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46. Ethnic Tourism: Symbolic Reconquest? (1961–2006)
- Indiana University Press
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46 ethnic tourism Symbolic Reconquest? (1961–2006) nicolas Bancel does ethnic tourism lend itself to postcolonial analysis? one must attempt to understand the construction of the gaze on “exoticism” in order to verify the hypothesis of a symbolic inheritance from the colonial era. With this in mind, my analysis relies on the discourse and images found in the brochures of twelve tour operators specializing in the sale of “ethnic” destinations in order to determine which essential arguments these businesses rely upon to capture the attention of future clients. My initial hypothesis is that this discourse and these images answer to the expectations and desires of the clients and therefore inform us on the imaginary and representations of the enthusiasts of ethnic tourism. But i will also try to be sensitive to the capacity for renewal of the discourses offered by these tour operators. What interests me here is not the intimate experience of ethnic tourism in itself—the “how it happened,” which would require another, socio-ethnological inquiry—but rather the way that it is presented, the manner in which discursive structures respond to desires, and to a projection of the experience . By objectivizing the semiotics of discourses and representations offered by tour operators, i wish to analyze the gaze that is directed at populations and remote spaces within the field of ethnic tourism, and also the categories of experience that are offered to future clients. This signifies that the experience of the other and of the elsewhere fulfills a certain conception of their discovery, of their unveiling, and refers back to the construction of a certain idea of oneself that is brought into play in the position that one intends to occupy in the encounter and that is reflected—or offered—in the discourse of tour operators. one of the major arguments consists in convincing the client that the discovery of the other and of the elsewhere is a way of discovering oneself. a worn-out argument, one will agree, but one that within this projection of an intimate experience of displacement brings into play the comprehensibility of strangeness, the way in which it is objectified, confined—while preserving its inexpressible aspect (which may constitute its “exoticism”)—thereby allowing for a renewal of the perception of “authenticity,” of spirituality, of time and space. ethnic tourism thus offers quite a program! 552 Ethnic Tourism | 553 one of the very subtle questions that interests me concerns the relationship between ethnic tourism and the colonial gaze. What relationship between colonial structures and colonial culture can one observe in this situation? does ethnic tourism have anything to do with “postcolonial society”? There is no consensus on these questions. i am aware that to create connections between our focus here and what is known as colonial culture is a highly risky enterprise. The argument that would consist in saying, “you see that we have proof, since colonial iconography (or discourse) showed (said) the same thing,” is very limited. There is a risk of functioning by analogy, and this “weakness,” or at least this “anachronism,” may be legitimately criticized. But, even to the extent that one has a right to compare the discursive units exploited in the brochures to identifiable units of colonial culture, one cannot assert that these units answer the same expectations, nor that they produce the same effects. a first obstacle concerns the historicity of the phenomenon of tourism—the details of which cannot for obvious reasons be evoked here—which goes back at least to the first third of the nineteenth century, that is, before the great expansionist push of europe in the 1870s.1 and yet this is limited to “international tourism ,” which implies leaving one’s country. With colonial expansion, and notably after the conquest of algeria, then of tunisia and Morocco, the French Maghreb became a destination of choice for the bourgeois elite of the last third of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that the writer victor segalen once described very well. This luxury tourism—the only one conceivable at the time—developed in parallel with the growth of tourist sites: spa and resort towns, the discovery of the monuments of arabic culture, and, above all, of the remains of roman occupation . travel writers—outside a few rare “discoverers,” like segalen, who acquired freely the culture and mores of the other, and, in another category, Pierre loti— who referred back to the categories of thought and pre-notions that structured bourgeois and academic culture at the time. yet...