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Written by Anita Pleumarom
Dear colleagues and friends,
In today's Clearinghouse, I'd like to share two articles that support the argument that Third World tourism is a form of neo-colonialism. Indeed, looking at the way the corporate tourism industry has been re-shaping the geography of the world, there are good reasons to suggest that tourism from affluent to less developed countries can be compared to the imperialist expansion of the 19th century. But while the old colonial powers overran foreign countries with force, today's conquerors use `neoliberal' logic and more subtle strategies of appropriation, subjugation and exploitation. [According to Richard Peet (2002), the main components of neoliberalism are "privatization, deregulation, and liberalization, all encapsulated within political beliefs about democracy, entrepreneurship, and individual freedom."]
Anneli Rufus' essay `There's no such thing as ecotourism' serves as a reminder that we should not be deluded by what is offered us as benign `alternatives' to conventional mass tourism. Call it responsible, sustainable, fair, pro-poor, community-based tourism - as long as the `alternative' does not effectively work to change existing political and economic structures and values, it just represents another `exercise in power'. It will yet be one more instrument that poses profit over local values and needs, and, as usual, it will miss out on the goals of more social and ecological justice and empowerment of weak, dependent communities.
What actually happens in the `alternative' set-up is the commodification and marketing of tourists' desire to appropriate foreign places, while the `alternative' tourists see themselves as non-predatory or even as benefactors. In this context it is interesting to see as to how some Western civil society organizations and networks have contributed to create virtual (speak: more acceptable) realities in destinations and to boost tourists' `don't-worry-be-happy' attitude. They suggest, for example, that tourists can enjoy guilt-free holidays in the Third World, by supporting environmentally sustainable/pro-poor/fair trade projects and campaigns designed to make `tourism misery' history.
This way, the tourists can easily convince themselves that they are not just consumers, encroachers, seducers and destroyers in foreign lands, but are helping the poor, supporting them to preserve culture and nature, even contributing to national development. Has the eyewash possibly reached the point that consumers are made believe they are the ideal activists to help save the world through tourism?
The second article is entitled `Mainstreaming Holiday Sex and the Neo-Colonial Attitude' and written by Franck Michel, who is an anthropologist lecturing at the University of Corsica. Michel suggests that sex tourism is just "an extension of the service aspect of mass tourism, in itself a revival of the old colonial attitudes towards the world."
The experience of travel to far-away places, where any taboo can be easily broken, allows tourists to divest themselves of any sense of responsibility. "For the organized tourist, the Other, the native of colonial times, is there simply to serve and to be exploited," states Michel, adding "There are differences between organized and sexual tourism, but the transition between them can be surprisingly smooth..."
Yours truly,
Anita Pleumarom
Tourism Investigation & Monitoring Team (tim-team)
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http://www.alternet.org/story/40174
AlterNet: Posted on August 14, 2006,
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS ECOTOURISM
By Anneli Rufus
Colonialism isn't dead.
Colonialism is alive and well every time you travel from the First
World to the Third and come home bearing photographs of sharks and
storms and slums, of scorpions fried for snacks, sunflowers bigger than
your head, stalled buses whose aisles are slick with spit, and then you
tell your friends and co-workers, "Oh man, it was so great, you gotta
go."
We call it ecotourism and adventure travel. That sounds sensitive. We
think Ugly Americans are the fat ones on cruises and on package tours
-- anyone but us. We think we're different because we don't have a
stars-and-stripes patch on our backpacks as -- buckle your seatbelt --
this summer's travel boom defies the presence of not one but several
wars around the world right now which may or may not become a world
war. This is the busiest summer on record for air travel, according to
USA Today, with 207 million Americans expected to board U.S. planes for
domestic and international flights, up from last summer's 205 million.
