as a global experience, and to colonialism in its global consequences. Operating in a ‘global ecumene’ (Hannerz 1992:34), a global socio-cultural, economic and cognitive space, tourism feeds into both the creolization of local identities and their reinventions and rebirths (cf. van den Berghe 1987). It is a potent source both of sociocultural change and of anthropological theorizing.

See also: Home and Homelessness, Liminality, The Rural Idyll

TRANSACTION

According to the bon mot, economics is about how people make choices while sociology is about why people do not have any choices to make. An anthropological emphasis on transaction within socio-cultural milieux, and its theorization as ‘transactionalism’, or ‘action/practice theory’, amounts to an attempt to mediate between these positions.

Transactionalism has represented an important corrective to earlier functional and structural emphases which managed to reify the institutional features of social life (offices, rules, rights and duties), and essentialize corporate groups so that they somehow persisted irrespective of the actions of distinct individuals. At best, individual actors appeared as conduits of social-structural effects, their actions and ‘choices’ simply causing to be reproduced the systems of marital or economic (et al.) exchange in which they were mired; here was no individuality or will, and little change. By contrast, a transactional perspective attends to the dynamism of social process and the creation of cultural forms. Sociocultural milieux consist of individuals in interaction, cooperation and competition, struggling to make meaning: to express themselves, to reach one another, to satisfy themselves, to control one another.Their engaging in strategic thinking, decision-making and initiative-taking, and their engagement with one another, give rise to socio-cultural processes and forms of varying duration and legitimation which are consented to and employed to varying degrees, for a variety of purposes, in various contexts. It is not system which is the a priori but individual agency, process and movement.

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Formative development

Building upon Raymond Firth’s distinction between ‘social organization’ and ‘social structure’ (1951), the former representing the present social system as derived from the sum of a series of decisions made by a group of individuals, and the latter the perduring factors which influence (constrain and direct) the choices about which individuals decide, Edmund Leach (1954, 1961b) explored the gap between behaviour as ideally prescribed by social-structural norms and that actually decided upon. The only actual socio-cultural order was statistical in nature: the patterns and changes to which a host of individual decisions incrementally and incidentally amounted. Moreover, individuals reached their decisions as a result of conscious and unconscious attempts to gain power over their lives—and thereby those of others. This, Leach concluded (following Nietzsche), was a universal human trait.

It was in the next generation of anthropological theorizing, in particular in the work of Fredrik Barth, F.G.Bailey, Robert Paine, and those associated with Max Gluckman’s Manchester School and after (Clyde Mitchell, Bill Epstein, Emanuel Marx, Bruce Kapferer, Anthony Cohen and John Comaroff), that transactionalism as such was formulated.

For Barth (1959, 1966), it is necessary to collate the strategic, the symbolic and the structural components of socio-cultural systems. The first thing to be said, however, is that system—the aggregation and integration, consistency and regularity of socio-cultural phenomena—is not axiomatic and is, in fact, variable. To the extent that they exist, normative systems are generated and maintained by individual actors making strategic decisions that reflect and maximize their individual interests. The ‘whole’ effect is one of feedback and flow; structural arrangements are the cumulative result of a number of separate choices, made by individuals in symbolic interaction. These arrangements then serve as ‘canalizing factors’ for future individual decisions; the symbolic and the structural may thus be conceptualized not as somehow other than the individually strategic, or superior to it, but as different generations of it. But individuals are not determined to relate to one another; if they are constrained by their past actions and choices, then they are liberated by them too. Socio-cultural order and pattern is made up of ongoing relations between political actors, actors who can also manipulate the order, and change the pattern, in pursuit of their goals.

For Bailey (1957, 1969, 1971), through employment of a key analogy of individual actors playing a game of power, one is able analytically to account for any number of different kinds and levels of socio-cultural

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interaction, sociation and institution from neighbourhood and village, through regions, to nations and beyond. ‘Social structure’, then, can be understood as the current ‘rules of the game’, within which individual actors make strategic choices, which then influence the institutionalization of future rules. ‘Institutions’ represent the officiations of individual actors wearing masks, whose role and authority have the consent (or at least the apathy) of those other individuals who act as institution members. All the time, moreover, ‘normative rules’, amounting to publicly accepted customs and routines by which the game of sociation is played and evaluated, are offset by the ‘pragmatic rules’ of private, individual wisdom, strategy and interest. Socio-cultural exchange, in short, may be conceived of as a game which individuals make up as they go along.

