reconstructed etnicity

RECONSTRUCTED ETHNICIIY Tourism and Cultural Identity in

Third World Communities

Dean MacCannell Community Studies and Development

University of California. Davis, USA

ABSTRACT

The thesis of this paper is that ethnicity is produced by group-level interactions and ethnic forms evolve as a result of changing structural relations between groups and rhetorical explanations and accounts of inter-group similarities and differences. The evidence for this argument is composed mainly of statements made by leaders and representatives of one group about other groups, and responses to such statements. These statements and associated behaviors are analyzed semiotically in that no distinction is made between the words of movement leaders and such matters as the wearing of an Afro hair style: they are both read as statements about group structure and the history of inter-group relations, although one may be in a more accessible idiom than the other. The paper concludes that the institutions associated with modern mass tourism also function as powerful shapers ofethnic identity. Keywords: tourism, ethnicity, semiotics.

Dean MaclTannell is Professor and Chair of Community Studies [University of California, Davis. CA 95616, USA). He is the author of The Tour&k A New Theory of the Letsure Class (1976) and The TLme of the Sfgn: A Semiotic Approach to Modem Culture (with Juliet Flower MacCannell 1982). He has recently assumed the editor- ship of the Amerfcan Journal ofSemlotfcs.

Annals ojToutism Research. Vol. Il. pp. 375-391. 1984 OISC-73S3/S4 83.00 + .I0 Prtnted tn the USA. All rights resewed. 0 1984 J. Jafarl and Pergamon Press Ltd

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RECONSTRUCTED ETHNICITY

LethnicitC reconstruite: le tourisme et IindentitC cul- turelle dans les communautes du Tiers Monde. Les thCses de cette Ctude sont que: 1) lethnicitk est le produit dinteractions au niveau des groupes, et que, 2) les formes ethniques Cvoluent par suite de changements dans les structures de relations entre groupes et dans les explica- tions narratives traitant des diffkences et des similarit& entre groupes. LCvidence en faveur de cet argument provient principalement de dkclarations faites par les leaders et reprksentants dun groupe au sujet dautres groupes, et des rkactions g ces dkclarations. De telles dkclarations et les comportements qui y sont associks sont examines de faGon skmiotique, cest-&-dire quaucune distinction nest faite entre les dklarations verbales des leaders et leurs comportements tels que de porter une coiffure Afro. Bien quun des modes dexpression puisse Ctre plus accessible que lautre, les deux formes de com- portement sont interprktkes comme des dkclarations sur la structure du groupe et sur Ihistoire des rapports entre groupes. Cet exposk conclut que les institutions associkes au tourisme moderne de masse constituent de puissants modificateurs de lidentitk ethnique. Mots cleE tour&me, ethnicit& skmiotique.

INTRODUCTION

In a recent speech to his people, American Indian Movement leader, Russell Means ( 1980:251, stated:

No European can ever teach a Lakota to be a Lakota, a Hopi to be a Hopi. A masters degree in Indian Studies. . . cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you a mental European, an outsider.

Means is attempting to build a correct image of Indian peoples in opposition to forces of assimilation into the Western mainstream, to gain widespread acceptance of that image as a model for actual behavior. In this paper, the term constructed ethnicity is used to refer to efforts such as Means, and to the various ethnic identities which emerged via opposition and assimilation during the colonial phase of Western history and in the new internal colonies.

376 1984 ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH

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Constructed ethnicity is only a conceptual springboard to a more complex phenomenon. The last sections of this paper argue that the institutions of modern mass tourism are producing new and more highly deterministic ethnic forms than those produced during the colonial phase. The focus is on a type of tourism in which exotic cultures figure as key attractions: where the tourists go to see folk costumes in daily use. shop for folk handicrafts in authentic ba- zaars, stay on the alert for a typical form of nose, lips, breast, etc., learn some local norms for comportment, and perhaps learn some of the language. There are, of course, many other types of tourism and even other ways that tourists relate to local color (mainly in service encounters) but these are less likely to produce specifically ethnic effects, so that analysis is concentrated primarily on those occasions in which the tourists attend primarily to ethnicity. The tourists approach to ethnicity differs methodologically from earlier military, scientific-ethnological, religious, and political-colonial approaches. Specifically, tourism promotes the restoration, preservation, and fictional recreation of ethnic attributes. In other words, tourism often behaves in much the same way as, and can superficially resemble, the behavior of leaders of ethnic separatist movements, only the energy comes from without, not from within. The term reconstructed ethnicity is used here to refer to the kinds of ethnic identities which have emerged in response to pressures from tourism.

