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This interview launches perhaps a new concept, that of ‘the tourist syndrome’ and examines the importance of tourism in providing a platform for the exploration of difference and
otherness. As with all of his work Bauman is keen to identify the ethical nature of social activities such as tourism.
keywords difference and otherness extra-territoriality globalization hospitality liquid modernity the tourist syndrome tourism and ethics tourism and space tourism
theory The interview took place in Zygmunt Bauman’s home in Leeds, UK, on 14 August 2003. It is perhaps a measure of a person’s impact on the world when a
taxi driver, randomly hailed from a provincial railway station, knows who you
are intending to visit simply from the address you give. But when on the return
journey, another, equally randomly booked taxi driver asks straight out: ‘How
was Zygmunt today?’ one begins to catch a whiff of celebrity in the air. Unlike
so many celebrities today, Bauman’s fame is not based on a lucky break or the
thinnest achievement, but on solid achievement over a lifetime. His books, too
numerous to mention in an introductory paragraph, have come at us in rapid
fire over the years with a series of dazzling, sparkling works over the past 20
years or so. He is certainly one of the most important and influential sociologists
of our times but he also has the distinction of being one of our best public
intellectuals. Fortunately for us he is also an extremely generous man and he
made room for this interview in an otherwise packed diary of lectures all
around the world.
My main objective in seeking an interview with Zygmunt Bauman for
Tourist Studies was to introduce him to scholars of tourism who have not read
him, or read him widely, in order to inspire a more reflexive Tourist Studies, one
based on a better grasp of how tourism configures with contemporary societies,
especially in the touristic heartlands of the West. Bauman is the so called ‘prophet of postmodernity’ and more latterly of liquid modernity but, more
significantly, he is one of the best analysts of the contemporary human condition.
Tourist studies need to address and be inspired by such analyses for many
of the reasons I outlined in the essay I co-wrote with Mike Crang in the first
issue of Tourist Studies – which Zygmunt read as part of his preparation for the
interview.The majority of tourist writers I read still cleave centrally to certain
of the rather outdated ideas of Urry’s Tourist Gaze (1990) and MacCannell’s The
Tourist (1976).This is a problem, not least because these books were set in two
types of ‘solid modernity’ – the 1960s and 1970s–80s, and because their notion
of tourism was based on distinctions (home/away; everyday/holiday; real/fake;
work/leisure) that no longer apply in the way they once did; and also on the
centrality of production – which has now given way to consumerism and on a
transformation of space that makes the notion of tourism as they had it seriously
problematic.
Bauman has written extensively on these transformations but there is a poor
grasp of them in the tourism literature. It is surely ironic that Bauman’s liquid
modernity, which gives rise to the sorts of mobilities, flexibilities and freedoms
that fuel the dramatic growth of tourism, if not the touristification of everyday
life, has not been drawn on or made much use of by recent writers in tourist
studies. Liquid modernity differs from traditional society which was an inflexible,
hierarchical social order and solid modernity which cast aside traditional
society in favour of what it imagined could be a better egalitarian blueprint for
human society.What characterizes liquid modernity by contrast is the abandonment
of the search for a blueprint, to search out and impose a newer, better solid
form of social order. Instead,we have slowly but surely undermined and undone
all forms of inflexibility and restraint, most dramatically perhaps with nation state
borders and the freedom to travel – whether the cargo is trade goods, information
or human travellers. It is precisely this world that we need to grasp, yet, like
all liquids it does not hold its shape for long.Transformation and states of becoming
are the social realities we have to deal with and Bauman has characterized
our central roles as consumers in liquid modernity as rather like tourists.
Importantly, Bauman tends to use tourism as a metaphor for contemporary life
in Western societies. He has also written interestingly about the post-September
11 world as the symbolic end of the era of space but clearly those essays in his
Society under Siege (Bauman, 2002) define a world where the anthropology of
frontier-lands takes over from the safe hinterlands of secure nation states.We have
entered a darker world and a full planet and it will be interesting to know his
views on whether or not, and if so how, tourism might figure in this new and
challenging world. So I began by asking him for his views on contemporary
tourism in relation to his understanding of contemporary society. In thinking
about this, it was not long before a new term was coined,‘the tourist syndrome’.