Critique

Developments of transactional theory such as Bailey’s and Barth’s met with the reactive critique of systems analysts—from the original functionalist and structuralist camps to arriviste Marxian and poststructuralist ones. There was a reiteration of the belief that only some form of methodological holism could apprehend the system and structure that was culture and society (thereby reinstating the axiomatic nature of these variable and processual phenomena). Only a top-down analysis, treating overarching or underlying socio-cultural forces and factors, could account for institutional patterns of relations between (socalled) classes, castes, clans, nations, bureaucracies, roles and genders.The notion of individual actors and their agency is a culturally specific one, it was further claimed, and it is ethnocentric, not to mention unwieldy, to seek to track the interested outcomes of the rational choices which they make. As Asad put it (1972), an emphasis on the rationality and voluntariness of individuals’ actions ignores the fact that outcomes are often unpredictable and unexpected. Moreover, a history of past action comes to restrict present choice, while it is the case that present action is equally, variously, compelled.

Notwithstanding that these criticisms in large part reiterated the holistic and deterministic assumptions and agenda which transactionalism had set out to reform, there was some attempt to effect a conciliation between the perspectives. Might it not be possible, Kapferer pondered for instance (1976), to bring together Barth and Asad by drawing upon Blau’s (1967) notion of the ‘emergent’ properties of institutions, relations and organizations which, once they have been set up by individual agents, can then exert an independent effect? This

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might set limits upon the methodological individualism which transactionalism would entertain since structure, content and form in socio-cultural relations are now seen as operating in an (emergent) domain of their own.

However, along with other, similar (periodic) attempts to bring together agency and structure (Giddens 1976; Bourdieu 1977)—such as is also represented by a flurry of recent work on risk (Beck 1992; Douglas 1992)—the positing of ‘emergence’ itself runs the risk of sliding down a slippery slope to reification and essentialism. One may well talk of structural and institutional arrangements in socio-cultural milieux without the need of erecting a conceptual boundary thereby to individual agents and agency, or claiming to enter a distinct sociological domain of independent and impersonal factors and forces (cf. Blumer 1972; Cohen 1975). Indeed, it is imperative that one does talk so: this is the problem that transactionalism still poses. In the words of one of transactionalism’s most famous forebears, Georg Simmel (1971 [1908]), the challenge is to describe and account for the extraordinary multitude and variety of routine interactions happening at the same time within a socio-cultural milieu, without giving ‘society’ or ‘culture’ the status of autonomous historical realities, and hypostatizing them.

The way forward Simmel believed in was to refrain from looking for a ghost in the machine; ‘society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction’ (1971:23). The interactions are the socio-cultural milieu—not merely its cause or consequence—and there is nothing else. A socio-cultural milieu amounts to a fluctuating field of transactions, only grasped by an analysis of the creativity and experience of its component individuals—individuals who create more or less society and culture depending on the number and types of interactions they enter into. Hence, ‘any history or description of a social situation is an exercise of psychological knowledge’ (Simmel 1971:32).

See also: Agent and Agency, Interaction, Methodological

Individualism and Holism

THE UNHOMELY

‘The unhomely’ is a Homi Bhabha turn of phrase (1994) which he employs to highlight the plight of ‘unhomeliness’ of all those people— refugees, migrants, the colonized, ex-slaves, women, gays—who have no home within ‘the system’. Today, most indigenous peoples of the world

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also belong to this category. As a construct it refers to the state of ‘hybridity’ (being neither here nor there), and as such is situated within post-colonial debate. In his writings on the unhomely, Homi Bhabha is offering some good advice. By demonstrating to the powerless the unhomely territory which is singularly their own, his aim is to suggest a way through which they could begin the process of self-empowerment. He calls for the development of a ‘literature of recognition’, through which these peoples could find the means to signify, negate and initiate their own historic desire. By discovering their own voices, their writings could have revisionary force toward the end of destabilizing traditional relations of cultural domination. Those who have been categorized by Western civilization as beyond the pale and thus its oppositional other, could do the job themselves of translating who they are, while at the same time expressing their nausea with the linear, progressivist, rationalist claims of establishment thought. There is much at stake with this new cultural discourse that is being called for from the marginals of the world (cf. de Certeau 1997).

