Travelling Paradigms: Marxism, Poststructuralism and the Uses of Theory

I was sitting in the Shangri-La cafe in Dharamsala, India, drinking a beer and reading a much-valued Newsweek when I spotted the Boeing advertisement. Travel, it commanded. Flight turns the world into a single marketplace (Newsweek International 1993:26-27). Because I was in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, studying the impacts of ethnic and spiritual on Tibetan crafts, the ad struck me immediately. A tasteful two-page spread in reds and browns displayed exotic goods, each evoking some distant locale, artfully arranged around a tattered Union Jack, a nostalgic icon of an imagined, benign colonialism that resonates with many travellers from the imperial nations.Ethnic tourism in postcolonial states is a strange new form of economic imperialism, one in which finished goods and memories are carried from periphery to center, where many are hungry for hand-made, authentic crafts and that, unlike mass manufactured goods or imagery, escape commodity status in the minds of many consumers (Kopytoff 1986; Nash 1993; Waterbury 1989). In the words of Boeing: ordinary citizens now have easier access to the world's goods than did the kings of old (Newsweek International 1993: 26-27).Tourism in the new millennium penetrates every corner of the globe, entering once restricted sacred realms in search of ever more unique goods and experiences. Anthropologists in even the most remote field sites often find themselves preceded by adventure travellers, and indigenous communities sometimes treat anthropologists as another species of customer (Brewer 1984). In the face of continuing poverty and the transfer of capital to the wealthy nations, many communities are attempting to cash in on this explosion of world travel, transforming domestically produced crafts into factory manufactured souvenirs, and sacred objects, ritual performances, and even their bodies into marketable commodities. Household and sweatshop craft production is growing and rates of exploitation increasing as communities subject to the gaze (Urry 1990) are integrated into an unevenly developed global economy (Nash 1984; 1993; Tice 1995).Since my original research was conducted (1992-94), there has been a boom in academic literature on tourism, and a proliferation of approaches in conjunction with an increased delineation of the diversity of tourism. Some of the literature, such as the work of June Nash (1993) Lynn Stephen (1993), and Karin Tice (1995), closely examines the material production of crafts and their circulation in transnational markets, with local consequences for class, gender and ethnic stratification. Another literature is highly theoretical, such as Clifford's Routes (1997), Adams's Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas (1996), and the edited volumes Touring Cultures (Rojek and Urry, eds. 1997) and Travellers' Tales (Roberteon et al; eds. 1994). They share poststructuralist influences: self-reflexive, suspicious of any monolithic theories or conclusions about tourism, and the incredulity to meta-narratives that Lyotard highlighted as the postmodern condition (1985). Unlike the polemic, authoritative, and homogenizing discourse of modern tourism, the discourse of postmodern consists of compromising statements and stresses the multiplicity of tourist experiences (Uriely 1997:983-984). In this paper I will refer to postructuralism as a diverse array of theoretical strategies that deconstruct modernist universalisms, essentialisms and foundationalist epistemologies, highlighting difference and the slippage of signifiers. Postmodernism will denote a cultural condition of instability and hybridity under a regime of globalized capitalism characterized by flexible accumulation(Harvey 1989). Many writers cited here, however, do not make such a distinction, and it is debatable that there has been any radical shift in the evolution of capitalism. Some recent anthropological literature deploys the terminology of travel and the Internet as general metaphors for postmodern disjuncture and displacement Modernist critiques of the destruction of authenticity have been displaced by more pluralistic, dialogic approaches influenced by both Bakhtin and Baudrfllard, e. …