Zygmunt Bauman: I would like to separate tourism as a metaphor for contemporary
living from the tourism as a body of specific persons and a sum total of
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certain activities.There are questions such as why large numbers of people are
shuttled about on specific days to specific places with specific itineraries. And
other important questions – above all why they go, what sort of impact it has
on their lives, and what sort of impact it has on the natives living in the destination?
This is what tourist studies are about, I think.These phenomena, growing
phenomena, are very important politically and economically – above all,
economically, but in the long run also socially, because of the impact on the
structure of living in the places where the tourists start, the places they arrive,
and all along their way.
The world is divided up into those places where tourists are carefully ushered
into and through, and those places they are prevented from seeing.Tourists only
flow into certain places. Our everyday worlds are similarly divided – an effect of
tourism or the realities tourism reflects? I remember being met at an Italian airport
by a young academic from a local affluent family; she apologized for a long,
winding, traffic-clogged route she took to the conference where I was speaking.
Indeed, it took her two hours to arrive . . . A taxi driver, though, who drove
me back to the airport needed but ten minutes to pass through the dilapidated,
slum-like, poverty-stricken streets she probably knew nothing about, and
tourists never visited . . .
When speaking of the ‘tourists’ or ‘tourism’ as metaphors of contemporary
life, I have in mind certain aspects of the tourist condition and/or experience –
like being in a place temporarily and knowing it, not belonging to the place,
not locked into the local life ‘for better or worse’.That condition is shared with
the modality of ordinary daily life, with the way we are all ‘inserted’ in the company
of others everywhere – in places where we live or work; not only during
the summer holidays, but seven days a week, all year round, year by year. It is
that characteristic of contemporary life to which I primarily refer when speaking
of the tourist syndrome.
Much follows, of course, from that characteristic. First of all, and perhaps the
most important, is the looseness of ties with the place (physical, geographic,
social):There is no firm commitment, no fixed date of staying; it’s all ‘until further
notice’. Presumption of temporariness is built into the way of being and
behaving.This is very different from one very important expectation which was
so typical of solid modernity and the foremost feature of a ‘Fordist factory’ or
more generally of panoptical power: The assumption that ‘we will meet again’
– tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next year, next decade perhaps . . . If people
know/believe that they are going to meet again and again and again, they strive
to work out a certain modus co-vivendi, elaborate certain ways of living together,
compose rules (norms) by which, as they assume, all of them will abide by.
On the way to such an agreement and even after the deal has been struck there
is a lot of conflict, there are explosive skirmishes and protracted battles – but
people, like the workers of a ‘Fordist’ factory (once a Ford’s employee, forever a
Ford’s employee), fight because they know that happen what might they are
bound to live together and in each other’s company for a long time to come;
Franklin The tourist syndrome 207
otherwise, the struggle would be hardly worth the sweat and the pain! On the
other hand, people who are hired for a particular fixed-term project and know
that they will be kicked out next year if not before, or people who work on a
day-to-day basis, have no reason to strike. What for? Striking is important to
elaborate the rules. But rules are necessary only when the relation is durable. If it
is not durable nor assumed to be you just stumble from one episode to another
and you make the rules as you go, always ad hoc, local rules with but a butterfly
life – like the tourists do . . . Such looseness of attachment – being in but
not of the place – makes tourism a well-aimed and pertinent metaphor for contemporary
life.
Another feature of the tourist syndrome is ‘grazing behaviour’. A flock of
sheep graze on one meadow, and when the grass is all eaten up they have no
reason to stay and move, or are moved, to another. Don’t take here the metaphor
literally – the tourists don’t eat up everything they find in the place and empty
the shop shelves – but as they eat what they came for they find the supply of
tasty titbits fast running dry. What they were seeking were, in the first place,
experiences – unlike the experiences they lived through before, unlike everything
else they knew; untried tastes, un-experienced sensations. But sensations
are un-experienced and tastes are untried only once.Tourists have by definition
‘pure relationship’ to the place they visit – ‘pure’ meaning that it has no other
purpose than the consumption of pleasurable sensation and that once the satisfaction
wanes, it wilts and fades as well – and so you move to another relationship,
hopefully as ‘pure’ as the last one.The world of pure relationships is a huge
collection of grazing grounds, and living in such a world is shaped after the pattern
of wandering from one succulent and fragrant meadow to another.This is
a valid reason for a sociologist, whatever field of human life s/he focuses on, to
study the ‘tourist experience’: It grasps in a purified form what in ordinary life
is mixed and obscured.