None of this is intended to suggest that there are ethnic attributes which are any more true or authentic than these political construc- tions and/or touristic reconstructions. Those who decry tourism for supposedly ruining innocent cultures will find little support for their position in this paper. In fact, the main conclusion to be drawn from the analysis is that these critics miss the important sociocultural impact of tourism which occurs in quite another way, as Westerners continue to write the true story of the existence of other peoples.

A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF ETHNICITY

Ethnic was originally a term referring to all groups not Jewish. By the time of Columbus, it had been narrowed somewhat to mean all groups neither Jewish nor Christian. Note that ethnicity did not refer to any specific characteristic of heathens and infidels-it only suggests a structural opposition of us/them-and it holds the Western culture to be the specific measure or standard for all other groups. Even before the term became a part of the technical vocabulary of ethnology (which was about the time of Darwin and Marx) it was known that some so-called ethnic groups were as determined

1984 ANNALS OF TOURISM RESEARCH 377


as others to maintain the us/them opposition-only we were the them.

In actual use, ethnicity occupies the conceptual space between bio-genetic ideas of race and socio-genetic ideas of culture. The accounts of 19th and early 20th century travelers and missionaries constitute the most thoroughgoing effort thus far to fill this space with observations of physical traits, genetic constitution, social behavior, and moral character. Here is an account of the Iranians dating back about 75 years ago:

The Persian [is1 easy-going, and always ready to make things as pleasant as possible for everyone else. Unlike most Asiatics, he is well disposed to the foreigner, extremely hospitable, and fairly honest in his dealings. Persians of pure blood have a quick apprehension, a ready wit and a persuasive manner. They are fluent in oratory and have more sense of beauty than the Turks.. . . On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Persian is a great liar.. . . Their culture, industry, readiness of address, and subtlety-in a word. the combination of their good and bad qualities-have earned for the Persians the reputation of making first-rate diplomatists, negotiators, and brokers (Hutchinson et al. n.d.:236).

One of the things that is interesting about this and similar accounts is the authoritarian tone: It leaves no room for questions and doubt, at least not in the way it is expressed. The authors have unhesi- tatingly attributed oratorical powers, appreciation of beauty, etc., to purity of blood.

In the twentieth century, academic anthropology opposed itself to the excesses of pre-scientific accounts of ethnicity by making a radical separation of questions of race from questions of culture. By the 1950s anthropological statements about race had been purged of all behavioral commentary and most observations of physical traits. Race, it was argued, is population and its geographical dispersion, the distribution within the population of blood groups, and inherited susceptibility to certain diseases. In 1958, William Boyd ( 1960: 17- 181 wrote:

One of the features that impresses the common man and the scientist alike are the differences in customs, languages, skin color, and physique between human beings from different parts of the earth.. . . [Llong ago people began, on the basis of such differences, to classify into races.. . . Originally people tended to confuse cultural traits, which are simply learned differences, with physical differences which are inherited and are not much


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influenced by environment. Thus the layman and early students of man attempted to classify mankind into races, for example, on the basis of language, and one heard of the Latin races, the Germanic races, and the Slavic races, the Greek race, and even the Anglo-Saxon race. It is true that in some cases language is a guide to racial origins, as in the case of the French Canadians of Quebec or the Pennsylvania Dutch of the United States, but languages can be, and are, forgotten by their original speakers and/or acquired by people of unrelated stocks, as the American melting pot shows us every day, so that the differences in the worlds languages, fascinating and useful as they are to the linguist, are very shaky foundations for racial classification. Later skin color was utilized . . . But it is too broad and vague a classification to be of much scientific value.

