John Urry, "Introduction," The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990): 1-15.
John Urry and Jonas Larsen, "Vision and Photography," The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011) [Sage Online]: 1-22.
Jonas Larsen, "The Tourist Gaze 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0," The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Tourism, First Edition, ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2014): 304-313.
[This reading is short and provides good context for the texts above, but it is optional]
Claudio Minca and Rachele Borghi, "Morocco: Restaging Colonialism for the Masses," Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (Surrey: Taylor & Francis, 2012): 21-52.
Primary Source Analysis:
After reading the above, conduct a Youtube search with the following terms: "morocco," "travel vlog," "marrakesh," etc. Watch some of these videos and center your blog response on an analysis combining the readings with these videos. Feel free to include personal anecdotes or stories that connect to the theme of photography and tourist experience.
Waleed Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008).
Upon watching the videos, the first thing I realized was that Urry's concept of representation over reality will be prevalent in every video I watch. The basis of his ideas on the structures of representation is the fact that the world was becoming far more media oriented. Seeing as photography and videos were becoming more popular means of showing and advertising travel destinations, the way in which we perceived destinations would be founded in images and representations, more so than in authentic unique experiences. Seeing as I would be watching youtube videos of Marrackesh and Morocco, I would only be seeing a representation of Morocco. My ability to watch these videos is already lending itself tot the Tourist gaze. The videos I see, the places people visit which I marvel at, this will all impact how I see Morocco, especially how I plan to see Morocco when I go back in real life. Having seen a specific mosque or restaurant, I could make a note of said place and choose to go on my next trip to Morocco.
ReplyDeleteThe Jemaa el-Fnaa souq as an iconic scene is a testament to the Tourist Gaze, people have let scenes from this souq represent their entire perception of what Morocco and the Middle East are. The word souq is subject to the gaze. In these vidoes, tourists treat the people, their clothes and daily hard work as theatrics for their pleasure. They see only what the souq represents, a contrast from their supermarkets at home.
As Urry believes, tourism comes from people's desire to see and experience a contrast of their daily life. A life unrecognizable to them, one where they don't have be the ones working, where they are meandering tourists in another world. This was perfectly shown in a David Chang and Chrissy Teigan's walk through Marrakesh in Netflix's travel show "Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner". At one point the narration describes Marrakesh as a place where "time has paused in its tracks". This plays into the Orientalist representation that the Orient is somewhere that's stuck in time. They both walk and look at the spice markets, with the camera panning over people walking in traditional clothing. The show attempt to reach for some kind of authenticity as they eat traditional food, however one could argue that this is simply another level to the structured tourist gaze.
terms: Postmodernism: "undermines the distinction between “representations” and “reality.” We are said to live in an oversaturated image culture where representations are everywhere and often more exciting than reality."
- Mostafa
Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ can be criticized by many. Perhaps the most common criticism is that the gaze doesn’t fully capture the tourist experience. The tourist gaze suggests that tourist experience involves a particular way of seeing. The way of seeing can be very narrow and doesn’t hold truth to the environment and place you’re visiting. Additionally, the problem with the Tourist Gaze is that it doesn't leave room for dialogue and interaction. In order, for one to actually obtain an understanding of another country that they’re a tourist in, they must go beyond gazing and interact with the locals and from a relationship with the country, culture, and its people. Little smattering of the local lingo goes a long way - not only when establishing important information such as directions or bus times, but also in showing you around and pinpointing cheap sites/items and store owners. Moreover, forming relationships with locals can be beneficial in helping you learn and understand the culture and country you’re in. The relationship between local and tourists is very beneficial and is needed when one someone visits a place of pleasure and interest. From personal experience and YouTube vlogs I’ve discerned that the relationship between the tourist and local is essential for a successful trip and understanding the culture.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Morocco can be perceived by many Americans as an expensive trip. Flights from the states to Morocco can range from $1000+ and as I’ve searched on YouTube many Americans have stated that Morocco and Marrakesh in particular is an expensive tourist site. However, I visited Marrakech a few months ago and I traveled from the UK. Google had tracked my flight as “too high” but my round-trip ticket was only 200 dollars! The estimated cost for Airbnb for 10 days was $100 dollars. This was extremely cheap for me. It made me realize that it’s so difficult and expensive for Americans to travel abroad due to the expenses of the flight. However, so many Europeans travel to a number of Arab countries because of the proximity of the continents to one another leading to the cheapness of the flights.