And then let us not forget the frailty of relationships which tourists enter into
wherever they go.This feature of the ‘tourist syndrome’ is intimately connected
to what we’ve discussed before: As they are a priori temporary and reduced to
the consumption of (limited and fast shrinking) sensations, the effort to construct
a hard and tough frame of mutual rights and obligations and mutually
binding rules of conduct is completely redundant – a waste of time and energy.
We don’t trust the relationships to last, we have no idea how long we
(tourists, workers, partners) will stay there. Daniel Cohen, the very perceptive
clever economist from the Sorbonne, pointed out that a young person who
joined the staff of Renault or Ford could be pretty sure that he will retire from
the same place at the end of his working life – but the young person who joins
Bill Gates’s Microsoft or another Silicon Valley company has no idea what will
happen to him in a few months’ time (Richard Sennett calculated that the average
length of employment in Silicon Valley is eight months).To be on the move
before the ground moves under feet, to be always ready for another run – this
is the name of the game. And so, just like during a tourist trip, you can cut out
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all the worries about the long term, far-reaching consequences of what you are
doing at the moment. In all probability, there will be no such consequences –
not for you at any rate.There is no lifelong identity that could be selected at the
beginning of life and pursued from then on, no ‘training for life’, no ‘whole life’
skills that can be acquired once and for all and won’t require revision – or forgetting
. . .
Living from one moment to another, living for the moment, is a crucial trait
of the ‘tourist syndrome’.When you juxtapose the ‘tourist syndrome’ with a ‘pilgrim
syndrome’ – with the modality of the pilgrim’s travels, where the signifi-
cance of every stage is derived fully from the diminishing distance separating the
traveller from the previously selected destination – you can see clearly how different
the contemporary life is.
Adrian Franklin: Yes, you also compare the tourist to the vagabond, another
travelling phenomenon of recent years, your point being that although we are
all now in a mobile world these two groups travel in vastly different ways:The
former celebrating their success and desirability as consumers, the latter admitting
their condition of desperation, consumer failure and undesirability.
ZB: Yes, there is this alter ego of the tourist, this dark side to the otherwise
joyful escapades full of adventure and seeing new sights; the broken-mirror
reflection, the caricatured lookalike of tourist ventures:Vagabondage.Vagabonds
do not travel by choice (they may only dream of tourist’s ‘I pay, I demand’ freedom);
most of them would probably like very much to stay put in the place
where they are rather than move on. Alas, they have to move, since they are
either expelled from there or cannot make a living. As a rule, vagabonds can’t
and don’t stay in a place as long as they want, they stay in the place only as long
as they are wanted.They don’t break relationships because the company of their
partners no longer satisfies them. It is their relationships that keep being broken
because their own company is no longer desired.
One more essential peculiarity needs to be mentioned.You’ve to decide (and
to pay) to seek the wonders and the bliss that the tourist’s life may offer, but in
our liquid-modern world you need not move an inch to turn into a vagabond.
You are still in the same place, but the place is no longer what it was . . .The
company you worked for disappeared, the partner of life (though emphatically
not for life) has moved out and away, the rules of the game have changed without
notice. And you know, even if it did not happen to you yet and you suppress
the awareness of its possibility as keenly as you can, that happen to you it
may – and at any moment. Dark premonitions blight each moment of joy . . .
The figures of ‘tourist’ and ‘vagabond’ mark the two poles of a continuum along
which our life and our expectations are plotted.
AF: The power of the tourism metaphor works with consumerism just as well
as it does with what you have to say about work, workplace politics and so on.