El Salvador has enjoyed a 20 percent jump in its number of visitors for
each of the past two years. Colombia is up 18 percent. Record numbers
are arriving in Cuba. When the Philippines' Mount Mayon started spewing
lava and car-sized boulders in mid-July, the government evacuated
locals, but tourists arrived in droves. Hotels were packed. Real
travelers mock the drones who flock to Rennes-le-Chateau in France
because they adored "The Da Vinci Code," or to Botswana because a
Scotsman writes bestselling mysteries set there, or to Namibia because
of Brad and Angelina, or to Vietnam for sex.
We think our motives are purer, that in the correct frame of mind, a
trip to exotica means independence and not exploitation, as we come and
see and -- well, not quite conquer but globalize with every dollar
spent. It's easy to say: "My aim is true, my morals are on track," but
Christopher Columbus and a million missionaries said so, too. Easy to
think it's not corrupting or condescending or anachronistic but cool to
collect snapshots of the other, trading smiles with strangers to brag
about at dinner parties later: souvenirs. Off we go, from Berkeley and
Brooklyn, we Marco Polos, Attilas the Hun, Captains Cook, Rudyard
Kiplings with tattoos.
Takeoff. That plane transporting 207 million of us to giant-flowerland
is causing global warming. That's what Ian Jack writes in the latest
edition of the literary journal Granta, whose theme is "On the Road
Again." Carbon emissions from aircraft into the higher atmosphere are
thrice as potent as those rising from ground level, Jack writes. To
slow the coming debacle, "because all we can do now is to modify the
severity of the inevitable," he makes a radical proposal that we go
virtually nowhere: "We would need to ration the carbon dioxide produced
by traveling to an allowance of no more than half a ton a year for
every human being alive today." That translates to 2,200 kilometers
(1,320 miles) by car a year, with no air travel, or 1,000 kilometers
(600 miles) by car a year with a round-trip international flight once
every 15 years.
"Fortunately for the climate," Jack half-jokes, "a lot of the world's population is too poor to do much traveling at all."
OK, so we the corporate shills -- having shelled out to the airlines
and big oil and then fouled the air -- arrive abroad. Here we are now,
entertain us, spurred by the same selfish yearnings as every pioneer
and pirate and imperial passenger from eras past. Yet despite the boom,
Lawrence Osborne laments in "The Naked Tourist" (North Point, 2006)
that there's "nowhere left to go," because "tourism has made the planet
into a uniform spectacle," with everyone "wandering through an
imitation of an imitation. ... The entire world is a tourist
installation." As a New Yorker travel writer who has come to loathe his
own profession, Osborne ought to know.
Tourism began not for fun, but as a form of torture: the medieval
pilgrimage, a mortifying slog. The word derives from travailler, French
for "to toil or labor." Certain murderers escaped execution by being
sentenced to perform a pilgrimage, in chains.
Nearly a thousand years later, nearly all trips are pleasure trips. But
after 9/11, travel became yet another loaded activity, far from
automatic. Strangers wand your body, scan your shoes. And while a
passenger aboard planes and trains it's so hard not to flirt with
mental pictures of flying into things, of arms on fire. Maybe that's
part of what fuels this summer's boom: the tingly frisson of potential
danger, of denying that danger, of accepting it but not knowing its
source, of not being certain that you'll actually arrive. With the
airline industry on ultrahigh alert after mass arrests in Britain and
talk of a thwarted plane- bombing plot, travel lurches yet another
notch out of neutral, out of normal. To go anywhere now, you have to
really want to go.
Although Osborne's diction evinces an elite British education --
"hoplites," "decalcomaniac," "stalactitic" and "helots" pop lightly off
his fingertips -- he is too broke to afford dental work before starting
his own trip through the Mideast and Asia, where every destination
resembles a theme park at which "you are asked to play a part in the
racial memory of others": Consumer. Invader. Crusader. Seducer.
Self-hating Westerner. Buffoon.
In Dubai, Osborne wonders what anticolonialist scholar Edward Said
would say about a booming emirate that, with its faux-Arabian Nights
shopping malls and steel palm trees, "Orientalizes itself." Andaman
Islanders act scary, then cynically hawk their handicrafts. Korowai
tribesmen in remote Papua are "persuaded to change out of their
T-shirts and shorts, put on hornbill penis gourds, and climb into
traditional treehouses" by the operators of a tour company whose German
name means "Back to the Stone Age!" Osborne develops a tremor as he
quaffs more and more whisky to kill "the awful taste of simulacrum."
