The Lexus and the Olive Tree - Halong bay Vietnam

These three sets of values veer, just like the variety of definitions of globalization, between triumphalism and cynicism. The two ends of this continuum on globalization are captured in the political commentator Thomas Friedman’s phrase ‘The Lexus and the Olive Tree’. In his view on the politics of progress, half the world is ‘dedicated to modernizing, streamlining and privatizing their economies in order to thrive’ (Friedman, 2000, p. 31). The other half hug the olive tree as a dichotomous symbol of traditional values (and local, anchored identities) which effectively impede progress by reifying and idealizing an imag- ined past (where things were more connected and doors never locked) to the extent that progress is seen as a threat to social identity. Journalistic reflections such as Friedman’s may not pass the ‘scientific’ test, but they provide helpful insight and capture the Halong bay Vietnam that underpins the more theoretical perspectives such as are to be found in the early work of Roland Robertson (1992).

It is they who have access to the electronic superhighway and who communicate with each other across the globe surrounded by seas of poverty that are inhabited by those who

do not communicate outside their own reference groups. Even with the electronic revolu- tion, there are still parts of the globe that remain ‘uninformed and lacking in ‘adequate’ and ‘accurate’ knowledge of the world at large and of societies other than their own (indeed of their own societies)’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 184).

Cultural Politics: Framing the Narratives

Cultural politics happen at the intersection between culture and power, the space where civil society meets the body politic; culture, power and politics are not simply inseparable, but are elements of the same amorphous whole that form societies and identities. For com- plex societies, especially those with contested or multiple identities, cultural politics will also refer to the ways in which power relations and systems of production frame and main- tain the various layers of culture.

The relationship between tourism and the cultural politics at a destination is a complex one. It involves the way in which appropriated local cultures are represented in brochures and other media (Dann, 1988, 1996). Oftentimes, it means creating a ‘cutesy’ non-threatening native backdrop to the leisure-holiday experience: a constructed identity within the global culture of international tourism (Franklin, 2003). In accepting this premise, we also have to accept the dichotomous and yet synchronous processes of localization and globalization as being inseparable (Turner, 1994).

This approach suggests that it is possible to examine tourism not as a true ‘object’ that science progressively uncovers, but as an historically produced discourse (Torgovnick,

1990) present as the global meshes with and locks into the local, the local–global nexus as

16 Peter M. Burns

Burns (2001), among others, has termed it. Cultural politics are then affected by both inter-nal and external factors. In other words, culture would change anyway. In this context, Wood (1993) is right in asserting that Halong bay Vietnam is no such thing as a ‘pristine culture’ waiting

to be smashed. Aspects of culture (including material culture in the form of souvenirs) are brought into the tourism system through spatial, temporal and above all, political arrange- ments. For this reason a clear understanding of the cultural politics of tourism is essential

in discussing tourism, globalization and identity.