In your writings on consumerism you talk about the transition from need
Franklin The tourist syndrome 209
through desire to wish. Do you suppose that we can trace changes in tourism
along those lines? So for instance in the old days people used to say you needed
to get away from your toils in a society of producers, but I’m not quite sure
about how desire in tourism differs from wish.
ZB: Basically I think the difference between desire and wish (I owe that
extremely pertinent distinction to Harvie Ferguson, (1996) is that desire needs
to be planted and cultivated, tended to, groomed; it takes time and effort to tune
and hone it . . . Acting on wish does not require such a costly groundwork.
Seduction is instantaneous, wish descends from the here and now. Consumers
are overwhelmed by the allure and act, so to speak, ‘on impulse’ . . .
There are permanent tourists, people who are in general on the move, people
for whom travelling is a way of life.You meet them in any airport – seasoned
travellers who in the ‘nowherevilles’ of which the airports are the most conspicuous
examples feel fully and truly ‘at home’ and behave accordingly. But
there are clearly also crowds waiting for charter planes to, say,Tenerife, Majorca,
Costa Brava, the Algarve or wherever – visibly tired, feeling a bit lost and certainly
unsure of every step they take. It would not be correct, though, to view
the opposition between such two categories of tourists and that between ‘acting
on desire’ and ‘on wish’ as overlapping.
First there is, elaborated and conducted over a long period of time, the cult of
certain places as harbours of particularly enjoyable tourist experiences and a ritual
of attending such places at specific points of the annual cycle. At a certain
time of year bodies should be transported from here to there . . . France is probably
an extreme case: On 01 August each year almost the whole population of
Paris jump into cars and head for the C.otes d’Azure . . . This is desire at work
– carefully and lovingly cultivated over many years until its absence, rather than
its presence, looks like norm-breaking.
At the same time, there is a relatively new, more efficient and in total account
cheaper technology of triggering consumer expenditure: Conjuring up wishes
and prompting to act on impulse. This has been acutely spotted and described
by Naomi Klein (2000): The technology of branding.You are alerted and right
away seduced whenever you see the logo . . .Well, everything can in principle
be branded and become thereby effective bait. Drinking water has been already
branded, and an unheard-of habit to carry a bottle with you whenever you go
and take a few gulps every once in a while immediately followed. Air can be
branded, the sand of the beach may be branded. Everything can be made a
wish-prompting object, and once the initial investment has been made, a lot of
money can be made out of it with little further prompting.
I believe that tourism may be promoted, and will be increasingly promoted,
deploying such technology in one form or another. Brands are catching because
people, bewildered and confused amidst the flood of contradictory peddling
calls, crave for confidence and security of choice. Selecting a branded objects
carrying a famous logo known and coveted by many, offers such a confidence
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and certainty without the awkward need of testing, trying, researching information,
collecting evidence . . .You may breath a sigh of relief when you see a
familiar logo, on whichever object or place it has been stamped, whatever your
current purposes and preoccupations may be and however the object in question
is related to them.
In your book (Franklin, 2003) you asked a very interesting question:Why did
people suddenly get interested in the old bread ovens in Lancashire? Well, anything
could be branded, at least carry a brand of ‘tourist attraction’ (are not the
brown boards near the motorway exits a sort of ‘logo’ for the tourist industry?),
and being branded means to be made into an interesting experience. Something
unusual, something you haven’t seen before, promising an experience you’ve
not had yet,worth making a journey for . . . Never before you worried and lost
sleep at night, to be sure, because you had not seen old bread-baking ovens.You
did not develop that sort of desire, you had not been overwhelmed by it – no
compulsion, no addiction . . . But now, if advertising has done its job well, you
have! At least you may. . .Alongside ordinary signposts showing directions brown
billboards (you already know what the brown colour means) are dug in at the
motorway exits which beckon to your generalized, diffused desire for attractions.
You didn’t plan to visit this particular ‘you must see’ place, perhaps you
were not aware that it existed, but suddenly you see those strange names on the
brown billboards.Why not stop for a moment, interrupt the journey and drive
those 20 extra miles? This is what you wish.You had no idea that you ‘needed’
to see the Lancashire bread ovens an hour ago, five minutes ago, now you know
– and you turn your car and go.
