Something that has always fascinated me is the world of tourism. This especially hit home as I went to Thailand, and realized the true difference between a tourist driven culture and a more 'authentic' culture.
However, after reading Jean Baudrillard, I'm curious how the tourist industry fits with his idea of the world as simulacrum. On the one hand, it makes sense. Disneyland is the world. It's presented as imaginary so we'll think that the world around it is the real world, while it's all a simulation. Similarly, if I go to Thailand, do the tourist parts of it align with Disneyland, in that they are the imaginary contrasting with the supposed real? Or is there actually a distinction?
I'm curious about the relationship between the tourist culture and the more 'authentic' culture.
I've always wondered if, on entering another culture, we can even see the authentic side of it. Regardless of where we go, even if it's miles and hours off the beaten track, we won't be able to fully access the true culture, or the heart of the culture. The tourist has an inherent inability to truly see the, shall I say, real culture. Because of this, everything I see of another culture is in a way a simulacrum.This said, I wonder if there even can be a 'real' culture. Baudrillard says not. The whole world is a simulacrum. Western society has disintegrated and left in its wake a simulation of what it once was. Since this is the case, it would appear that any 'tourism' is only a further attempt to satisfy our nostalgia. We hope that we can see the culture, but since it isn't there to begin with, the tourist industry only supports the imaginary, to comfort us and protect us from the realization that all culture is simulation.
Nat,
ReplyDeleteI think the issue for Baudrilliard is how we "process" what we are experiencing. He would say that the Western/scientific way of experiencing things inevitably leads to some sort of rupture between "what is" and "what we think it is." The question is, in what way or how self-consciously are places (such as D-land) prepared for us, that is, to elicit specific responses for us--same goes for Thailand.
I actually wrote an entire literary essay on this topic regarding Peru, Nat. The question that I had about my travel experiences related more to whether or not the culture that I saw was preserved by the tourist industry or created for it. Is it fake or real? How do I as a tourist get to the essence of Peruvian life? The only answer that I could come up with is to live in it forever. To see it through the eyes of someone who performs his or her daily life in the midst of that tension between the variety of simulations.
ReplyDeleteI like you post, Nat. I was thinking about that myself, and I would have to say I agree with your last few points: that tourism is simply indulging nostalgia, and hiding that all culture is simulation. We "create" the world in which we live, and anyone viewing from the outside can simply never be a part and never quite understand how our created world works or the motivations behind it. In viewing another culture, we're almost always seeing the face of it, but rarely the construction, which inhibits our ability to really "see" it. And even living in it forever, as Jacquie says, may or may not work, because the entire time you are learning the new set of "rules" and "reasons" behind the simulation of that particular culture. You are still the outsider coming in, trying to figure things out. And I think that a lot of times, deep down, we want the culture to be different and something we can't understand because we can then just observe and be intrigued and not have to really participate in creating the simulation. It goes back to the nostalgia idea. We want to believe certain things exist, especially reality. And the less we understand of other cultures, the less we are faced with the fact that they are merely a construction, just like our own.
ReplyDeleteNatalie, I have often wondered about this myself. My own "abroad experience" was in Israel, and the Holy Land sites are unavoidably touristy. Many tourists were even offended when they were hushed in the Church of All Nations (the church built around a rock that is supposedly where Jesus sat down and cried before being arrested. There are a lot of churches built around rocks. People get their pictures taken touching the rocks. It is-- rather medieval). But the hushing gets me thinking. In that place, at least, the real culture does exist underneath the tourist culture, despite 2000 years of tourism. The monks were there, living their daily lives, dealing with tourists, but not catering to them. We just didn't notice them, or else found them a novelty or an annoyance. Or maybe the real culture IS the tourist culture-- these are monks I am talking about, after all. Probably not native to the land. And the people of Israel make most of their capital off tourism, live tourism every day. It's part of the problem with the wall around Bethlehem. The Palestinians there are growing extremely poor because there is so much less tourism now. At what point does tourism become life?
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