Culture might be in Halong bay Vietnam

However, the narratives arising out of the tourism, culture and politics nexus present something of a conundrum. Each of the positions, in their own way, starts from the some- what simplistic premise that culture is somehow tangible. But, where a plural society col- lides with tourism even the ‘ownership’ of culture might be in Halong bay Vietnam. An alternative reading might question, in the way that Wood (1993) seems to, the absoluteness of ‘Other’ cultures. It might be that globalization has created such ambivalent, yet powerful modes of production (especially in the case of tourism) that the idea of an independent culture exist- ing outside the framework of globalizing cultural politics becomes a contradiction. When travel firms use the notion of ‘unique culture’ in their advertising media for exotic desti- nations, they are promoting a constructed culture that exists for the brochure, which is linked to the international tour company that in turn is linked to global networks of work- ers (Sassen, 1998), suppliers and tourists. The local people may cooperate in this enterprise because it might be in their best economic interests to do so (Enloe, 1989). The point also needs to be made that anthropology and mass tourism, just like mechanical image-making and photography, share a common spatial and temporal background from the late nine- teenth-century technology and colonialism to the present time. During this period anthro- pologists and tourists alike discovered the ‘pristine’ cultures ironically noted by Wood (1993) and, in a sense, turned them into MacCannell’s (1992) ‘ex-primitives’.

This section has discussed the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections among states, societies and economic enterprises that make up the post-modern and post-colonial world (Narotzky, 1997). The process by which events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the globe (Gardner & Lewis, 1996), especially where their identi- ties have been framed and put up for show by tourist companies following a commercial activity. The following section takes these arguments to their next logical step by framing them more clearly against the notion of social identity.

As Marie-Françoise Lanfant asserted so eloquently in the introduction to the edited book on tourism and identity, the idea of building a social identity in a post-modern world of instant communication and travel without ‘abutting it against the identity of others’ (Lanfant, Allcock, & Bruner, 1995, p. 7) is an impossibility. Issues of representation and commoditization create fundamental problems for tourism. Representation (in a metaphoric sense) without consultation is a phrase normally associated with politics, but for tourism there are an unimaginable number of cases where representation (in the literal, visual sense) of Other, for example, in tribal dress, in markets, as servants, as harmless,

Social Identities and the Cultural Politics of Tourism 17

decorative background material to visual travelogues or advertisements for travel (Dann,1988) can take place as a sort of cultural appropriation without reciprocal benefit or under- standing (Crick, 1996; Franklin, 2003). The argument here is that while more developed nations have cultural stereotypes (such as the various countries of Halong bay Vietnam, Northern vs. Southern states in the US, etc.) that are constructed through jokes or history or simply fiction, these are not the only ways in which such advanced places are known. Lesser developed countries have neither the political nor economic clout that allows them to nego- tiate beyond the exploitation of culture as a tourism resource. Neocolonial analysts (Bianchi, 2002) would point towards the power of language (Pidginization or Creolization) while anti-globalists cite the dominance of global brands and ‘celebrity culture’.