‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

Tourism as a livelihood diversification strategy among Sámi indigenous people in northern Sweden

Tourism entrepreneurship is frequently promoted as a livelihood strategy for Sámi indigenous people living in northern Sweden. At the same time, tourism’s ability to fully take over struggling primary sectors has been brought into question, due perhaps to a mismatch of skills or to tourism’s seasonality and low pay. In spite of that, the role of tourism development might relate less to financial autonomy but could best be characterized as being supplementary and complementary to other occupations. Additionally, the motivations behind tourism involvement among Sámi tourist entrepreneurs remain largely unknown. This interview-based study therefore aims to uncover why Sámi indigenous tourist entrepreneurs living in northern Sweden get involved in tourism and to what extent tourism is part of a livelihood diversification strategy. The findings show that a combination of factors such as lifestyle choices, existing touristic demand and readily available forms of capital lead people to become tourist entrepreneurs. At the same time, for some respondents, tourism is part of a livelihood diversification strategy where its development is not sought for replacing a struggling traditional occupation, namely reindeer herding, but for complementing it.     

Kimberley Friction: Complex Attachments to Water‐Places in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT Water, in all its physical, symbolic and metaphorical guises, has an obvious interconnection with people. Without water, human and other life forms cannot (and do not) exist. Less obvious is water's potential as a site of anthropological investigation to explore attachments to place. Such attachments, as Arturo Escobar observes, facilitate a multiplicity of place‐based cultures, and emerge when ‘connectivity, interactivity and positionality’ are present. His observation makes epistemological room for what Anna Tsing conceptualises as the ‘friction’ that permeates environmental and indigenous projects. Via Australian‐based Kimberley ethnographic insights, this article examines people's attachments to place‐based cultures when they become meaningful through multi‐layered tensions about water.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

Critical tourism scholars: brokers of hope

Abstract

The past four decades of tourism research have demonstrated that the field would be impoverished without recognising the human aspect of scientific inquiry. The contributions made through critical approaches, Indigenous perspectives, qualitative methods and morally instilled concepts such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘community development’ have accentuated that tourism scholars are not detached and value-free producers of knowledge. Rather, our gender, ethnicity, personal and political views enter research agendas and actively shape knowledge. Alarmed by a host of social, economic, environmental, political and ethical concerns, and motivated to end injustice, inequality, oppression and discrimination, we also circumnavigate hope. However, researchers’ relationships with hope can be problematic, as evidenced by the recent tensions within critical tourism scholarship. In order to examine the extent to which hope ought to be part of tourism research, it is important to engage with the notion of hope seriously and methodically. By drawing on different varieties of hope, it is argued that these can underpin research projects to different degrees, including critical hope, hope-as-utopia, transformative hope, radical hope and pragmatic hope. It is emphasised that hope is connected to critical research in elementary ways and plays a vital role in envisioning a more just, inclusive, sustainable and equitable world. The acknowledgment of hope as part of critical research is particularly valuable amid the COVID-19 pandemic – an event with devastating consequences for communities worldwide. Through a hopeful lens, our momentary loss of tourism may bring with it a renewed appreciation and care, which has been eroded by rampant commodification and comatose consumerism. The hope driving post COVID-19 visions of tourism is argued to lie in more thoughtful and responsible engagement with tourism, and in our ability to positively transform it.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.     

Hopeful possibilities in spaces of ‘the-not-yet-become’: relational encounters in volunteer tourism

Volunteer tourism has rapidly emerged as a pervasive form of contemporary global tourism. This paper examines the importance of incorporating non-representational theories into analyses of volunteer tourism. Discussions of volunteer tourism are often framed within fixed notions of culture, identity and power relations. In this paper I argue that attention to embodiment, affect and emotion can provide more nuanced insights into the ambiguities of volunteer experiences and encounters. Drawing on fieldwork from a small coastal town in Peru, the study focuses on the encounters between volunteers and locals and the role of emotions in the framing of their experiences. While emotions and expectations are often framed by development aid discourses that characterise volunteers and locals into neo-colonial binaries, there are also numerous possibilities for how volunteers and locals are ‘affected’. By attending to the ‘more than rational’ dimensions of the volunteer tourism experience I draw out the relationship between embodiment, affect and what philosopher of hope Bloch (1986) calls the ‘ontology of the-not-yet’. It is within the embodied encounters in spaces of ‘the-not-yet-become’ where hopeful possibilities in volunteer tourism are found’ This opens up new ways of understanding volunteer tourism. This may, in turn, facilitate more responsible and equitable practice in volunteer tourism projects.     

