The tourist is not this a bit boorish individual and herd that is so often portrayed. It is a complex traveler who carries with him his desires and dreams. His ways of traveling speak volumes about our society and our time.
Analysis of tourism practices are often exposed to a first error, which is to amalgamate the subject and the phenomenon. To confuse or refuse to distinguish tourists tourism. Thus the observation of the traveler as a person - with his desires, values and dreams - it disappears in favor of the study due to mass: quantity, its number, its spaces, its cash. On behalf of sociological distance, statistics neutrality or dealer realism, it thus comes to a purely accounting approach to tourism practices: times, times, percentages, frequencies, locations, transportation, seasons, lodging, dating ...
These approaches have their uses of course. But they ignore all the psychological aspects of the trip. Tourism can not be reduced in the windows of tour operators or come down to the opinion of the guides, hotels and other tourism professionals. Against this error, it is go here to meet a subject without which the tourism phenomenon would not. Exploring the jungle of myths and imaginary representations and ensuing projects. The "Map of Tenderness" of possible trips, trends, or the complex geography of holiday wishes ... no tourism without tourists. Stating the obvious? No doubt. But it nevertheless seems useful to recall again and again thereby anyway: "The traveler is still what matters most in the journey (1)! "
The idiot of the trip
The pitfall of this confusion is that it leads to lend to the tourist vices of tourism: environmental harm (arrangements and pollution), cultural offsets (reduction and picturesque folklore), adverse economic impacts (inflation and speculation), the effects social destructuring (urbanization and migration), often redoubled moreover the development of traffic arising from the taste of lucre, luxury and lust (sex, drugs and casino) ... On this basis, the traveler finds attributed to the perversities reality from the handling and mercantile exacerbation of his desires and dreams ...
This antitouristique posture, so unfair as it is, is very convenient. The slaying of the idiot of the trip on the altar of true travel has long been a morally satisfactory sacrifice for the elites (2). By decreeing responsible pernicious effects of the leisure travel industry, it is guilty of judging these tourists from the ravages of tourism and persecute them accordingly. The trick is crude but convincing! And we grasp better then the approximation so often between the tourist and the sheep. Follower and cursed, it is not only that of Panurge but also the Bible ...
The second error, equally widespread, and largely determined by the first, is to underestimate the tourists in its complexity. It is found innocent or guilty: passive or active complicity of the tourist forfeiture, naive or cynical, awkward or opportunistic, it is wrong in all cases. The sheep here becomes volatile. It is pigeon. Pigeon, of course. Or manipulated traveler. This is a certainty. The tourist is, you know, be a crude, uneducated, rude, shallow, selfish, eager, lazy, stupid, etc. The language has also taken note of this postulate. Do not they say "being there as a tourist" to stigmatize, useless, the intruder unconscious or irresponsible? Whereby traveler devalued eternal underestimated, as the "tourist class" - renamed "economy class" passenger low cost - the meaning of his travels, their functions and symbolic stakes are too. Today, as in the social sciences than for professionals (although they deny it), do not give this subject the dignity of being complex study is a very common attitude ... yet
Yet what use this hedonistic leisure mobility relies ever a fundamental question: why do we travel? Why do we do it again? Why do we persist in this mobility, and even doing it again-when we're out of land promised to discover or country to conquer? We no longer have to flee danger or basic resources, work or food, climate or safe places to find? While we are neither nomads nor migrants or showmen nor tramps or other mobile vitally dependent, that we are no more than those that need or tradition grow the movement, why are persisting despite us perfectly still travel? It is here that this subject proves its importance and interest. The tourist is entirely in his determination and perseverance. He travels despite criticism, crises, scorn and danger, while not pressing anything grows there, in principle at least. He wants to continue traveling. What for? This is its major anthropological value.
The tourist is a symptom of society. Far from its reduction to practice social class or status of raw material of a lucrative market captured by sellers of paradise, the fact remains that tourism talks about society. He talks about our desires, our dreams, our fears and our dislikes. The urge to travel, the envy of the world, conceals our preferences and trends. She talks about us. She reveals.
Everyone's worldview
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said the eater, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are. "The anthropologist can tell the tourist:" Tell me how you travel, I will tell you what kind of society you live and how you design your existence. "Our vacation, travel, holidays and tourisms interposed, express trends: strong guidance attitudes, sensibilities mutations, changes in ideologies and representations.
He was thus a time of Montaigne to the guests of the nineteenth century, when the aim of the trip was first officer of health, we traveled for his health. And it is now to travel for fear of losing it, sometimes taking excessive precautions to prevent the risk of disease! Similarly, discovery side, did we go from pleasure to fear. If we once left at random, with a taste of the unexpected, it goes today bristling information, forecasts, reservations and insurance of all kinds. Nothing is more unpleasant for the "adventurer" contemporary, always linked to the Net, before, during, after, never detached, disconnected, so when he travels really far, an unexpected! This is such an incident, escaping his foresight could make him lose his money, his relationships, network, or worse, its time! Thus he will therefore now in a "sick society of the time" (Nicole Aubert, The Cult of the emergency.'s Sick society of the time, Flammarion, 2003) which even the leisure traveler, hurried, stressed, n has ceased to mend a "canvas" which he does not want to go out ...