That’s a growing business. Many places try hard to find something that would
make them into a ‘must see’ tourist attraction, and most will, with due imagination,
find that something. Until recently Bradford was a very ugly and dull
city – old, abandoned factories, gaping windows without glass, nothing to
admire, nothing to put it on the map, the very opposite of the idea of a tourist
haunt.Well, the city elders managed to rebrand Bradford itself. If you drive
through Bradford, you’d be informed of another unheard-of, unlike-any-other
attraction on every crossing and corner.
AF: So wish is replacing desire?
ZB: Not replacing, complementing. Sideways of wishes branch from the beaten
tracks of desires . . . There are plenty of people saying ‘I must go to the
Algarve’ or ‘to Corfu’ or ‘to Marbella’ – places to which every decent person,
every family of Joneses, every neighbour along the street went at least once.You
have to take some snapshots or a few videotapes to show that you have been
there. But the tourist industry can’t settle for that. It is too limited, it leaves no
room for expansion. Leaving things were they are, counting on well-groomed
desires alone, wouldn’t make good business. New business must be created, and
be created daily. And the sky is the limit once wish takes over.
Franklin The tourist syndrome 211
As you know, the-state-of-art shopping malls are aimed at ‘accidental buyers’
– people who go there just for a spot of entertainment without the intention
to buy anything specific – pushed not by a need clamouring to be satisfied but
pulled by a diffuse longing for recreation. People who stroll through the shopping
mall with that sweet music in the background, this enchanting and intoxicating
array of colours and smells – are not seeking objects, but sensations:They
are pining for an adventure, they covet to be seduced – they are waiting for a
wish to arrive like the scribes suffering of ‘writer’s block’ wait for the moment
of inspiration. And the wish would surely oblige – courtesy of shopping mall
designers and managers, eager to take the waiting out of wanting.
AF: I want to go back to your point about the social ramifications of tourism.
Obviously one is the way in which it has transformed localities but I would be
interested in your thoughts on its wider structuring or ordering effects.
Especially, for example, on globalization. In your book on globalization
(Bauman, 1998) you include an intriguing chapter on tourists and vagabonds
and clearly tourism and vagabondism are social aspects of globalization and also
your notion of a ‘full planet’. But do you think tourism was a necessary ordering
of globalization? So, for example, John Urry and Scott Lash (Lash and Urry,
1994) made the case that innovators like Thomas Cook were as important as
Henry Ford as key authors of modernity. Getting the world moving was a profound
thing to do in many ways because it created markets where there were
none, it created a world that could be known in advance before you travelled.
With Thomas Cook you could get the guidebook before you travelled, you
could get the money arranged, the tickets arranged. It created the demand to
travel widely and freely – for women alone and safely for the first time for
example. It is the sort of model, not just of people travelling but a kind of global
organization or ordering. Surely the world became more systematically and
routinely connected and perhaps establishing norms of connectivity?
ZB: No doubt the point is valid and grave, but I wonder to what extent the
pioneers of ‘standardized’ tourism may be charged of the advent of extraterritoriality
– but particularly of promoting intra-planetary connections.
Standardization stamps uniformity where connections would be, sameness over
differences, uniformity over exchange.The annual flood of German tourists to
Rimini, Italy, could add a few German-language advertisements to the Rimini
streets – but it hardly affects German–Italian ‘connections’. By design or by
default,Thomas Cook taught and trained his clients to expect the same kind of
service, hotel rooms, facilities, gadgets wherever they go, and everything else on
top in a thoroughly sanitized and ‘detoxicated’ form.Travelling businessmen and
globetrotting academics proved to be diligent pupils and trainees. Planet-wide
chains of Holiday Inns or Sheratons are there not to bring the far away life
closer, but to supply an extraterritorial enclave, the reassuring sameness amidst
variety – impermeable and invulnerable, immune to the local idiosyncrasies or
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allowing its strictly measured volume – only as much of (tamed) idiosyncrasy as
is un-intimidating, comfortable.
