A new class of tourist: trendies on the trail

5 A new class of tourist: trendies on the trail

13111 As Crick (1989) argues, ‘human beings’, the tourists themselves, are only infrequently the object of consideration in much tourism research. And yet it is upon tourists that the industry is founded. In part this has resulted from academic prejudices of analysing production rather than consumption (Lash and Urry, 1994) and the tendency to focus upon the impacts (economic, environmental, cultural) of tourism where tourists are at best a homogeneous and undifferentiated group and at worst are deemed immaterial.

It has been suggested at various points in earlier chapters that tourists need to be taken more seriously, and recent campaigns on the ethical forms of travel and tourism from development agencies (such as VSO and the Tear Fund) seem to suggest that they are. To this point in the book, a number of key factors have been stressed. First, Chapter 2 sought to demonstrate the significant economic changes that have resulted in post-Fordist modes of both producing and consuming goods and services. In part, these changes can

be traced through to the emergence of new and varied forms of tourism in the Third World. It was also argued that these changes have tended to invest more power in us, the consumers, or the tourists: we have more choice. Second, it has been suggested that the influence of the new middle classes can be linked to the emergence of what may be referred to as postmodern cultural forms. The importance of these social groups in both producing new forms of tourism in the Third World and forming a significant role in taking such holidays was highlighted. It may be worth taking another look at Figure

2.3, Table 2.4 and Box 3.3 to recall this framework. Both points stress the increasing significance of tourists, with the second factor high- lighting the importance of social class. Of course this is not to say that class is the only factor in studying tourism; far from it. But it is a significant factor and is especially important in the analysis of new forms of tourism, in that the ‘world of tourism is rife with the class distinction in our everyday world’ (Crick, 1989: 334). Yet an analysis of the significance of class and tourism is only weakly developed. It was argued in Chapter

2 that analysis of tourists has centred around either classifying tourists or carrying out motivation and attitude surveys. Although such approaches are of interest, they have tended to limit the scope of tourism analysis.

This chapter explores what use an analysis of class offers in developing a critique of Third World tourism. As elsewhere in the book, this is not a definitive statement of how tourists should be analysed and understood, but an attempt to broaden our thinking and approach to the field of tourism. Initially, the chapter discusses the importance of social class as a concept and how it is reflected in travel and tourism. In particular, the relationships of contemporary global change to the way classes are formed will be considered. The second half of the chapter identifies a number of crucial factors evident in the formation of new middle-class tourism, and it is argued that travel and tourism have an increasingly important symbolic role to play as social classes seek to define

11111 and distinguish themselves from other social classes. The final sections of the chapter

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indicate why social class analysis is of importance in considering the impacts of Third World tourism. 1

Class, capital and travel

Of all social science concepts, arguably, it is class that has been subjected to the most thoroughgoing marginalisation since the 1980s. Politicians began to talk in terms of classless societies, academics became preoccupied with the fragmentation of traditional class lines (working class/middle class/upper class) and more and more people have begun to think in terms of their individual, as opposed to class, status. This is a lure of individualism that led Crompton (1993) to conclude that the ‘retreat from class . . . is becoming the sociological equivalent of the new individualism’ (1993: 8).

However, a recognition of the role of social class in contemporary capitalism has begun to re-emerge. A number of authors have begun to illustrate the relationships between cultural changes and the development of new middle classes (Betz, 1992; Featherstone, 1991). In common, these authors agree that these significant and numer- ically expanding class fractions have an instrumental part to play in new cultural forms. Indeed, Lash and Urry refer to postmodernism as a ‘hegemonising mission’ for the new middle classes, and elsewhere they are considered as both producers and consumers of postmodernism – par excellence (Featherstone, 1991). In Box 2.3 we identified a number of key characteristics of postmodernism and highlighted their relevance to the analysis of Third World tourism. Briefly these involved: the emergence of specialist agents and tour operators (and its adjunct, more individually centred and flexible holidays); the de- differentiation of tourism as it becomes associated with other activities, and the growth of interest in Other cultures, environments and their association with the emergence of new social movements.