But even the Thai health resort to which a doctor sends him -- a place
where fresh flowers stud the swimming pools -- exudes a sense "of
dejection, of pointlessness." Osborne flees in a cab.
Anthropologists haunt him as he prepares to enter Papua, hailed as the
last truly primitive aerie on Earth -- a jungly puzzle where, in the
1930s, Margaret Mead "found all the material she needed to overturn
what she perceived as the patriarchy, racism, and puritanism of her
native America."
Despite time marching on, Osborne observes, "Papua has stayed wild.
Almost nobody experiences it." Even people he meets in not-so-far-away
India have never heard of it. Thus Papua feels like the last possible
source of a buzz for someone so shamed and callused by his "long
collusion with the forces of global tourism" -- which, he notes, is the
world's fastest-growing industry and one that pretty much defines and
confines the economies of entire nations. Osborne regrets having been
"induced" to roam, to spend years on end in thousands of hotel rooms in
204 countries while having no home of his own: "Passing one's time in
this way is a novel form of dementia."
I know. I used to travel. Now I don't go anywhere anymore. I even used
to write travel books, and talk about them on TV. I have seen mummies
whose still-perfect hands shimmered like caramel. I have seen
rainforests and a shipwreck, and found shampoo bottles washed ashore. I
spoke Chinese. But now I wonder whether it is right to guide anyone
anywhere that he or she could not find on his or her own. Travel
writing is advertising; it's turning foreigners and their landscapes
into commodities.
And tourism, as James Hamilton-Patterson writes in Granta -- in an
essay titled "The End of Travel" -- "is an industry determined to
embrace you. ... It wants you to spend as much as you can on fatuous
souvenirs; it wants you to do Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal; it wants
you to have the rainforest experience or the Mysterious East experience
or the Rose Red City Half as Old as Time experience, and it doesn't
terribly mind if you also have the
fleeced-by-muggers-on-Copacabana-Beach experience."
First Worlders penetrating the Third World aren't the wild rebels they
imagine themselves to be, he snorts. They're deluded children, lulled
by the convenience of their own electronic toys and their longing to
make the folks back home envy them for where they've been. More and
more trips these days, he writes, are "apparently influenced more by
the Guinness Book of Records than by a desire to travel per se. People
aspire to be the first to swim the entire length of the Mekong
backstroke or become the only dude ever to go snowboarding in
Antarctica. Take a camera crew along to capture your waggish ego!"
And sure enough, the last few years have seen a flood of
adventure-memoirs whose authors undertook exactly such stunts: John
Pollack's "Cork Boat," about building a vessel from wire and 165,321
wine-corks and sailing through Portugal, because that's where cork
comes from; Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between," about walking
across Afghanistan in 2002; Jeffrey Tayler's "River of No Reprieve,"
about motorboating into Russia's Arctic; André Tolmé's "I Golfed Across
Mongolia"...
In an ever-flatter world where simply seeing is no longer enough, where
adventure travel gets spun into "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race,"
neoswashbucklers feel compelled to traverse entire nations and
waterways on foot or in unorthodox boats, suffering and sometimes only
barely surviving. An Afghani official warned Stewart: "You'll die, I
guarantee it," and he almost did. Tayler was marooned. But even this --
even what appears to be anti-travel writing, with its horror stories
about power outages and Taliban gunmen and canned meat and house-sized
icebergs and whole populations afflicted with what Tayler calls "broken
souls" -- is travel writing nonetheless. Because in its perverse way,
it still makes you want to go. Because you'll feel like a coward or a
dork if you don't.
Go on, sneers Hamilton-Patterson, who has lived all over the world: Ski
down Kilimanjaro before the last snowdrift melts on a planet whose
"accelerating demise is helped along by the mounting effluent of our
journeys."