This is hardly a fulfilment of the nineteenth century ambition to travel to
learn, travel to understand, travel to get in touch with alien people and to
embrace and imbibe and assimilate the untold riches stored in their heads, in
their timeless cultural lore . . . Rather, the opposite, really. One meets the natives
in the shops at the other side of the counter, in the restaurants bringing dishes
from the kitchen. Or you watch the natives as a spectacle – selling their ‘otherness’
to tourists, making their living by selling their culture as spectacle. Hardly
a ‘contact between civilizations’, let alone an exchange between cultures.You
may go hundreds and thousands of miles, in order to find yourself in cosily
familiar surroundings, comfortably secure because familiar, with a few ‘local
touches’ sprinkled over it to justify the expenditure. Powerful minds are working
on that, trying to strike the right balance between security of the familiar
and adventure of the strange. Success or failure of the tourist industry hangs on
that balance. The right proportion of genuine or pretended ‘otherness’, source
of pleasurable experience of novelty, challenge and adventure, and reassuring
familiarity, source of the security feeling, that’s the name of the tourist game
these days.That’s what I suspect most of the R&D money in the tourist establishment
is invested in.
Myself, I happen to travel a lot, lecturing in all sorts of universities, in all sorts
of countries.Apart from Albania I have been to universities in all the European
countries. But wherever I go, whenever I give a lecture, the questions are always
the same. I don’t feel like really being in a different country . . . I meet each time,
I suppose, an audience as ‘extraterritorial’ as myself, the guest.And I believe that
the feeling is reciprocated. I guess that people who ask the questions probably
find it easier to communicate with me than with their next-door neighbour.
We all, complete with the language we use, the topics we debate, the style of
expression, the fashion of narrating the world, formulating problems, constitute
a world in its own right, but loosely tied to our respective physical environments.
I think this applies also to travelling businessmen in no small measure.
Wherever they go they discuss exactly the same problems in similar terms
(banks that want to show themselves to be indispensable to travelling businessmen
because of their knowledge of ‘local specificity’ can find little to emphasize
in their commercials except the different depth of bowing practised in
different lands). Languages may be different, but then there are translators.
AF: When I was reading your essay on tourism I got the feeling that you saw
it as a rather dismal or disappointing leisure. And today you’ve contrasted the
traveller as being a more heroic character, trying to make contacts, connections,
learn. In Globalisation (Bauman, 1998) you contrast the consumerist world of
tourists in their extraterritorial spaces with the unwanted and shunted-about
shadow lands of global vagabonds – refugees, dissidents, illegal immigrants and
Franklin The tourist syndrome 213
so on with their heavy ties to territory. But in your later book Society Under Siege
(Bauman, 2002) you begin to talk of the need for a global political order in
which modes of travel and hospitality may become reconfigured. Is there a better
world than the world of tourism and vagabonds?
ZB: I wouldn’t personally use the term ‘dismal’. I don’t think the way people
live today is dismal . . . People are doing their best, to the best of their abilities
and the resources at their disposal (however meagre), to make a decent living,
to live with dignity. And I don’t hold a grudge against people wanting to satisfy
their curiosity of the world, for example, in tourism! What I am afraid of,
what I am wary of and of which I am suspicious, are the substitutes, that mislead,
misdirect and mis-channel the potentially creative impulses into a sideway
or downright blind alley.
In my little book about community (Bauman, 2001) I discuss the dangerous
phenomenon of fraudulent substitutes for the absent real thing (substitutes that
in fact make the real thing yet more absent) a bit more widely.There are ‘substitute
communities’ which I call ‘cloakroom’, or ‘peg’ communities. I call them
that because they remind one of the kind of two-hour community that is created
in cloakrooms of, say, theatres; people come to the theatre, all go to the
cloakroom, all hang their overcoats or anoraks on pegs, go to performance, and
when the performance is over they pick up their coats, each one hereafter going
in his/her own direction. They would probably never come together again.