Anthropology, alterity and the myth of primitivism

The place of anthropology within this discussion about types of cultural discourse is hardly simple. First of all the constructs of ‘the unhomely’ and ‘hybridity’ are part of a much larger set which include other related notions that mark a Western imagery of otherness that has proven to be exceedingly powerful in Western dealings with those marginal to our own way of life. Included would be such major concepts as ‘exoticism’, ‘primitivism’, ‘tribalism’, all highly relevant historically to the process of ‘doing anthropology’. Most of anthropology’s ‘technical language’ has denoted primitivism (see Overing 1987). If a people were labelled as having a ‘tribal’ level of development, it was understood that they were ‘pre-literate’, ‘pre-state’, ‘pre-technological’, ‘pre-industrial’, that is, weak, unevolved and underdeveloped in culture, politics and technology. While ‘the tribal’ may be said to have the digging stick, magic and religion, we have high-tech agronomy, philosophy, ontology, epistemology and fine art! It is very clear that those who have been labelled ‘tribal’ have been understood as ‘primitive’ or even ‘savage’ from a perspective that is purely Eurocentric.

There is a history to such eurocentrism. Alterity in the modern West has been framed by its history of expansion and conquest, one that inscribed the relations unfolding within it as between a powerful centre and a periphery that was lacking economically, politically, culturally. In large part, the West seems to have attained its official identity by defining

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itself against its own idiosyncratic version of other peoples (cf. Brett 1991:114) As Susan Hiller notes (1991b:11), Western policy in its assimilation of external others has always been to consume only what could be most easily digestible. It was anthropology, the science of alterity, that provided both the technical vocabulary and the objectified imagery through which those peoples who were conquered and colonized by the Western state could be digestibly incorporated into a European mental framework.

Primitivism, exoticism and the birth of modern art

While anthropology clearly has much to answer for, its appropriation of the European other was but one force among many others involved in similar pursuit. It is not coincidental or insignificant that the concepts of ‘primitivism’ in art and the human sciences have the same temporal beginnings in the nineteenth century (cf. Hiller 1991b). As Kenneth Coutts-Smith, the Danish artist and sociologist of art, explains (1991 [1976]), the expanding European military and economic imperialism was paralleled with the development of structures of both cultural and intellectual colonialism.The Napoleonic adventures in Egypt concluded with the appropriation of Egyptian cultural property—all those monuments and mummies—as spoils of war. As the awareness of extraEuropean cultures rapidly increased among the European elites, all ‘exotic’ cultures became grist for the artists palette as a myriad of new ‘outsider’ styles became ripe for the picking. Exotic cultures became a rich source for inventive Western imagery of what were considered to be signs of the raw, the truthful and the profoundly simple—or, from the Freudian point of view, the primitive monster child within.

In the early nineteenth century, the romantic movement in art concentrated upon an exoticism of the mind, a subjectivist focus through which there was an attempt, according to Coutts-Smith (1991:24), ‘to appropriate the whole twilight territory of the mind, the landscapes of dreams and fantasies, the preserves of psychology and psychopathology, the primitivism of childhood, the bizarre territories of superstition, magic, folklore, and the absurd’. However, such subjectivist concerns in art were quickly overtaken by an objectivist turn where style, not content, became paramount. As in the work of Delacroix, who captured the people of North Africa as if still-lifes of a guitar (Coutts-Smith (1991:25), modernity in art followed the road of abstract objectivism, the powerful transformation that occurred as well in the human sciences where a potent distancing from fellow human beings became de rigueur. Human objects, in art as well as in anthropology, became increasingly

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read in ahistorical, formalist terms. There is much akin in Picasso’s African masks and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.

