Tourism and Home

Watching a TV program at the weekend a situation was shown which reminded me of a big problem. A conservation area in Africa means that the local people are not allowed to hunt. Instead they need to perform for tourists and use that money to buy food.

On the surface of it, it seems like a good compromise where everyone gets something. But I was deeply aware of a problem I have seen before.

You see African tribes people in body paints, dancing and waving their spears and singing. There are interesting spectacles and make unusual photos and videos - but what does it mean?

To the people doing the dance I cannot begin to imagine what it means, only that this is the dance which they do, their friends do, which their parents did, which their ancestors did. It is the dance maybe they do at a particular time, it is a dance which evokes certain feelings. Most importantly it is a dance which belongs here with these people, with this music, on this land.

The problem is however that if these tribes people are no longer doing it as they would have usually done it, but are doing it for the entertainment of tourists then it ceases to reveal anything about these people other than they want some money and this is how they get it. They may a well put on western clothing and disco dance if it will get money. By contrast the tourist attraction is that this dance is in someway different, represents something unique to this place - especially since the tourist has travelled so far to see it.

The process of breaking into the tribal world, of offering money for what they do, and especially since they are required now to earn a living this way has changed the whole context of the dances. They no longer represent a distinctly different way of life - as they might have done to visitors in the past, but increasingly are the product of tourism itself. The dance has been relocated from the world in which it was evolved into a new world where it is performed to generate cash from viewers - something for which it was never created.

What will happen then is that being divorced from its creative origin, it will be formalised as a memory of the past (even by its own people). It will be paraded as a stuffed version of the original as a piece of archaeology from which viewers may peer into the past and wonder what world it came from. The more formalised it becomes and the better know it becomes, ironically the more it will have been divorced from its original context and meaning.

This is what they call the "crisis of modernity". That the expansion of economics to every part of our lives, and the power of manufacturing and markets has meant that the products of human labour are very quickly removed from the hands and contexts that created them, and are relocated into a market and the world of anyone who will buy them. The consumer has complete mastery over the meaning of an items.

But with great irony because many objects we purchase we wish to associate with the world they seem to come from. We buy a statue "Made in Africa" because we think it carries in some way a memory of its origin. We buy a perfume marketed under a celebrity name because we think it carries some of that celebrity. We buy a Ferrari because of its image likewise.

In a way this illusion works because other people are also fooled by it. But if everyone is fooled by an illusion does that make the fact it is an illusion important still?

That is a big problem with groups approached in previous posts. What is our interest - to be in agreement with people, or to be clear and truthful about things even if it means disagreement. A decision we need to make at some stage in life!

The fact is a statue carved in Africa is the same as a statue carved at the end of the road - if you like the statue keep it - but where it came from is meaningless... unless you happen to be from Africa yourself and still remember something of the art and culture there which may give that statue some added significance - you would know.

However just being from Africa yourself does mean the statue "from Africa" has anything automatically in common with you. Being "from Africa" is entirely lost in an international market. It is entirely lost in people too. It is the languages, memories and customs which make people from Africa - if its not already there you can't make it happen. Like the statue - if its form does not determine its origin to the observer then its origin is lost, and so its "original" meaning and context. A new one will have been created by the presence of this item. Maybe the one which goes "oh so you are well travelled then - you are an adventurous tourist".

Home is the issue for Modernity. Does anything have a home anymore in a world which spends so much time looking at other people, buying their products, trying out their ideas, clothes, food and music. Like mirrors facing each other, humanity is becoming reflected into itself endlessly. Identities which pride themselves in being so distinct are already inwardly folded so many times. Bin Laden is supposed to have an obsession for pop-singer Whitney Houston who has been seeking spiritual refuse in Israel from drugs and sex addiction - how many cultural and ideological contradictions can there be at once!

The question of "Home" was a central issue of interest a few years ago which I strayed from subsequently - it would be good to revisit this. What is "Home"? When are we at "Home"? especially in the mixed up modern world. Is "Home" a physical place, a social place, or a spiritual inward place of self-identity?