There are such ‘cloakroom communities’ wrapped around celebrities or celebrity
events, around a paedophile freshly released from prison – any ‘event’ with a
short attention-life expectation will do.The need they answer is genuine. People
do long for communities they miss.They want the real stuff, but real stuff being
unavailable, they settle for substitutes – frail, fragile, fissiparous formations that
would fall apart tomorrow once new headlines appear in the newspapers and
everybody is cajoled, forced to forget yesterday’s passions to make room for new
ones. Substitutes mitigate, attenuate the pain, the suffering caused by the absence
of the real stuff. If bread is missing, you would chew grass to calm the pangs of
hunger . . . Substitutes are instant cures.They do not treat, but exacerbate the
disease and make it more difficult to cure, as the energy which could be channelled
into therapy is diverted.
Tourism is such a substitute, a substitute satisfaction of a genuine need – that
could otherwise prove creative and deeply ethical:The need to top up the proximity
of otherness with recognition of shared humanity and enrichment of its
contents. The other, to use one of Kant’s expressions is ‘sublime’ – facing the
other is a sublime experience, a mixture of fear and awe.We tend to be afraid
of the strange and unfamiliar while being attracted to it – a very ambiguous and
ambivalent feeling, a combination of mixophobia and mixophilia which I
described in the book mentioned earlier (Bauman, 2001). Politically, ethically,
socially it’s a very, very important experience – to be attracted by otherness, to
be inclined in some sense to get to know something you didn’t know before,
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to go where you were not before, and so on. In our times particularly, crowded
together on a full planet, we face the need to rise to that challenge more than
ever before.A couple of hundred years ago we had reason to rise from the level
of local community to the then not-yet-imagined community of the state, of
the nation. Now, we have to make another step, a giant leap as a matter of fact
– to rise to the level of humanity as such.
Strangers, aliens, ‘foreigners’, people of different forms of life, are nowadays
the one case in which you can say that we are going to meet tomorrow, the day
after tomorrow, next year and as far in the future as our fantasy may reach.And
so, as always in such situations,we have to work out the ways of reconciling natural
attraction with natural repulsion – the mode of coexisting. Curiosity of the
‘otherness’ could be a very helpful motive, an excellent springboard to gather
momentum in that long and arduous venture. It is, though, diverted sideways –
capitalized upon in the service of commercial goals and used up, exhausted in
the process.You spend the whole supply of curiosity in the trip to Algarve,
where you drink the same beer you drink at home (and even meet the same
neighbours because you probably travelled on a charter plane).There is something
you can write home about – cars, for instance, are driven on the right
(that means wrong) side of the road. Substitutes create an illusion that certain
impulses are satisfied while they are being wasted.The impulse which could be
used for other, imperative purposes is frittered and exhausted.The impulse however
is profitable enough for the tourist industry to be up in arms to prevent us
from using these impulses for non-tourist purposes – which from the point of
view of that industry would be a real waste.
So the impulse is genuine and so is, as I would say – I would risk this oldfashioned
word – the ‘need’. I think there is a genuine need inscribed in the
evolution of the human species evolved, or arising from the way in which
humanity made itself.We are ‘transcending beings’ which constantly look forward
beyond the border they have drawn, beyond the limits they set, and we
need this propensity of transcending today because we are facing a truly life and
death challenge. Either we all teach each other and learn from each other, or we
will live unhappily ever after, if we stay alive, that is. Curiosity of the other and
the impulse to transcend our reciprocal otherness comes handy under those circumstances.
But it keeps being used up, diverted, channelled away squandered
by the commercialized pseudo-multiculturalism which boils down to the waiter’s
different skin colour and different spices in the food – in lieu of genuine
conversation or a real attempt to get an insight into the other’s life and thought.
AF: So if we were to produce a global politics, you know the global will, and
hospitality in the world of human beings and humanity, and providing the
tourist industry couldn’t stop it, or undermine it by distracting us, I mean what
would travel, how do you suppose people’s curiosity would be satisfied?
Franklin The tourist syndrome 215
ZB: I wonder whether the ‘humanity building’ cause could be promoted better
by staying in your own urban environment . . .Whenever you travel touristmode
today, the odds are that you’ll land in that extraterritorial ‘nowhereville’.