Additionally, many vloggers had stated “not to buy anything from Marrakech because it’s overly expensive” but for me this wasn’t true. Perhaps since I’m an Arab and knew how to get through in Marrakech and bargain with my Arab accent. As many western civilians/ non-Arabs have stated in many of the travel vlogs that Morocco is not as cheap as you think and that many people have been ripped up by local civilians. Additionally, they state that Marrakech is probably not something you’ve ever experienced before so you most likely won’t be prepared. For me, I’ve experienced similar environments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, so it wasn’t anything new for me personally. For those who traveled to foreign Middle Eastern countries the environment is similar. However, sounding like a foreigner can get you in trouble and I’ve perceived that personally and within many of the YouTube vlogs that I’ve watched. This is a tough one for American/ English people because unless you can speak Arabic like a local, they are going to assume you are a “gringo”. If they think you are American or European, they will highball you on their price. Therefore, when I travel to any Arab country, I shut down the American/English in me and I bring out the Egyptian in me. When I am asked where I am from, I state Egypt. When local questions start to question more and start to interrogate if I am from America, state I went to an English school in Egypt, and for me that and my friendship with the locals helped me survive my trip in Marrakech. For instance, when I was in Marrakech, I was bargaining for a Tagine and when I told the shop owner that I was an Egyptian he sliced the price in ½. However, it was still a bit expensive for me and I had left. I came back with one of my local friends, and she was able to slice the price in ¾. Nevertheless, the locals were able to introduce me to sites and little spots that one would could never know about unless they were a living local resident in the area. They introduced me to their culture and cooked me traditional foods and that’s how I was able to experience tourism in Marrakech. Not through a tourism gaze but through interactions and dialogue with the people.
DeleteKeyword: “The Tourist Gaze is essentially about how tourism as a
leisure activity and an industry are formed according to “the exercise and decisions of the
gaze.” For Urry, this means that tourism is predominately a visual practice. Tourism is a “way
of seeing” where business stages visual experiences and tourists consume them visually.
Focusing on the gaze brings out how the organizing sense in tourism is visual. And this mirror
the general privileging of the eye within the long history of Western societies, as discussed by
Foucault and others” (Larsen 305).
Watching travel vlogs gives me hives. I hate them so much! This contempt developed my freshman year in London when my friends each decided to pick up vlogging. When we went away on weekends, I was constantly annoyed by their cameras, always recording, and their eyes, always down on the screen. The roots of my frustration seem to echo the same sentiments that Urry and Larsen, both separately and together, name as the tourist gaze. Though anytime you enter a new city you are essentially a tourist, I have always been taught to see myself as a traveler and seek out unique and “authentic” experiences. I recognize that it is almost impossible to understand a place if only visiting for a week, but still, there is a certain excitement in getting to know the underbelly of a city, rather than the larger constructed idea of a place. From personal experience, visiting a city or country is much different when you are accompanied by a friend or guide from that place, and 10/10 times I would rather explore a place with someone who knows it than with a generic tour guide. Tourism though is about entering a different reality that As Urry states, people aren’t interested in learning that everywhere daily life is mundane, or at least pretty similar. Thus, when people travel they look for escapism through traditions, foods, and aesthetics that separate them from their usual environment. Then photography comes into the mix of things. Being in such strange, even “exotic,” landscapes, and the desire to capture those visuals, led to the development of photography. Urry and Larsen comment that photography “seems to be a means of transcribing reality” and that photographs appear to be “miniature slices of reality” (Urry and Larsen, p.9). However, photography is just another way to escape reality– whether gazing on photos to transport one back in time in space or taking a photograph, which requires the active manipulation of one’s gaze, photos separate the viewer from the view.