Boyd might have stressed even more than he did the mutability of physical traits. There are readily available skin lighteners and darkeners, hair curlers and straighteners, hair dyes, breast implants and breast reduction operations, tinted contact lenses, mechanical penis enlargers, permanent skull deformations from head bindings, eye rounding operations, nose jobs, and much more. In Los Angeles, a man who faces the apparently horrifying prospect of appearing in public with a woman taller than himself can go to a special studio and have himself stretched to a guaranteed minimum gain of two inches in stature lasting up to eight hours. Students of anthropology are assured that they are being trained to go around such dodges for purposes of scientific classification of races. But this seems to miss the important question of why people do such things in the first place? Why does virtually every human being on the face of the earth approach his or her own phenotypic characteristics as a plastic medium of expression reflecting currents of opinion? The answer proposed here is that these modifications of physical traits constitute a me&language for communication across important structural divisions such as exist, for example, between the sexes and other groups which command a primary sort of identification. They are a language for communicating in settings in which there can be no presumption of mutual openness to conversation.

The most recent phase of analysis of ethnicity and related phe- nomena is coming to be dominated by sociobiologists who are committed to putting genetics and behavior back together again. There is a great deal of promise in this program. Edward Wilson (1975:41 writes that sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological base of all human behavior. But one should not be eagerly



looking forward to a time when he can revise his characteristiza- tions of the Iranians and others, while placing them on a more scientific footing. Wilsons comment notwithstanding, one after another, the leading sociobiologists have lined up to say that ethnic differences are precisely the kinds of behaviors that sociobiology is not about. Van den Berghe (19791 restricts his admirable analysis of family systems to what he calls cultural universals or species-wide uniformities. Barash ( 1979:5) suggests that one stops being over- whelmed by superficial ethnic differences and study what remains the same about people underneath their customs and habits.

Fortunately for the topic at hand, a concern for ethnic differ- entiation fits rather more neatly into the frameworks used in this analysis: structuralism and semiotics. One cannot help remarking in passing that sociobiologists have backed away from ethnic differences too quickly. On the surface level there is an interesting alignment of concerns between leaders of ethnic solidarity movements and sociobiologists: both speak freely of life and death, survival, struggle, adaptation, and the ike. On a more basic level, it is intuitively evident that ethnic differences in food production, health practices, behavior, attitude, etc., overlap and interact with the immune systems in concrete and complex ways which would provide a fertile field for sociobiological research. Of course, apparently, according to some recent helpful reviews by Thomas Sebeok ( 19801 and others (e.g.. Blacking:19771, students entering this field will discover early on that physicians and biologists know even less about the immune systems than sociologists know about society.

STRUCTURE, RHETORIC AND ETHNICITY

As a minimal kind of working definition, assume that an ethnic group is a subsystem of a larger social order composed of two or more interacting ethnic subsystems. Further, assume that all ethnic traits which appear to be intrinsic are the product of a kind of natural selection as strategies for communicating with the other group or groups in the larger system. They are eventually framed as emit qualities in order to make them more effective communicational strategies, a reason for one group to be stubborn in its dealings with another, as in such statements as this is our sacred way, or the white bureaucrats classic passive aggressive I dont make the laws, I just enforce them. There is ample evidence that language itself becomes regular only in opposition to other languages. In other words, assume that ethnicity is an aspect of an extended vocabulary used by groups to communicate their differences and similarities


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with other groups, but primarily their differences. Of course, as in all areas of social life, for the thing to work it is necessary for everyone to be taken in by their own fabrications.

The present approach is not in alignment with academic theories of race and ethnicity, but interestingly, it is fully congruent with statements made by leaders of movements for ethnic self- determination. In the mid 1960s. for example, at the peak of the unpleasantries between blacks and whites in the United States of America, Stokely Carmichael, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), insisted that rhetorical changes are necessary preconditions to political and economic change, and change in ethnic identity and self-esteem. Note the use of such phrases as tone of voice, speaking for, speaking to, etc., in the following quote for the opening sections of an important policy statement widely circulated by SNCC in 1966:

One of the tragedies in the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There has only been a civil rights movement, whose tone ofvoice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks.. . For too many years. black Americans marched and had their heads broken and got shot.. .We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, youre nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.

An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community-as does the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-must speak In the tone of that community. not as somebody elses buffer zone. This is the signflicance of Black Power as a slogan. For once, black people are going to use the words they want to use-notjust the words whites want to hear (Carmichael 1966: emphasis added).