International Heritage Tourism in Rwanda: Paving Over the Past at the Musanze Caves

Through a case study of the Musanze Caves, this paper describes the impact of Rwanda’s heritage tourism industry on archaeological resources. The paper outlines Rwanda’s tourism industry and describes how it privileges ‘natural heritage’ above ‘cultural heritage’, a situation which is negatively impacting upon archaeological sites such as the Musanze Caves. To create the Musanze Caves tourism experience there has been significant non-archaeological excavation and construction in the caves, which has damaged regionally significant archaeological remains that date from 1000 CE to the present. Furthermore, the Musanze Caves tourism experience does not incorporate extant archaeological information into the presented narrative, which is instead based on ‘natural heritage’ and adventure tourism. This situation is damaging rare resources that might help construct new historical narratives to replace untenable colonial and pre-genocide ones, and is generally unhelpful in communicating the knowledge that we do have about the region’s history.     

The Idea of Indigenous Knowledge

The idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a relatively recent phenomenon that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to ‘western’ thinking and conceptualization. Advocates of indigenous knowledge maintain that its study has profound educational and ethical relevance and also emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the ‘African Renaissance’, in particular. This paper argues the following: (1) ‘indigenous knowledge’ involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in anti-discrimination and anti-repression discourse, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of ‘knowledge’, following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not adherence to a popular concept of debatable plausibility that has profound educational, ethical and political consequences.     

Modern Őmie Women: Virtual Indigeneity and Intimations of Empowerment

The women of ?mie Artists, a cooperative that produces original bark cloth paintings for the global indigenous art market, are described in contemporary ethnographic publications as ranked into a hierarchy of chiefs on the basis of their ‘wisdom’ which is expressed in their paintings. This depiction of the ?mie, who comprise a marginalized population of less than 2000 in Oro Province of Papua New Guinea, is dramatically different from what was known of their culture several decades ago. An assessment of the likelihood of this virtual depiction reflecting the social empowerment of ?mie women is undertaken. Although the impact of missionization and entry into capitalist markets is recognized, it is the interpellation of the art market of the ‘indigenous artist’, working within a traditional mystical tie with the land and the ancestors, which must be seen as precipitating what appears in virtual form an amplification and cultural embellishment of women’s traditional knowledge and practices. This process is foregrounded against the historical change in valuation of women’s cultural contributions by the discipline and the art world.     

Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

Focusing on the striking instance of colonial New Zealand, this article examines constitutional design for colonies of European settlement, arguing about such design in two key respects. First, this article examines the proposals of so-called ‘colonial reformers’ endeavouring to influence constitutional framing, including how their notions on ‘local self-government’ or ‘municipal government’ were reflected or not, while also illuminating their concepts of how to accommodate indigenous territorial governance and indirect administration of indigenous territories in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Second, recovering traces of these disputes and ways of thought from the archives, and how they were operationalised in grounded constitutional drafting or design, rather than resorting to analysing abstract canonical, high-level texts, such as those of Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill, is ultimately more rewarding for evaluating constitutional emergence and design. It reveals tensions within ‘colonial liberalism’, as characterised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. How putative settler interests informed these metropolitan-Westminster constitutional enactments or not, assessed through cabinet-level discussions, in Colonial Office deliberations on settler agitation, illustrates missteps and failures as well as the particular ways in which diverse features of imperial constitutional design emerged. Examining these points is timely given Linda Colley’s focus on a ‘contagion of constitutions’ in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries.     

Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2019–2020 has the potential to transform the tourism industry as well as the context in which it operates. This global crisis in which travel, tourism, hospitality and events have been shut down in many parts of the world, provides an opportunity to uncover the possibilities in this historic transformative moment. A critical tourism analysis of these events briefly uncovers the ways in which tourism has supported neoliberal injustices and exploitation. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis may offer a rare and invaluable opportunity to rethink and reset tourism toward a better pathway for the future. ‘Responsible’ approaches to tourism alone, however, will not offer sufficient capacity to enable such a reset. Instead, such a vision requires a community-centred tourism framework that redefines and reorients tourism based on the rights and interests of local communities and local peoples. Theoretically, such an approach includes a way tourism could be ‘socialised’ by being recentred on the public good. This is essential for tourism to be made accountable to social and ecological limits of the planet.     

The challenge of proximity: the (un)attractiveness of near-home tourism destinations

ABSTRACT

Imaginaries of touristic otherness have traditionally been closely related to geographical distance and travel far away from the everyday. But in today's context of sustainable tourism, a moral and behavioral shift may be expected, toward traveling near home. Distance may actually become a disadvantage and proximity a new commodity. This implies a need to disentangle subjective understandings of both distance and proximity in relation to perceived attractiveness of and touristic behavior in places near home. Thus, it is aimed to shed light on how ‘proximity tourism’ is constructed, endorsed and appreciated (or not).

An online survey (N = 913) was administered to residents of the Dutch province of Friesland, exploring their attitudes toward their home province as tourism destination and representations of proximity and distance in relation to preferred vacation destinations. We grouped respondents into four categories, reflecting destination preferences: (1) proximate, (2) distant, (3) intermediate and (4) mixed. These groups were differentiated and characterized using quantitative and qualitative analyses. The ‘proximate’ and ‘distant’ preference groups, respectively, were most and least engaged in proximity tourism. However, the perceptions of proximity and distance expressed by the ‘intermediate’ and ‘mixed’ preference groups were associated in a nonlinear way with appreciation of the home region as a tourism destination. Additionally, respondents used proximity and distance in various ways as push, pull, keep and repel factors motivating their destination preferences.

Interpretations of both proximity and distance were thus important in determining engagement in proximity tourism and, in turn, the potential for proximity tourism development in the region. This implies that such development will require a balanced consideration of the relative, temporally sensitive ways that people negotiate distance and proximity in their perceptions of being at home and away. Our results advance the discussion about imaginaries of travel, distance and proximity, and their impact on regional tourism.     

Tourism and cross-border regional development: insights in European contexts

This paper aims to structurally analyse the role of tourism in regional development processes in European cross-border regions with different historical development paths. Departing from an institutional perspective, the research is based on comparison of the position of tourism in region-building processes in the newly developing German–Czech cross-border region and the more ‘mature’ German–Belgian borderlands. Results indicate that the development of local cross-border tourism projects is no guarantee for positive destination-wide regional development impacts. In some cases, these projects may even reinforce asymmetrical socio-economic development directions of neighbouring borderlands. Rather, the socio-spatially equitable distribution of tourism benefits in cross-border contexts depends on several process-based aspects. These include the presence of ‘thick’ (cross-border) institutional arrangements, multi-scalar representation of tourism stakeholders in decision-making processes and a transversal position of tourism in regional development strategies. However, both with cross-border institutional ‘under-mobilization’ (Germany–Czech Republic) and with institutional ‘over-mobilization’ (Germany–Belgium), the informal network position of institutional brokers proved key for safeguarding the integrative character of tourism in the inevitably complex cross-border region-building process.     

