Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
when every grape begins to taste the same and fi nally tastes sour, a reversal then being neces-
sary to refresh one's senses and analytical capacities before the next round.
In international tourism, people often voluntarily open themselves up to a degree of stress
as a price to be paid for enjoyment and they manage the situation as well as they can. The need
to combine exposure and withdrawal is also apparent in the temporality of travel. Package
tourists on a single-week vacation are often pressured to make the most of it, being therefore
at risk of spoiling the holiday with a gluttony of activities. The constructed familiarity of
tourist enclaves takes some of the work of learning away, their routines allowing more inten-
sive leisure. The tourists may, nevertheless, feel exceedingly tired afterwards, as if in need of
a vacation. Something similar occasionally happens to long-term independent travellers on a
shoestring budget. After months of continuous nation-spotting on the road, the novelty of
Latin America may start to fade and homesickness develops. The tourists should have been
able to manage these situations, but their desire for achievement overcame their sensibilities.
Social interaction in public space is organised by particularly strict norms, especially in
regard to interpersonal communication and the privacy of the body (Goffman, 1963;
Rodaway, 1994, see also Gibson,
Chapter 6
and Edensor and Falconer,
Chapter 9
of this
volume). In foreign territories, people tend to feel more crowded and intimidated than in
their familiar surroundings (Ruback
et al.
, 1997). Even though
Homo touristicus
, the travelling
human being, frequently is a social animal, they prefer to be in control in these situations.
Social interaction is, after all, not only about support, affection and mutual interests.
Orientation and learning to communicate can be a demanding combination when people get
crowded, have confl icting interests and compete with one another for space, especially in
urban destinations.
From this standpoint, each visit outside a
tourist enclave
, whether physical or behavioural,
involves working at acting and learning, with both success and failure. The enclave therefore
epitomises the 'leisure' part of travel, whereas the 'outside' is characterised by 'work', even
though these qualities overlap in both realms. As the classical authors in tourism have noted,
tourists often tend to keep their distance from local societies, preferring experiences which
have been simplifi ed, sugar-coated and staged for them (Boorstin, 1964; MacCannell, 1992;
Turner and Ash, 1975; Urry, 2001). This does not, however, indicate inferiority on the
tourist side. It may be a human ability to adapt relatively easily into new situations, but the
adaptation requires a degree of time not available in short-term transitions. Therefore, these
situations need to be managed by spatial arrangements, both by the tourists themselves and by
service providers.
Metaspatial enclaves
Some anthropologists (e.g. Selänniemi, 2003; Turner, 1969; Wagner, 1977) have conceptual-
ised the transition between the everyday and tourism as
liminality
and analysed the spatiality
of tourism in terms of
liminal spaces
. From the viewpoint of geography, the formation of
tourism spaces is, however, not only about individuals in a rite-of-passage style of transition.
Tourism is constructed around
metaspatial
structures and actions which maintain the charac-
teristics of the culture of tourism and enable people with variable intercultural skills to visit
previously unknown territories.
The innovation of
metaspatiality
and
touristic metaspaces
was originally grounded in fi eld
material collected in South Asia, where backpackers regularly distanced themselves from local
society in a number of enclave-like spaces, spending much of their time together in bubbles
of visitor control, in order to manage their culture confusion (Hottola, 1999, 2004, 2005).