Nevertheless, the different ways in which different social classes consume tourism is vastly under-researched. This is significant in that we have argued above that much new tourism is based on the notion of individual travel. As Figure 5.1 conveys, a culture of travel (as opposed to tourism) that is shamelessly hedonistic has emerged: chill out, the world’s a breeze, so experience it. But most of the existing commentary amounts to little more than the rhetorical and polemical ranting of middle-class writers bemoaning the scale, effects and popularity of mass tourism. The analogy of tourism to pollution is commonplace (Brooks, 1990; Guerrin, 1991; Turner and Ash, 1975) and is often expressed in socio-cultural terms where it is the swarms or tidal waves of tourists that constitute a problem that must be contained. It is a view that appears to be prevalent across the arts, academia, the media and the industry. The renowned French photogra- pher, Henri Cartier Bresson, contends: ‘I’m an adventurer . . . The Africa I experienced was literally that of the “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit”. It was a time when people were travellers, not tourists . . . I travelled on a shoestring. Regimented tourism is a conta- gious form of pollution’ (quoted in Guerrin, 1991). Rosenthal admits that perhaps it is timely to ‘accept that some areas will remain “sacrificial resorts” which continue to attract tourists who do not seek an experience of “deeper” quality’ (Rosenthal, 1991: 2). And as an operator contends: ‘With the days of the package holiday . . . drawing to

a close, we are about to discover very special holidays for very special people: like you’ (Sherpa Expeditions 1992 brochure). Equally limiting is the fact that the role of geography, the spatial dimension, is all but ignored, despite its fundamental role both to understanding tourism as a process and how social classes are constituted as part of that process. As Thurot and Thurot note, the ability of the middle classes to maintain their ‘social distance’ from others has

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Figure 5.1 The culture of travel

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become more difficult because ‘great distance no longer offers substitutable destina- tions’ (1983: 182). As Box 4.1 suggested, the circulation of tourist areas has tended to focus either on the deterministic cyclical nature of tourist development or the cyclical character of tourists themselves. In the former approach, tourist areas are modelled as moving from discovery to overcrowding (Butler, 1980; Doxey, 1976). In the latter approach, a taxonomy of visitor characteristics are noted (Cohen, 1974, 1979a; Smith, 1989). Although this approach offers greater scope for thinking about the relationships between social class and tourism, the links remain weakly developed.

Bourdieu and ‘habitus’

By acknowledging the importance of cultural consumption in the study of social classes, the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1984), has provided a productive way for thinking about the relationships of class and tourism. A number of authors have noted the applicability of his influential work to tourism (Bruner, 1989; Errington and Gewertz, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1994; Urry, 1990b).

Briefly, Bourdieu (1984) argues that social classes wage ‘classificatory struggles’ seeking to distinguish themselves from each other by education, occupation, residence and so on, and, of course, through commodities, which is taken to include both objects (cars, furniture and so on) and experiences, such as holidays. They achieve this, Bourdieu suggests, by constructing ‘lifestyles’. We have already alluded to this notion of lifestyle (‘Sustaining lifestyles’, p. 24) as a useful way of considering the individuals’ uses of a range of objects, experiences, hobbies and beliefs to, sociologically speaking, ‘mark

their territories’. 2 These lifestyles, Bourdieu concludes, are the products of what he terms habitus, and it is worth spending a few moments considering the significance of this concept. Habitus represents the ability and disposition of individuals and social classes to appropriate objects and practices, to act in certain ways (Thompson, 1991), that differ- entiate them from others. A knowledge of ‘foreign’ food, good wine, classic literature or Latin American film, for example, may all assist in differentiating from others without such knowledge or appreciation. Habitus is, therefore, a ‘cognitive structure’ (Jackson, 1992) which ‘gives people a sense of their place in the world’ (King, 1995: 28). Or as Painter suggests, ‘Habitus gives individuals a sense of how to act in specific situations, without continually having to make fully conscious decisions. It is this “practical sense”, often described as a “feel for the game”, that Bourdieu’s theory of practice seeks to understand’ (2000: 243). And for Bourdieu it is the necessary starting point for a theory of strategies that ‘aims to account for the logic according to which groups, or classes, form and break up’ (1986: 119). Box 5.1 provides an application of the concept.

Two important points emerge from Bourdieu’s work. First, social classes are in constant struggle to ensure that differentiation from class fractions above and below are maintained. Travel has always had an important role to play in this process of differ- entiation, and as tourism has become more widespread the struggle has intensified. It is difficult to deny that Marbella, Kos, Phuket and 18–30 provide a very different set of meanings and representations from Tikal, Chiang Mai, Kilimanjaro and Explore. So different places, the different experiences to be had, and even different operators, add up to what we could describe as a ‘symbolic system’; it is the way in which we repre- sent objects and experiences and then communicate this to others. And we can also argue that these different components ‘each embody particular class “tastes”’ (Allen and Hamnett, 1995: 240). Habitus, therefore, represents a certain ‘class culture and milieu’ (Zukin, 1987: 131) and provides the basis for class reproduction and differentiation. The traveller/tourist distinction, although highly stereotyped, is reflective of a wider debate over social class differentiation.

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