By the late 197Os, the main architects of ethnic opposition to the white majority in America were no longer black. They were Indian. Still one finds an overriding concern for rhetorical forms, manners of speaking, and the way things get said. Here are the opening lines of the Russell Means speech (quoted above) to the Black Hills International Survival Gathering in the summer of 1980 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota:

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process epitomizes the European concept of



legitimate thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture. the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white worlds ways of destroying the culture of non-European peoples,. . I will allow this [writing1 because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead. dry leaves of a book. I dont really care if my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see: they can only read.. .You notice that I use the term American Indian rather than Natiue Ameri- can or Native indigenous people or Amerindfan when referring to my people. There has been some controversy about such terms . . . Primarily it seems that American Indian is being re- jected as European in origin-which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota-or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc. . . . (Means 19801.

The statements made by Carmichael and Means, when read from within the ethnicity, translate into a new stress on the blackness of blacks or the Indianness of Indians, and intensification of a particular set of ethnic forms which are selected as correct. Often the process emphasizes a new interethnic realism where formerly negative self-images are neutralized or made positive.

Insofar as Carmichael, Means, and others are giving voice to an efficacious form of collective self-reflexivity which selects, modifies, and enhances certain ways of dressing, believing, talking, marrying, etc., one can speak of constructed ethnicity. From the standpoint of the perspective of this paper, constructed ethnicity is a redundancy: all ethnic traditions are constructed according to this or paralleling (ethnol methodologies.

Wild Indians and Bandits: Ethnics Beyond the Frontier A phase in the evolution of assymetrical intergroup relations which has now almost passed might be called the pre-colonial or initial contact situation. There are standardized forms and expectations even for this situation-at least from the standpoint of the dominat- ing society-so much so. in fact, that one of the anthropoid apes (the Orangutan) was originally, mistakenly classified as an ethnic sub- group of homo sapiens. There is a great deal of historical commentary on assymetrical social relations at the point of initial contact, accounts of raids, massacres, famous rip-offs (e.g., the purchase of Manhattan), shocking differences in social values, cannibalism and human sacrifice both within and between the groups, etc. There are also some recent excellent anthropological


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studies of the specific ethnic effects of this type of contact including Renato Rosaldos (19781 study of Ilongots and Rolena Adomos ( 198 1) work on the continuing effects of the initial contact between the Spanish and the great Indian civilizations of the Americans.

The Second Phase ofAssymetrica1 Group Relations: Internal and External Colonies. Once all, or almost all, the groups on the face of the earth are drawn into a single network of associations based on the monetary or some other system of equivalencies (i.e., the translat- ability of any languages into any other language), the stage is set for an explosion of group-level interactions requiring greatly expanded production of rhetoric or ethnicity. The simplified model presented here is composed of two dimensions, structural superiority- inferiority and rhetorical association and antithesis. These suggest four basic forms of relationship between groups in the production of ethnicity: First, an inferior group attempts to associate itself with a superior: second, the inferior group defines itself as the antithesis of the superior group or the superior group as the antithesis of itself; third, a superior group attempts to associate with and copy the ways of an inferior group: and fourth, a superior group defines itself as the antithesis of an inferior group or vice versa. All these possibilities exist in real situations, each producing different ethnic results. Of course, the model could be made much more complex without changing its basic terms by considering interactions between three or more groups and/or by looking at both ends of a relationship simultaneously. On this last point, for example, when both the superior and the inferior group relate via the form of antithesis, one has a working consensus about the definition of the situation and perhaps a civil war. When the superior group opposes the inferior while the inferior seeks to emulate the associate with the superior, one has what is sometimes called the status quo or a pre- revolutionary situation. This article comments onlyon the basic four interactions.