For me, travel is a misty dream, like a fairground ride in a landscape
now dismantled. I miss it. Am I saving some tribe from extinction by
not looking for it, much less telling you about it? Or am I starving
some shopkeeper by not buying his sandals? Both. Neither. I am out of
that game now.
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Peace, Earth & Justice News: August 24, 2006
[This article was originally published by Agence Global (www.agenceglobal.com), it was translated into English by Donald Hounam]
MAINSTREAMING HOLIDAY SEX AND THE NEO-COLONIAL ATTITUDE
By Franck Michel
From Thailand to Tunisia, sexual tourism is on the rise. With its roots
in prostitution, it is an extension of the service aspect of mass
tourism, in itself a revival of the old colonial attitudes towards the
world.
Mass-marketing Sex Tourism
As sexual tourism, like traditional tourism before it, is democratised,
prostitutes are becoming a standard holiday option. In Phuket or Ko
Samui in Thailand, it is no longer unusual to encounter a western
backpacker with a "girlfriend" hired for the week or month perched on
the pillion of his motorcycle or clinging to his arm. And as it grows,
sexual tourism is being mass-marketed.
In Thailand, young westerners in search of adventure and excitement are
gradually supplanting a previous generation of German, Japanese and
American tourists who themselves succeeded US and Australian troops
serving in Vietnam. New clients from Malaysia, China and South Korea
are arriving on the beaches and in the bars.
Tourist-oriented prostitution is developing in many third world
countries where there is a ready supply of poor, ill-educated, easily
exploited young men and women, who may not want to work as prostitutes,
but are more or less forced into it. Affluent tourists flock in,
looking for cheap, easy sex with young, available, submissive bodies.
Many of the visitors, to salve their own consciences, convince
themselves that they are not abusing the vulnerability of these young
people, but are just helping them, supporting them, even contributing
to national development.
In the wake of the boom in mass tourism in these countries, the
increase in the number of individual tourists encouraged the expansion
of prostitution. There is a specific geography of sexual tourism: women
go to Goa, Jamaica and Gambia, men prefer southeast Asia, Morocco,
Tunisia, Senegal, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Surinam and
Mexico. In Brazil half a million children are estimated to be involved
in prostitution.
For many westerners, mass sexual tourism offers a revived colonialism,
adapted to a more mobile contemporary universe. Some, in a desperate
attempt to separate forced from voluntary prostitution, assert that in
certain cities in the developed world, or in prosperous enclaves in
some poor countries, "free", up- market prostitution can allow women to
operate independently and dispose freely of their own bodies.
But westerners have to concede that in most third world countries, as
well as in the poor districts of cities in developed countries,
prostitution is still dominated by pimps and by the threat of violence
and rape. The myth that in developed counties prostitution is the
result of individual choice makes combating it more difficult in
underdeveloped countries.
Other tourists try to maintain a spurious distinction between child and
adult prostitution. The more the consensus condemns the sexual abuse of
children, the easier it becomes to excuse the abuse of adults (male and
female) as an inevitable consequence of the world in which we live.
Everyone condemns child abuse but turns a blind eye to traditional
prostitution.
No one is guilty
Sexual tourism becomes a practice for which no one is responsible or
guilty, particularly since it is closely linked to the established sex
industries of pornography and prostitution; prostitution being just the
practical application of what pornography proposes. While both these
industries exploit human beings and commodify their bodies, media and
advertising are preparing the way for the official recognition of the
sex industry. The omnipresence of sexual violence in the media serves
to normalise it. Even its condemnation furthers this goal: a paradox
typical of the chic soft-porn culture that celebrates the domination of
men at a time when their virility seems less secure.
To encourage and stimulate sexual demand, the goods on offer must be
more enticing. The market is expanding and diversifying. A worldwide
supply of ever younger women from all over the world is attracting new
clients. The flow of sex migrants, drawn by consumerist illusions,
guarantees a steady turnover of disposable submissive bodies.
Competition drives prices down. The new popularity of female sexual
tourism shows that women are walking in men's footsteps, repeating the
same representations of power, dominance and exploitation.