Mirror of an era
The anthropology of tourism is therefore part of what used to be called in the days of Herbert Spencer, Gustave Le Bon and Ferdinand de Saussure, the "general psychology." Its mission is "to identify patterns and structures of representation of the imagination which, attitudes and vintage sensibilities, inform and guide practice (3). "It is clear these models and imaginary. It is they who are causing a phenomenon of considerable mobility. They generate, guide it and redefine constantly, depending on historical, inflections or changes in our worldview, and the influence of these variables on the collective psychology.
It is obvious today that a tourist can not be compared to that of yesterday or the day before yesterday. Aristocrat of old, petty bourgeois emancipation of formerly member of the Touring Club of France (4), city in search of fresh air, employee and worker rewarded (5) Paid Vacations war boom in the heart of the 1960s, rebel backpacker years 1970, each generation, each age class or each class brings its worldview, its own set of desires, patterns of behavior and imagination of his time. Those are fluctuating variables, but still significant. Leisure travel tells us because it is a place of issue, disinhibition, free expression, emotional release and re-appropriation of self. As rightly wrote Jean Viard, paid holidays are like "permissions that limit desertions and imaginary diseases soldiers (6)," and that so vacation trips are special moments to tell the gaps and enter expectations of everyone. They are in this respect a bottomless pit to watch at your leisure (this is the case to say) the desires of men, their quests, their leakage (see The four desires capital) ...
Given this key question - why do we travel? - Add that said "tourist" complex subject is a man who, although at the shelter necessities, not only continues to travel but additionally ever again. Repeating, repeating the experience of the trip, he did it again (read Travel: eternal renewal)! Here is a reason in another. Why do we travel is one thing. Why "revoyage 't be quite another! Why are we on leisure travel proven recidivists? Why this amazing obstinacy as curveball a trip to another, and without which, again, the markets for vacation and tourism would not be?
Yet, begin from
The origin of this pattern of practice - which is even ready today to continue in spite of the crisis, to use resourcefulness, hospitality of parallel networks and barter (7) on the sidelines of official institutional services and the legal market - the number of units of various kinds have been developed. One of the first mentioned rightly, is the desire for distinction. So do we use going on holiday and leisure travel as a means of social recognition and ostentation, but also integration of domination. We should also mention the cultural and health benefits of the trip, which in every way shape, heals, educates young and old alike as it is known at least since the Renaissance. As for development, we can finally write down the almost mechanical report this cyclical practice of mobility accreditation with urbanization, a state of civilization which sees companies in proportion to the size of their cities, issued in reaction even more holiday departure cities are large.
But beyond these psychosocial determinations, functional or civilization behind the phenomenon, there, do not forget again, the subject can not be reduced to these roles and causes, so efficient they are.
The subject with his dreams, his reasons, his unreason as (8), its cardinal desires, this determination to repeat the experience, his freedom. This is not only a consumer of travel. It is also an inventor, an interpreter, a hermeneutic.
Also, finally, should be careful not to confuse the media and the public, particularly in the belief that such a place invariably manifested such a desire because he would prescribe the function or use his visitor. For example, the call of the desert of loneliness and desire can only be answered Sahara and Greenland. A cabin in the woods or a garden background may be sufficient, as the encounter with the other does not require every time a far country to echo the altruistic dream. So Claire Bretécher, mocking his famous Frustrated on vacation, sent word to one of them: "This idea of going to the Third World while the underclass is seven metro stations (9)! "In contrast, and despite geographical appearances, hiking ten or fifteen in the Kalahari, Queyras or Taklamakan will report cenobitism well as societal temptation and desire to host both can be satisfied in a festival at the beach, camping or obviously in town. Of course? "If I had to imagine a new Robinson, Roland Barthes said, I do not lay it on a desert island but in a city of twelve million inhabitants, it can not read or speak or write: it would , I believe, the modern form of myth (10). "
Dreams and reasons
It is the imagination of the traveler, shaped by those desires, which determines his worldview (places and environments) and the experience of the trip (trip or stay), for others and for himself. Without this imagination, this world would be nothing but empty as spaces and these trips vain mobility - that so often are blamed for this antihero accused of unnecessary journeys: the tourist (11) ... In addition to their meaning, use and, of course, their image, it is this imagination that makes the world an attraction - an object of attraction and desire - and travel a temptation and an invitation without which the desire to leave is not, and so why necessarily recur even less!
The writer André Suares wrote of a traveler: "Countries are just what it is. They vary with those who go (12). "And those through them first with their dreams and their reasons. It is their first luggage. That merchants and industrialists are next to their carriage trade is another matter, of the order of the phenomenon, its operation, its commercial recovery. Let us not be confused. And go in search of this forgotten man, a symptom of society ...