First, the inferior group attempts to associate itself with the values, imagery, etc., of the superior group. This is a very common pattern, perhaps the most common. The typical arrangement is an exploited minority attempting to adapt itself to the needs and requirements of a larger, containing system. Louise Lamphere (19761. Michael Hechter (19751, Joe Jorgenson (19711, and others have begun to refer to groups in this situation as internal colonies. Frank Young (1971 I calls them reactive subsystems. Dean MacCannell (19771 suggests that they are examples of negative solidarity. Frederik Barth ( 19691, Pierre van den Berghe ( 19701, and Edwin Almirol ( 19781 have nicely documented adaptations of ethnic



groups along these lines. Specifically, they have shown that upward political and/or economic mobility is associated with assuming the ethnic characteristics of the larger containing system.

However, two points should be noted. One, there is a tendency in much of the literature on ethnicity and ethnic change to assume that this is the only direction the process can take. This is a serious error and a barrier to understanding these difficult matters. Two, emulation and passing are often accomplished with such finesse that the resulting ethnic behavior of converts is more coherent and convincing, actually better than the original. Of course, the entire effort can fail miserably, and inevitably does when the socially superior group shifts its grounds as occurred prior to the following conversation that was reported to this author by one of its parties. Two French university students heatedly engaged in discussion an African exchange student in a university restaurant in the south of France. The African had proudly proclaimed that his people were fully converted to Christianity, whereupon the French replied with disgust that that only proved their continued susceptibility to mumbo-jumbo. The African reacted with genuine shock, You dont believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord? I thought only Barbarians did not believe in God. The French students answered laughing uproariously, Wrong, it is only the Barbarians who do believe in God.

Second, the inferior group defines itself in opposition to or the antithesis of the values of the dominant group. This is the pattern which most interests Michael Hechter (1975:lO ffl in his theory of ethnic change. Hechters work on internal colonies is especially valuable in the present context, in that it is fully congruent with the more general model being proposed here. He writes:

To the extent that social stratification.. . is based on observable cultural differences, there exists the probability that the dis- advantaged group will, in time, reactively assert its own culture as equal or superior to that of the relatively advantaged core.

Since increased contact between core and periphery does not tend to narrow the economic gaps between the groups, national development will best be served by strengthening the political power of the peripheral group so that it may change the distribution of resources of its greater advantage. Ultimately this power must be based on political organization. One of the foundations on which such organization might rest is. of course, cultural similarity, or the perception of a distinctive ethnic identity in the peripheral group (1975:10,34; emphasis original).


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Something like this strategy and result evidently operates in the materials discussed above from the American Indian and Black Power movements.

Third, a superior group associates itself with an inferior group (discussed later).

Fourth, a superior group defines itself in opposition to an inferior group. This is a famous, ugly pattern which in everyday life takes the form of conversations laced with gratuitous ethnic slurs and charac- terizations, such as those found in Malinowskis diaries and Hemingways correspondence, and discriminatory decision-making.

Again, this is considered important here not in the ways it might conceivably affect the slurred group. It should also be considered as an aspect of the ethnicity of the speaker. Midwesterners, who prob- ably have fewer significant contacts with Jews than any other major minority, still use the term Jew as a generalized negative adjective: e.g., the Jew tractor broke, or the Jew horse ran away. This usage is a part of male, midwestern, white ethnicity. Dominant group antithesis has been carried to extremes in Germany and South Africa.

It might be noted that dominant groups in modern society are aware that it has become unfashionable and even dangerous to define themselves in this way, especially in public, and they have begun to police their own language and behaviors pretty effectively.


Reconstructed ethnicity, is the maintenance and preservation of ethnic forms for the entertainment of ethnically different others. Reconstructed Ethnicity is fully dependent on the earlier stages in the construction of ethnicity. But it represents an end to the dialogue, a final freezing of ethnic imagery which is both artificial and deterministic. The new reconstructed ethnic forms are produced once almost all the groups in the world are located in a global network of interactions and they begin to use their former colorful ways both as commodities to be bought and sold, and as rhetorical weaponry in their dealings with one another, suddenly, it is not just ethnicity anymore, but it is understood as rhetoric, as symbolic expression with a purpose or a use-value in a larger system. This is the basis for a distinctive form of modern alienation, a kind of loss of soul, which Goffman (1959:25) first described in his studies of face- to-face interaction:

As performers [and here we might say, as performers of our ethnicityl we are merchants of morality. Our day is given over to



intimate contact with the goods we display and our minds are filled with intimate understandings of them: but it may well be that the more attention we give to these goods, then the more distance we feel from them and from those who are believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery, the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces one to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage.