There is an important symbolic relationship between sexual tourists and
organised tourists, those who rely on an agency or tour operator to
arrange their holidays, and who shrug off all responsibility as soon as
their feet touch the soil of their exotic holiday destination. As a
traveller at Hanoi airport in Vietnam said: "Here I am, just off the
plane. For the next few weeks I'm handing over my life to my guide. I'm
totally shattered by my job and while I'm on holiday I don't even want
to think, I just want to be carried along." This tourist wasn't talking
about sex, but other tourists would easily take the next step towards
it.
On the other side of the world, everything becomes possible and any
taboo can be broken. A tourist in a party may consign himself to a
guide or travel agent, and allow himself to do things that he or she
would not normally consider back home. He or she may be prepared to
offend Muslim fishermen by bathing nude on a Malaysian beach; or flirt
with an urchin peddling cigarettes at tables in a Vietnamese restaurant.
This is how an ordinary tourist, far from home, can end up doing the
unthinkable. There is a more ready desire for self-transformation
because the experience of travel allows tourists, organised or not, to
divest themselves of any sense of responsibility. For the organised
tourist, the Other, the native of colonial times, is there simply to
serve and to be exploited.
That a financial transaction has taken place can permit sexual tourists
to deny any sense of human responsibility towards the Other. They feel
no obligation to give respect or pleasure. By paying for a sexual
service they have bought total access to an individual over whom, for a
given time, they exercise absolute rights, including the right to
reduce that person to the status of a commodity.
The client is king
They are not obliged to show consideration. Their victim must submit.
They can do what they want, with no fear of expulsion or punishment by
the local authorities. The client is royalty, especially when on
holiday. The Other, whether treated well or badly, is reduced to the
state of a sexual slave.
There are differences between organised and sexual tourism, but the
transition between them can be surprisingly smooth. In her book, Sex
Traffic: Prostitution, Crime and Exploitation, Paola Monzini wrote: "In
general paid sex has become a more or less visible component of mass
tourism." But most sexual tourists still operate alone, because of the
fear of being identified and denounced, and because of the
egocentricity of the abuser.
Any organised tourist susceptible to the current cult of the body and
youth, based on sexual desire and cultural malaise, can became a sexual
tourist. The archetypal example is the protagonist of Michel
Houellebecq's novel Platform, whose immersion in sex and travel allows
him to delude himself that he is more than just an unremarkable,
submissive employee escaping from a dreary everyday existence. In the
West, sexual tourism is represented in oversimplified and incomplete
ways as either sordid or spiritual.
The main reasons for the unprecedented growth in mass sexual tourism
include worsening poverty; the liberalisation of sexual markets, which
encourages trafficking for prostitution; the persistence of
patriarchal, sexist societies; and the degradation of the image of
women through widespread, normalised sexual violence. There is also the
explosive growth of international tourism and migrancy stimulated by
two social factors: the democratisation of travel (huge numbers of
tourists flying cheaply everywhere) and the hypersexualisation of the
young, fostered by the media obsession with sexual violence.
The market also feeds off the opposition between poverty and beauty in
a structurally unequal world. Emotional poverty in the developed world
contrasts with economic poverty in the underdeveloped world. The
material beauty of the consumer goods available in the developed world
contrasts with the beauty and spirituality of the landscapes, people
and traditions of the underdeveloped world.
When the World Tourism Organisation met in Cairo in October 1995, it
adopted a declaration on the prevention of organised sex tourism,
alerting the industry and its clients to a global problem that does not
just involve children. The struggle against it is at least becoming
better organised.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Franck Michel is an anthropologist who teaches at the
University of Corsica and runs the Association Déroutes et Détours. He
is the author of Désirs d'Ailleurs (Presses de l'Université de Laval,
Quebec, 2004 ) and Planète Sexe (Homnisphères, Paris, 2006).
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NOTE: The articles introduced in this Clearinghouse do not necessarily
represent the views of the Tourism Investigation & Monitoring Team
(tim-team).
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- Various 
