Why We Travel: On America’s Wide-Eyed Tourist Gaze

As a sociocultural and material force, tourism is so large as to be incomprehensible. The difficulty of understanding it in full requires us to break it down into parts, an exercise not unlike the act of travel itself: We can’t fully take in the places we visit, so we instead form impressions from bits and pieces.

These intangible souvenirs are fallible and prone to fade, though; when someone asks to see them, there’s nothing to show. Photography provides a solution, enabling us to shore up memory and capture passing moments. While the act of taking a picture has long been second nature for many of us, examining its origins provides an interesting link to our current moment. Although we can trace our archival imperative to the early days of leisure travel, armed conflict and a global pandemic truly solidified photography’s place in mass culture. The First World War along with the 1918 Spanish flu resulted in what the historian Tammy S. Gordon refers to as “a memory emergency.” Confronted with death, the need to create a visual archive of life increased. A need, it seems, we’ve carried with us since. (...)

As far back as the Grand Tour—the antiquated practice, instituted in the 16th-century, of young, upper-class European men taking extended trips abroad in service of their education—self-documentation has been an important part of the tourist experience. The oil painting of the young aristocrat posed in front of an ancient ruin was the precursor to the shirtless millennial standing on top of a mountain in his dating profile picture. These images gesture at self-worth, reinforcing associations between mobility and conquest. To have been there is one thing, they tell us; to have proof, another.

Just as modernity has democratized the tourist portrait, it has also made travel available to the general populace. In the second half of the 20th century, cheap flights and paid vacations helped international travel become part of mass culture and a cornerstone of the world’s economy. In 1950, there were around 25 million international tourist arrivals; in 2019, there were 1.5 billion. Tourism now generates ten percent of the global GDP and employs one in ten of the world’s workers.

Or at least it did, before the world changed. This past December, the World Tourism Organization reported that 2020 was “the worst year on record in the history of tourism.” International travel fell by over 70 percent, setting tourism back to 1990 levels. In terms of economic losses, the pandemic has been ten times worse than the global financial crisis of 2009.

“The pandemic has proved the centrality of tourism through tourism’s omission,” writes the Italian journalist and social theorist Marco d’Eramo. “Once this industry ceased, not only airlines and shipping companies but aircraft manufacturers and shipyards found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy.”

D’Eramo’s newly-translated book The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry Into the Tourist Age is a sprawling assessment of what he refers to as “the heaviest, most polluting and most important industry of the 21st century.” Along with parsing tourism’s social and environmental impacts, d’Eramo stresses the immense size of its economic footprint. Airlines, cruise lines, hotels, restaurants, casinos, travel agencies, guidebook publishers, souvenir manufacturers, and gift shops are just a few of the enterprises in tourism’s massive network of commercial operations. Propping up the whole affair is an unorganized labor force composed of tour guides, street performers, transit operators, trash collectors, sex workers, musicians, cashiers, desk clerks, maids, cooks, waitstaff, bartenders, and dishwashers, to name only a handful of the often underpaid, non-benefitted employees of the tourism industry.

The toll has yet to be fully calculated, but estimates suggest that between 100 to 120 million direct tourism jobs could disappear as a result of the pandemic. The travel industry’s collapse has produced an unusual reality in which stranded tourists, flights to nowhere, and deconstructed cruise ships all exist in the same blurry timeline. While it’s likely that COVID-19 will fundamentally change how we think of travel, this moment of staying in place could be useful for reflecting on why we go anywhere at all. (...)

“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere,” writes Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place. Published in 1988, the book-length essay is an unsparing critique of tourism, colonialism, and government corruption in the author’s home country of Antigua. Just as every native is a potential tourist, Kincaid posits, “Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere.” Tourism is a luxury typically reserved for people with money, dividing privileged travelers from those with no choice but to remain in place. It’s here, where people are “too poor to escape the reality of their lives,” that tourists seek to visit.

Rather than creating a shared understanding of the world, tourism often widens the chasm between the visitor and the visited, the viewer and the viewed. “When the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you,” Kindcaid writes, “they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”

If viewing tourism through a critical lens causes discomfort, it’s likely due to how the process leads to self-examination. As d’Eramo notes, tourism is a “mirror or magnifying glass for society.” He draws on the work of Erving Goffman, one of the most significant American sociologists of the previous century. Theorizing on the role-playing of everyday life, Goffman maintained that our presentations of self are fluid. In our attempts to influence perceptions of our own image, we change according to context. Elaborating on this behavior—which is by turns deliberate and unconscious—Goffman differentiated between front stage and back stage behavior: in the front stage we are performers, while back stage we are closer to our true selves.

“For Goffman the theatrical dimension of the relationship of the self to others is not an accessory,” writes d’Eramo. “In any interaction it will always be present; there is no opting out.”

Extending Goffman’s theory, d’Eramo connects the concept of the front stage and back stage to the “unmistakable theatricality” of the tourist city, in which workers underpin the sightseeing industry while also functioning as sights to be seen. By the same token, “every city must ‘play’ itself.” If this performance is, as d’Eramo argues, one that is reproduced throughout the world, an earnest appraisal of tourism will eventually lead to seeing past its facade. Every tourist a native, and every native an actor.

by Andru Okun, LitHub | Read more:
Image: Duane Hanson, “Tourists.” Photo by Antonia Reeve. © Estate of Duane Hanson / ARS, New York / DACS, London 2018. (National Galleries Scotland