Ethnic reconstructions for tourists in particular inject new com- plexities into the relationship of social and economic values. While the attention of tourists may provide some intangible payoffs in the form of flattery, it is difficult to find concrete benefits in this type of ethnic tourism for the people whose life is the attraction. The economic structure of ethnic tourism is such that most of the money involved does not change hands at the site. Most of the money is spent on luggage, cameras, clothing, air plane tickets, and tour bus rides, etc., before and after the actual visit. Even though the ethnic attraction may be the entire reason for making the trip, while at the town itself, tourists often spend nothing at all, or they make whimsical purchases of souvenirs, or buy a beer or an ice cream cone, or make a dollar donation to a local restoration project.

Also, the kind of changes that are necessary to develop a group for ethnic tourism rarely improve the lives of its members as sometimes occurs in development for other forms of tourism. Note, for comparison, that when historical shrines are the attraction, as in Philadelphia, they can be enjoyed by locals and tourists alike and augment the resources of the communitys education system in a meaningful way. But, if as a local representative of an allegedly colorful minority, you are the attraction, it is hard to figure out how you might come to benefit from the role or learn anything ethnic from yourself. Or, for another comparison, when a still useful old piece of machinery or large building is the attraction, as in the case of San Franciscos cable cars or Fishermans Warf, again, these things can be used by tourists and locals alike for necessary transportation, entertainment, etc. But if, as a local representative of an ethnic attraction, it is your very own house and garden that the tourists come to see, they can only be a source of inconvenience and potential embarrassment. In sum, ethnic tourism is especially vulnerable to a form of social disorder. Touristified ethnic groups are often weakened by a history of exploitation, limited in resources and power, and they have no big buildings, machines, monuments, or natural wonders to deflect the tourists attention away from the intimate details of their daily lives.


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Modern mass tourism is based on two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the international homogenization of the culture of the tourists and the artificial preservation of local ethnic groups and attractions so that they can be consumed as tourist experiences. Both liberals and developers believe that ethnic groups should be playing a part in this larger system, while the people themselves are understandably bewildered by the sudden interest. Tourism has the capacity to make dizzying leaps over existing political, cultural, and social class boundaries, enmeshing a great diversity of local groups, communities, artifacts, and natural attractions in its expansion. What is evolving is not Marshall McLuhans utopian vision of a global village where high technology permits a return of simple, friendly, and close social relations. Tourists are neither global vil- lagers nor are they destroying the villages of the world as some critics of tourism have claimed. What one is witnessing is a reifica- tion of the simple social virtues, or the ideal of village life, into something to see. The village is not destroyed, but the function of the village shifts from being the base of social relations in the local community to an interesting detail in the recreational experiences of a tourist from out of town. It is noteworthy that this process not only affects real communities, it is sufficiently advanced that it is producing pseudo-communities for touristic attention such as Main- street USA at Disneyland.

Ethnic attractions always stress the importance of emerging self- consciousness and self-determination of the ethnic minority, the need to correct the historical record insofar as it undervalues the contribution of the minority, and it reminds the visitors of past discrimination against the minority. It is worth recalling that this kind of understanding was once the product of humane scholarship and a liberal arts education. Interestingly, the expansion of tourism corresponds almost perfectly to the decline of the humanities in higher education in the United States and elsewhere.

We might ask what can happen to the quality of our understanding of other peoples, other places, other times, when it is no longer based on humane scholarship and comes to depend, for the most part, on visits to Mainstreet USA, Chinatown, etc.? On the one hand, the experience is more tangible and real-seeming. But it also rests on a social relationship between tourists and locals which is fleeting and superficial and subject to a great deal of self-interested manipulation by both parties. In some areas, such as the Right Bank of Paris, tourists are looked down upon as boorish slobs. In other areas tourists are envied or hated for their wealth and worldliness. In either case the relationship between the tourists and the local people



temporary and unequal. Any social relationship which is transitory, superficial and unequal is a primary breeding ground for deceit, exploitation, mistrust, dishonesty, and stereotype formation. The opposite is a long-term relationship involving many reciprocal rights and obligations that is based on mutual trust and respect, or even hatred.