The search for authenticity

The irony is that for many anthropologists and also artists their own respective ‘appropriations’ of the exotic was understood as critical strategies to protest and work against the militarist, colonialist and capitalist values of establishment views and action. Anthropologists researching in colonial Africa saw their work with ‘tribals’ as an ameliorating force undermining of the worst damages of colonial government. As but one example of the use of primitivism in the artistic world, the German expressionist, Emil Norde (see Lloyd 1991), began in the second decade of the twentieth century to use tribal artefacts and themes from folk art as visual models to combat the materialism and fragmentation of modernity. For Norde and many other artists the incorporating of the art styles of non-European peoples into their own work provided the means through which they could achieve an authenticity that had been lost, they felt, in the art and lifestyle of their own times (see Lloyd 1991:96 ff.). The desire was to penetrate into the ‘essential’ by capturing the primal vitality of primitive hand-made production and the spontaneity and intuitive force of child, folk and native arts. Tribal, folk and child creations alike were considered to be objects that were authentic, and also unalienated (see Lloyd 1991), unsullied by the Industrial Revolution.

The goal of such primitivists was clearly political. During the first half of the twentieth century, the overt aim of the artists like Norde was to shift—through their use of primitivist styles instead of the ‘sophisticated’ ones they had been taught—the historicist, evolutionist categories that had become so prevalent in European thought. A similar path was followed by anthropologists who created the new ahistoricist methodologies of functionalism and structural functionalism in order to undermine prevailing evolutionist models within their own discipline. Anthropologist and artist alike, both made the political thrust of their new, anti-evolutionist styles and methods clear.

From today’s point of view, it is easy to say that all these primitivist notions of ‘primal vitality’, ‘life in the most elemental forms’, all these concepts that conjoined the folk, the native and the child, so important to early-twentieth-century primitivism are just Eurocentric myths.They are a European version of things, providing yet more ammunition to the salient myth that tells of Europe’s unique attainment of adulthood in contrast to the achievements of all other cultures in the history of the

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world. The artists, despite their politics, were nevertheless objectifying peoples of other lands through their elevation of style to an absolute principle, and their neglect of context and content. Likewise anthropologists were freezing ‘the native’ in time and space, distancing them from nowadays time through their structuralist and ahistorical methods (also see Fabian 1983; Ardener 1985).We can therefore also say that the myths of primitivism had their danger, for the desired ‘primitive’ state of authenticity pertained equally to a fantasized, savage and monstrous colonized ‘other’ (cf. Mason 1990; Corbey 1991).

In other hands than those of the ‘right-minded’ artist or anthropologist—for example the colonial administrators or other agents of nation-states—the idea of the ‘simple’ and the ‘natural’ signified as well ‘the undeveloped’, ‘the marginal’, ‘the illiterate’, an essential aspect of an evolutionist mentality that rationalized political domination over all those conquered territories of the Americas, Asia and Africa. Primitivism fed into a major theme of modernist ideology, one that proclaimed it to be the right of Western civilization to conduct what Bauman (1995:166) has labelled a merciless war on the ‘dead hand’ of tradition. This was a war against cultural particularism which demanded the training, civilizing, educating, cultivating of the colonized, undeveloped other. The gigantic aim was to disqualify and uproot all those particularizing authorities (the shaman, priest, chief and king) standing in the way of an ideal order where human homogeneity could be achieved—through the subjection of all those local lifeways to the dictates of reason.

Authenticity and ‘the unhomely’

By definition, ‘unhomely’ peoples are ‘hybrids’, that is, people who are no longer authentic. The very idea of authenticity—even when thought to be used for very positive ends—had the consequence of freezing other peoples into a mythic past, where to remain authentic and thus appreciated they could not leave. Until very recently there has been a strong code in anthropology that a real anthropologist did not study people who were so tainted as to wear Western clothes—men in trousers, women in skirts, rather than loincloths of beaten bark or selfspun cotton. The notion of authenticity, with all its primitivist baggage, prevailed to such an extent that the received wisdom was that only the culturally very ‘pure’ were worthy of anthropological attention. If a person wore Western clothes, could speak a Western language, or worked for Western masters than he or she could not be an authentic ‘native’.We could study only real Yanomami, Dinka, or Hagen, and not any Guahibo, Ashanti, or Quechua who had become ‘townies’ or engaged in wage

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