ReplyDeleteTravel has become a performance, and now more than ever, travel is motivated by the desire to document oneself in a new place, rather than to experience a new place. “We are going to get such cute Instagram pictures” is a phrase that I have heard in reference to travel so many times. But what is worse than seeing another person’s vacation photos is watching them go on their vacation, as is so easy to do through travel vlogs. The Morrocan travel vlogs that we watched only amplified my distaste for the genre, especially after Minca and Borghi’s article on tourism in Morocco. Each vlog followed the same pattern: mint tea being poured in the introduction, walks around the souk, OMG we’re riding camels!, and belly dancers performing at dinner. These experiences are all deeply touristy, in that they have been manufactured by Morocco's tourism board to create an idea of Morocco. I find it deeply discouraging to know that such experiences have been designed for tourists, even hula dance performances in Hawaii were co-produced with Kodak. These vlogs all tell the same story of Morocco and demonstrate a sort of universal experience that one has when exploring a place. Now, I feel sort of pessimistic about traveling, and I cannot help but wonder if there is such a thing as authentic travel.
Key Word: Tourist Gaze- inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault, the tourist gaze is about how tourism as a leisure activity and an industry formed according to “the exercise and decisions of the gaze,” meaning tourism is a “way of seeing” where business stages visual experiences and tourists consume them visually. (Larsen, 305).
Question: Is all tourism problematic?
Best,
Hadley
The three readings due today covered different aspects of tourism. I found each of them to bring new points that I had never thought of before, as well as touch upon many things that I have experienced in my life and travels.
ReplyDeleteIn Minca and Borghi’s “Morocco: Restaging Colonialism for the Masses”, I found the concepts and language use to be interesting. A word that kept coming up throughout the reading was “banal” (eg. the “banality of tourist practices” or “banal tourism”). Banal, by definition means “lacking in originality, obvious or boring”, which I found to be a necessarily strong word to use in this piece. The idea of banality was well supported and the examples given, particularly towards the end, held up the argument. Another thing that I learned from this reading was how dependent Morocco’s economy is on tourism, and how deeply ingrained it is in society. Starting as early as the late 1800s, Morocco has been a tourism hub, specifically because of its location being near Europe. Because of this amount of tourism, it has been commodified into this “exotic” or “Oriental” place that people travel from all around the world to experience in a hope to resurrect “colonial nostalgia” and experience new cultures. On page 24, the authors brought up an interesting point about how the “opening up of Moroccan skies”/ the emergence of low-cost European airlines was a large part of the surge of European tourists, especially in Marrakech. The reading also brought up the fact that hotels “attract and accommodate rich and sophisticated clientele”, which I have also noticed to be a big issue with world wide travel and tourism. This reading really connected back to our discussion about Orientalism, specifically discussing the “reason” for the country’s attraction being the “exitic and Oritnetalit images that had not yet been ‘exploited’ in all their potential”.
In John Urry’s “The Tourist Gaze”, he gives a zoomed out, more theoretical perspective on tourism. To Urry, tourism is a desire to experience something that is different from daily life. He states: “people’s basic motivation for consumption is therefore not simply materialistic… it is rather that they seek to experience ‘in reality’ the pleasurable dramas they have already experienced in their imagination”. This was an interesting point, but one I partially disagree with. I feel that it undermines the materialist aspect of tourism. From experience, I have found that people tend to commodify and appropriate material aspects of culture when traveling, as well as exploit cultures using social media. It is important to recognize this aspect of travel, and that not everyone has the purest intentions, or is aware of their surroundings and the culture they are immersing themselves in.