Recently, Pierre van den Berghe (in correspondence) has pointed out something very obvious but which others have failed to see. In addition to the transient, exploitative, and stereotypical nature of the relationship of tourists and locals, it is also almost always a cross-ethnic relationship: a momentary linking of peoples who have different socio-biological backgrounds. Accordingly, the spread of tourism is also the spread of a new form of ethnic interaction and relationship on the same fleeting, superficial base.

When ethnic peoples first became enmeshed in the global monetary system, they were discriminated against on the basis of color, not paid a fair market price for their labor, not educated, and labeled as inferior. One should ask if they are likely to do any better under tourism. At first glance, it would seem they might. Perhaps they will not receive any economic benefits from tourism, but at least they will receive recognition for their past perseverance and dignity: they worked hard on the bottom rung of the occupational ladder, they did not attain material success in the eyes of the larger society, but they maintained self-respect nevertheless. On this basis, one might make a case that plans for converting ethnic groups into tourist attractions indicate that the world has changed in a progressive direction, that people who were once despised for being ethnically different are now accepted as moral if not economic equals.

It also seems possible that what one is witnessing is a pseudo- change. Perhaps what really happens in ethnic tourist contexts is only the rhetoric of ethnic relations changes to create the impres- sion of progress while older forms of repression and exploitation are perpetuated beneath the surface. It might work something like this: When an ethnic group begins to sell itself, or is forced to sell itself, as an ethnic attraction, it ceases to evolve naturally. The group members begin to think of themselves not merely as people but a living representatives of an authentic way of life. Suddenly, any change in life-style is not a mere question of practical utility but a weighty question which has economic and political implications for the entire group.

When the touristic definition of an ethnic group or community prevails, the group is frozen in an image of itself or museumized. The group becomes a thing and, Durkheims dictum notwithstanding,


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that is exactly what people are not. A still vital group is a system of practices, values. and ideas that can shift and transform over time and fit together with other groups in the larger society, first in one way then in others. The larger society, if it is to evolve and adapt, is dependent on the capacity of its sub-groups continuously to align themselves in new ways. This process is the only means of social renewal in a society with no frontiers, the only way a society can create internal frontiers and draw upon its own creative potential. If, on the other hand, the various sub-groups of society are transformed into tourist attractions and relate to one another only via com- mercially enforced stereotypical self-images, they cease to develop and the total culture ceases to develop.

Any group or community in todays world should be able to undertake self-criticism and to change in any way it wants to go until it begins to restrict the similar rights of others. The touristic requirement that a group internalize an authentic ethnic identity, even if the resulting image is widely held to be a positive one, is no less a constraint than the earlier form of negative ethnic stereo- typing. Conforming to the requirements of being a living tourist attraction becomes a total problem affecting every detail of life. Your status as an attraction affects the job you have, the way you are supposed to behave off the job, the kind of authentic clothes you wear, the way you wear your hair, etc. Everything becomes a serious matter for discussion, authentification, clearance. Any deviation can be read as a political gesture that produces conflict not between groups but within the group.

In other words, it appears that tourism has helped in getting beyond the phase of ethnic relations where minorities are kept in place with light salaries, heavy prison terms, and redneck cruelty. But one may have come full circle. Insofar as the larger society extends its acceptance conditional upon the minority restricting itself to an authentic image of itself, one is only doing with admiration what he earlier did with dogs and guns. As the rhetoric of hostility toward minorities is replaced with a rhetoric of appreciation, the circle of their potential exploiters is dramatically expanded. Now blacks can exploit blacks, Indians can exploit Indians, etc. All with a clear conscience under the rubric of the development and preservation of culture. 0 0

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was originally prepared for the seminar on Ethnic Tourism presented by the Committee on Comparative Studies in



Ethnicity and Nationalism in the School of International Studies, University of Washington, May 28, 198 1. The author wishes to thank Pierre van den Berghe for many helpful suggestions, the Macrosocial Accounting Project at University of California, Davis and The Com- parative Cultures Program at University of California, Irvine for material support in writing this paper.

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Submitted 28 April 1981 Accepted 22 March 1982 Final version submitted September 1983


reconstructed etnicity

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