A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers

5. Performing Others’ Voices: Quoting Native and Tourist

5 [Tourists’ n]onrepeatable encounters with strangers more easily serve metonymic functions, delivering unambiguous exemplificatory knowledge of “the Frenchmen,” “Italy,” “the Third World,” or even “humanity.” Judith Adler While choral and individual voices represent that which is utterly familiar to the backpackers—their single and plural selves—we now turn to explore voices imported into the performances from a foreign exterior. The following quotations index voices that are attributed to either “native” or “local” (mekomi) or “tourist” (tayar ) animators.1 Basically, both share a common attribution—namely, being outside the community; they are voices of the Other—that which is alien, whose alienness is both constructed and made discernible against the densely enclaved Israeli polyphony . Though the evocation of native and tourist voices is infrequent, such voices nonetheless play an inimitable role. As performative resources, they differ from the resources engulfed in voices that correlate with the narrators’ selves: individual and group (and, as we will see, collective). By exploring voices that are constructed as emanating from the social space exterior to the community, from the background against which travel narratives ensue, light is shed on the construction of the community ’s borders and thresholds. Additionally, otherness is imported and “translated ” into the live discursive communal fabric in the capacity of communicating the authentic—profound and foreign—experiences of the great journey. The evocation of foreign voices in the performances designates the touristic scene depicted in the narratives as multinational and multiracial. While traditionally research had revolved around the “guests–hosts” relationship, recent trends argue that this dichotomous perception is rather simplistic (Bruner 2005; Edensor 1998; Smith 1992). Instead, the various public spaces of tourism engulf various guests and various hosts. The construction of meaning in these heterogeneous spaces is established by multiple and multilayered interactions that take place among hosts, among guests, and between hosts and guests. And although a good deal of the research has been devoted to exploring tourists’ perceptions of the Other (following MacCanPerforming Others’ Voices: Quoting Native and Tourist 79 Chapter 5 80 nell 1976), actual encounters with “natives” and representations thereof have been scarcely researched, far less than the theoretical stature would imply. Further, absent from the literature is analysis of tourists’ perceptions of each other and the interactions—if and to whatever extent they indeed occur—that take place among different tourists who all share the public spaces of tourism (on national , sociodemographic, and gender grounds). While general patterns of interaction between tourists are occasionally explored (Loker-Murphy and Pearce 1995), the ways in which tourists react to as well as make use of ethnic-national heterogeneity in extra/multinational spaces has hardly been examined. Indeed, recent criticism addresses some of the basic preconceptions among tourism scholars and points to the homologous perception they had of tourists: male and Western/white (Alneng 2002; see also Graburn 1983, 18). Yet, because borders face two sides at the same time—“interior” and “exterior,” “us” and “Other”—by performing Others’ voices the backpackers are in fact demarcating the community’s borders. Additionally, although native and tourist voices are both foreign to the backpackers, they are performed differently and provide a range of discursive distances and perspectives that narrators may positionally assume. In performative terms, tourist and native voices serve in implicating the audience of the performances differently, and thus amount to creative discursive resources that are unique to the realms of tourism. With regard to reporting and performing foreigners’ voices in interethnic and interracial interactions, Buttny and Williams (2000, 123) observe that “using the words of others can be a valuable resource to understand how out-group members are discursively constructed,” which indicates the “discursive constructions of race and interracial contact” (see also Buttny 1997, 1999; Tusting, Crawshaw, and Callen 2002). Quotations of foreigners are particularly interesting in a linguistic sense, for if the underlying quality of quotations concerns their accuracy in conveying the original linguistic expression, a question arises as to the language by which Others’ words are delivered. What is the language that Nepalese porters or French mountaineers speak as figures in the backpackers’ narratives? The inquiry becomes still more complicated, even puzzling, when the “natives ” themselves speak Hebrew fluently (the result of the routinization of backpacking itineraries; see the introduction and Noy 2006a). The backpackers then come upon a conflation of that which is intimately familiar (their mother tongue) and that which is suspiciously foreign. Indeed, backpackers are preoccupied with these instances , which they recount repeatedly, where...