As far as really getting to know the other is concerned you gain little or nothing
at all and your time and money are wasted. On the other hand – if you venture
to Leeds city centre . . . I happen to live in a sedate, conservative and middle
class or lower-middle class area where people take care to observe the norm and
be seen as observing it.They beware the alien ways . . . But in other places of
Leeds people, ethnics, religions, life styles mix daily and happily and do it
matter-of-factly, as part of their daily routine. The areas where the university
students live are thoroughly mixed, you know, and mixed in a genuine way –
not just statistically, but socially: People meet in the same shops, in the same cinemas,
on the same street, in the same discotheque – at work and at leisure, in
the public realm and privately.They talk to each other, exchange views, they get
to know each other and respect each other’s otherness. Soon they stop noticing
the colour of skin. It doesn’t matter any more.
Let me repeat – the city environment continuously generates a curious blend
of mixophilia and mixophobia. There is mixophobia – the fear of the rough
areas, of no go areas, of proximity of alien characters, obtrusiveness of alien customs.
And there is mixophilia – sincere curiosity of the fascinating secrets which
all otherness holds and the desire to learn them, to know and to see at close
quarters how other people live, what they think. Paradoxically, the chance of
meeting the other (I mean genuinely meeting, not mis-meeting) may be greater
when you stay at home in the big cities than when you go a thousand miles
away in order to land up in a Holiday Inn. When I ponder the prospects of
humanity, I derive more hope in this ‘globalization coming home to roost’. . .
AF: So it’s the young who will pioneer it? They’re the ones who will make
the change, they’re the ones who will dare to go and dare to transgress.
ZB: Oh yeah. And they behave differently when they walk the streets. I see
very many groups of young people which are of mixed race – mixed everything,
as a matter of fact. But I seldom see groups of older people of the same
mixture, you don’t find it. All these American films which are politically correct
you always see . . . whenever a group of people is shown there are bound
to be one or two blacks, a couple of Hispanics, perhaps a sample of ‘native
nations’ thrown into the bargain – depending on the current balance of forces.
The ‘really existing street’ looks different. On the other hand, however, it’s very
seldom that you find a group of young people which is uniform. Not in places
like Leeds at any rate. I think that by design and more yet by default our cities,
particularly our big cities, are schools or training grounds of living with
strangers – living with difference. Strangers that you routinely meet and mix
with stop being samples of civilizations at war and turn into individual human
beings with their individual charms, vices or oddities. Rubbing each other’s
tourist studies 3:2 216
elbows inside the city crowd seems to be a most promising way to ‘achieving
humanity’.
AF: There’s a challenging thought to bring us to a close. Zygmunt, thank you
very much.
ZB: What’s your drink? You are not in a car?
AF: I’d love a drink.
ZB: Gin and tonic?
AF: Fantastic!
references
Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalisation:The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (2002) Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (2001) Community – Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity.
Ferguson, H. (1996) The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construction of
Modernity. London: Routledge.
Franklin, A. S. (2003) Tourism: An Introduction. London: Sage.
Franklin, A. S. and M. Crang (2001) ‘The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?’,
Tourist Studies 1(1): 5–22.
Klein, N. (2000) No Logo. London: Flamingo.
MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist:A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York:
Schocken Books.
Lash, S. and J. Urry (1994) Economies of Signs and Spaces. London: Sage.
Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.
zygmunt bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and
the University of Warsaw. He is the author of many books including Intimations of
Postmodernity (1992), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998), Liquid Modernity
(2000), The Individualized Society (2001), Society Under Siege (2002) and Liquid Love
(2003).
adrian franklin is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Bristol. His
books include Animals and Modern Cultures (1999), Nature and Social Theory (2001),
Society Under Siege (2002) and Liquid Love (2003). Address: School of Policy Studies,
University of Bristol, 8 Priory Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TZ, UK. [email:
adrian.franklin@bristol.ac.uk]
Franklin The tourist syndrome 217
tourist studies
© 2003
sage publications
London,
Thousand Oaks and
New Delhi
vol 3(2) 205–217
DOI: 10.1177/
1468797603041632
www.sagepublications.com
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