民族生态旅游:保护性开发民族旅游的有效模式

旅游对目的地社会文化的影响,特别是对民族地区传统文化的负面影响,是目前学术界的一个热点问题。如何对民族旅游进行保护性开发,实现既大力发展民族地区旅游经济,同时又使优秀民族传统文化传承并动态向前发展的旅游目标,是一个亟待解决的重要课题。针对某些学者提出的生态博物馆模式,本文在分析该模式局限性的基础上,认为民族生态旅游是保护性开发民族旅游的有效模式。     

An investigation of factors determining cycling experience and frequency

A bicycle tourism destination is composed of complexes of different attributes that are crucial for the determination of tourist satisfaction levels. However, the relative impact of sector-specific destination attributes on bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency has been both poorly understood and studied. This study is an attempt to fill this literature gap by exploring a demand-side perspective on the important contributors of overall satisfaction with cycling experience and the key determinants of cycling frequency. The 28 sector-specific destination attributes were drawn from the relevant literature, and then modified by a panel of industry experts. Using exploratory factor analysis, three destination-specific attribute-level satisfaction factors were identified in descending order of satisfaction degree: ‘provision of signage services,’ ‘provision of safety and emergency services,’ and ‘quality of bicycle routes.’ Among these factors, ‘provision of safety and security services’ and ‘provision of signage services’ were found to be the most important contributors to overall satisfaction. Finally, ‘monthly income’ was proven to be a significant predictor of cycling frequency. This study is of great importance as there is a growing body of evidence that the use of bicycle for leisure, recreation, and tourism is undergoing a resurgence worldwide. The findings of this study may be of interest to scholars in Western countries where bicycle tourism is mature and highly developed and in Asian countries where the sector is at an early stage of development. Since bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency can be increased by modifying destination marketing and management practices, the government and industry sectors should focus more attention on ensuring the provision of multi-functional grocery and convenience stores along designated bicycle routes, developing an informative and visible signage system for designated bicycle routes, and targeting middle- to high-income bicyclists with diverse bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience options.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

“We can’t return to normal”: committing to tourism equity in the post-pandemic age

Abstract

Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—particularly in preparing its current and future leaders. A commitment to equity is about making specific changes in practices and decisions at multiple levels, along with growing a wider ethical framework. This pivot of a mindset requires us, as tourists, corporations, and educators to step away from a selfish perspective and critically change our perception and understanding of tourism to a truly equitable focus. Consequently, these actions force us to question the consumerism and capitalistic lens that has contributed to mass growth across the touristic landscape and instead, choose a system that fosters sustainable and equitable growth - which in turn, ‘slows down’ our ways of consuming the world around us - transforming our values and experiences of what tourism is and should be.     

Conflicts Over Trees and Waves on Siberut Island

ABSTRACT The paper describes some recent developments with respect to logging operations and the tourist industry on the island of Siberut (West Sumatra, Indonesia). It discusses these developments from the perspective of the notions of equitable access and benefit sharing and prior informed consent. These are often referred to as basic principles in dealing with external intervention within the territory of indigenous peoples. After the initial logging boom during the 1970s and 1980s about half of the island was declared a nature reserve in the early 1990s. All logging operations were terminated. Backpack tourism started to develop more or less simultaneously, stimulated by the lure of a Stone Age culture on a tropical paradise island. This contributed greatly to the efforts to safeguard the island's rich biodiversity. Recently, however, a new form of logging started on the island, with a university as concession holder. But also a new kind of tourism discovered Siberut: its waves are supposed to be of excellent quality and allow for first‐class surfing. As a result of regional autonomy and the process of democratisation in Indonesia, the local people are not willing to accept these new forms of resource use without at least sharing in their benefits. This paper is based on extensive periods of fieldwork on Siberut over the past twenty years.     

Latin America: trade and culture at a crossroads

ABSTRACT

Trade liberalization took the cultural community in Latin America by surprise, forcing a defensive reaction that took years to generate adequate public policy responses. However, cultural policy has changed unevenly in the region. Two issues became the center of culture and trade debates after the 1990s: cultural industry production and traditional indigenous knowledge. Mexico, by far the largest producer of audiovisual content on the continent, has been reluctant to adopt defensive approaches or red lines during trade negotiations. In fact, Chile is the only country that negotiated a ‘cultural reserve’ in its FTA with the United States. Regarding traditional knowledge, only states with large indigenous populations like Guatemala, Panama but especially Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador in the Andean Region dedicated significant efforts to fight for intellectual property protection for traditional knowledge, including benefit-sharing for the commercial use of genetic resources, derived through indigenous collective knowledge.