Lastly, the “Vision and Photography” reading brought up some questions and comments for me. First of all, I found the reading very informative and relevant, especially today. That being said, because it was published in 2011, it doesn’t include much about social media. This is a discussion I would like to have in class, because I feel that this idea of “showing off” your travels is something that people aspire to do now. In addition to this, I would like to discuss the very tricky topic of cultural appropriation in relation to travel photos on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
In conclusion, the research that I did on YouTube not only made me frustrated but disheartened. Although there were many high-def, beautiful videos of Morocco that embodied the culture well, there were also many disrespectful ones. I noticed two separate patterns in my “vlog” searches. First of all, I noticed the baseball cap wearing white men with backpacks: the classic “bro” tourist. These vloggers spent a lot of time talking to the camera and making their videos about their personal lives, rather than being in the moment and experiencing their travels. The second pattern I noticed was these dolled-up beauty guru type vloggers, who wore revealing clothing taking photos in front of camels and exploiting Moroccan culture completely in my opinion. I found this “type” to be most problematic. As I conducted more research, I learned that dress code is quite important in Morocco, as 99% of their population is Muslim. Learning this and then looking back on these vlogs, I was upset by the lack of respect that many of them had, wearing bikini tops and cropped shorts around Marrakech. Although this was likely a result of them not doing enough research, it is a huge problem nonetheless– I believe that this is something that needs to be more widely addressed in popular culture because it is a huge issue.
DeleteKey word: Tourism (Urry)
DeleteDefinition: a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organized work.
Questions:
Can we discuss the problem(s) about the world bank? This might be a huge topic/not relevant to the class, so don’t worry if we don’t cover it today– just something that was brought up briefly in the Minca and Borghi reading.
How can one be a “respectful” tourist?
This class readings all revolved about Tourism, which is an interesting topic in analyzing economic, human nature, and physiological factors of the Middle east and north Africa region and how did they got affected by the new wave of world tourism. In this class readings, it is worthy to note out that the readings were more focused on the theoretical views of the concept of tourism in general and it wasn’t based on Middle Eastern historic tourism stories.
ReplyDeleteIn the first piece of The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, it was a piece more focused on the philosophical views of tourism in general. It illustrated how can tourism be correlated with economic, political, national and religious factors of a certain nation. The rise of tourism as a global industry that circulates money and cultures created a new concept and that is “The Tourist Gaze”. This concept is the first gateway or expression that the person would think about this place. An example of that would be Paris. It is well known that Paris in the the most romantic place on earth. The correlation between romance and Paris is called the Tourist Gaze that Paris is a romantic place. This also push couples who are recently married to visit that city and enjoy the romantic adventure. However, it might be not that romantic “and I believe from my experience that it is not even close to be the most romantic city in the world”.
With the concept of the “Tourist Gaze” it made me think how can a country use this concept or tool and try to create a “Tourist gaze” to reenergize the tourism sector in its country. An example of that would be the United Arab Emirates specifically Dubai. I think that Dubai used the views of the world that the gulf region is a place of rich people due to oil and gas. Dubai focused on making the city the most lavish and exuberant nightlife city that rich people often visit. This made a “Tourist Gaze” that Dubai is a city for Rich tourist or tourist who wants to have fun nightlife.
The second piece illustrated the usage of photographs in conceptualizing a “Tourist gaze”. We can see the correlation between the two texts and how do they focus on the concept of “Tourist Gaze”. Photographs went into an interesting cycle, specifically when it is linked with tourism. The writes expressed that the rise of photographs made it more of a powerful tool to positively or negatively determined the “Tourist Gaze” of a certain country. It also made it more of a political and economical tool to use photographs to glorify the place and the experience and it even made the tourist gaze to have a longer time frame with people. However, photography alienated the tourism experience in seeing something new. For example, seeing a picture of big ben and then visiting it.
Keyword:
Tourist Gaze: tourists place on local populations when they participate in heritage tourism, in the search for having an "authentic" experience.