What is the Point Here?
The Post-Tourist and the Traveller
In the last few years a new touris has appeared; or at lesat a new type of tourist has been identified - the "post-tourist." The post-tourist is part of the post-modern world. He or she is aware that nothing is authentic; that every tourist experience is new and different; that tourism begins at home, in front of the television. The whole globe is a stage on and in which the post-tourist can revel; the crass and crude is just as interesting and delightful as the traditional and authentic to the post-tourist. He or she is abundantly aware that he is a tourist, not a brave and inquisitive searcher for culture and truth; just another sunburnt, probably over-weight, almost certainly ignorant foreigner spending money to have a holiday (not a travel "experience") in a foreign country.
Paradoxically this lack of apparent discernment is what is seem to identify the post-tourist as turly discerning. Feifer, in 1985, stated that the post-tourist is well aware that he is "not a time-traveller when he goes somewhere historic; not an instant noble savage when he stays on a tropical beach; not an invisible observer when he visits a native compound Resolutely realistic, he cannot evade his condition of outsider." Of course, all this could be discounted as the meaningless meanderings of a group of academics with little better to do than play with words or ideas. But, there is something akin to the post-tourist of the academic world beginning to inhabit the real world of tourism. These people might have once been discribed as just cynics, marvelling in the shear ironies of life. They are tourists for whom tourism is a game to be taken lightly; people who recognize that they are just another "guest," another consumer of the tourist experience. No-one, and nothing, special.
The "traveller" in contrast to the post-tourist finds it hard even to think of him or herself as a tourist at all. This, of course, is hubris built upon the notion that the traveller is an "independent" explorer somehow beyond the bounds of the industry. Anna Borzello in an article entitled "The myth of the traveller" in the journal Tourism in Focus (no. 19, 1994) writes that "Independent travellers cannot acknowledge - without shattering their self-image - that to many local people they are simply a good source of income. ...[not] inheritors of Livingstone, [but] bearers of urgently needed money." Although she does, in writing this, grossly inderestimate the ability of travellers to see beyond their thongs and friendship bracelets, she does have a more pertinent point when she argues that it is important for travellers realistically to appraise their role as tourists, because: "Not only are independent travellers often frustrated by the gap between the way they see themselves and the way they are treated, but unless they acknowledge that they are part of the tourist industry they will not take responsibility for the damaging effects of their tourism."
Joshua Eliot, 1998
Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States
It has become nowadays so easy and so common to cross the world that the simple circum-navigation of the globe "merely for wantonness" is very rapidly ceasing to be in fashion. But as the rough places of the earth become smooth to the travellers, and they no longer fear "that the gulfs will wash us down," there is growing amongst them a disposition to dwell awhile in those lands whose climate and inhabitants most differ from ours. The more completely such places are strange to us the more do they attract us, and the more isolated they have lived hitherto, the more do we feel called upon to visit them now.
Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, 1923