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Dr. TT Sreekumar

Review of
TRANSFORMING, RE-FORMING TOURISM: PERSPECTIVES ON JUSTICE AND HUMANITY IN TOURISM
A Publication marking the twenty fifth anniversary of the Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism.
Editor: Ceasar D’Mello

Tourism has eclipsed traditional industries and livelihood options in many parts of the world and has emerged as the single most important industry in several countries. However, studies that seek to understand its impacts on economy, environment, and culture are constrained by methodological and theoretical limitations. One of the reasons for the ambiguities and inadequacies in the area of tourism research has been its inability to properly appreciate the importance of the ethical dimensions of human development. A focus on the distributional and socio-cultural effects of tourism within the framework of ecological approaches to development would help understand the complex and diverse impacts of tourism on nations, regions and local communities. Tourism certainly engenders a framework for redistribution as it opens avenues for consumption and production. Nonetheless, redistribution that disregards the political and ethical imperatives that would mould its shape and directions would reinforce structures of unequal exchange.

Regarded as a third world phenomenon, tourism is indeed a post colonial challenge. Its discourses encompass some of the major debates in justice, development, deprivation and freedom in the era of decolonization. Institutional critique of tourism began to take shape in the post colonial period responding to the growing concerns about combating poverty and other development maladies in the poor countries. Janus-faced character of tourism in contemporary discourses, (as a universally replicable model of development and as an instrument of oppression, dispossession and cultural disintegration), emanates from the contestations that generated the new debates on the impacts of post colonial tourism.

The book under review, “Transforming, Re-Forming Tourism”, published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of The Ecumenical Coalition of Tourism (ECOT) is subtitled “perspectives on justice and humanity in Tourism”. It is a bold attempt to address this challenge reexamining facts and perceptions, rhetoric and reality, ironies and paradoxes while exploring spaces for initiating changes in the unequal economic and social power equations that tourism has engendered. It is now clearly known that one of the most important international agendas of global tourism industry is to silence the civil society. Contextualized in the dilemmas of contemporary civil society interventions for claiming its rightful place in current debates, a book that looks at the processes and patterns in global tourism from perspectives that provide models and paradigms for alternatives is deeply political and challenging.

Enriched by a reflexive reassessment of the role of ECOT in shaping the current debates the introduction by Ceasar D’Mello sets the underlying tone and tenor of the book with his reflections, inter alia, on how post colonial tourism has disadvantaged local communities. He says that “from the very beginning, ECOT’s ‘preferential option’ has been with the communities marginalized and made vulnerable by tourism” (P.12). The substantial work that ECOT has carried out in defining, positioning, sustaining and redefining alternative policies and practices in Tourism in the last two and a half decades forms the subject matter of Peter Holden’s informative essay “Maintaining the Rage: Roots of ECOT”. Transforming a post colonial rage against global iniquities of modern tourism into concrete action has been a particularly challenging task given the multitude of institutional and organizational barriers in mobilizing resources for developing an alternative platform. Holden brings to our attention the fact that a post colonial dimension has been deeply built into the programme of alternative tourism from the very beginning. Holden makes several insightful observations in his essay. Reciting ECOT’s history, he says “tourism in the context of Third World people have had effects which are qualitatively different from the impacts which it has outside Third World. Consequently it is third worldness and not simply tourism where the rage needs to be maintained” (P. 26). This is a broader view that must help shape future civil society interventions and guard activists from cynical retrogressions.

The book is usefully divided into several sections of uniting themes and concerns. The first substantive thematic section explores the contestations of Tourism as a tool for building a world community. The articles by Tricia Barnett, Rosemary Viswanath, Annette Groth and Judith Almeida look at the ethical, economic, environmental and gender dimensions of global tourism. Barnett’s article reassesses the possibilities of transcending cultural and economic barriers through a transformed tourism informed by ethical guidelines. Recognizing the place of tourism within formidable economic project of neo-liberal policies thrust upon third world by global financial institutions, Viswanath provides an illuminating narrative of the processes that keeps the quest for justice and humanity in tourism disappointingly elusive. Taking the argument a step further, Groth discusses the intensifying corporatization of tourism industry and its disempowering effect on local communities. She concludes that increased concentration in the tourism industry in the recent decades is a cause for serious concern. Quite insightfully, she also argues that the tweezers-grip of corporatization will affect the nature and quality of critical research and action in tourism. Nothing could be closer to truth than her observation that “it is increasingly difficult to find political analysts and academics, generally, and in the field of tourism who have the background as well as financial means to conduct neutral and objective research. Academics and scholars are increasingly dependent on consultancies paid by multinational organizations and/or companies and therefore ot independent” (P.60). Irrespective of one’s reservations on the notion of what constitutes “neutral and objective research" her argument on the constraints of freedom of research remains valid. Almeida’s paper focuses on the Goan (India) experience of gender representation and women’s participation in tourism industry. The essay seeks to challenge the economic conservatism of the UNWTO that tourism offers “enormous opportunities” for women’s advancement.

The section on Tourism and Development consists of three contributions. The essay by Jeff Wild argues for the necessity of engaging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by religious and civil society organizations. This, for him would be a more strategic approach than either ignoring or too heavily criticizing the project. Heinz Fuchs’s note reflects on the joint journey by ECOT and Church Development Service, Germany. The essay by Julia Schornhall and Shirley Susan explores in some detail the nexus between tourism, poverty and AIDS. They argue that tourism industry must discard its inhibition to recognize the relationship between tourism and AIDS and join the campaigns that fearlessly address the issue.

The section on “Tourism and Faith Perspectives” addresses the spiritual dimensions of tourism and approaches of world religions to the question of just tourism. Archbishop Agostino Marchetto and Anthony Rogers in separate notes provide different aspects of pastoral approaches to the awareness and critiquing of tourism. Buddhism’s perspectives on tourism are sketched in the contribution by Sukthawee Suwannachairop. Muhammad Abdus Sabur provides a brief introduction to the contours of Islamic approach to the question of accountability in tourism. The need for including tourism and human rights perspectives in theological education is convincingly brought out in the paper by Margit Leuthold and Christian Baumgartner.

In the section on Tourism and Environment, two short essays and an interview with Oliver Hillel are included. The essay by Marco Vinicio Garcia critically reviews the concept of eco tourism while ECOT’s interview with Hillel brings out some dilemmas faced by international organizations like UNEP in addressing ecological questions related to mass tourism practices. Rungrot Tangsurakit and Sabine Minninger shares some experiences from the post Tsunami field work and draws lessons for future policy making and disaster prevention interventions in Coastal tourism destinations. The two subsequent sections on “Regional perspectives” and “Case studies” provide glimpses and snapshots of the diverse impacts of modern tourism on Nations and local communities. The insights and caveats in the essays by Rami Kassis and Regula Kauffman, Peter Rezel, Nic Maclellan, Ernest Canada and Jordi Gascon help readers to appreciate better the similarities and dissimilarities in the effects of tourism in different regions. The illuminative case studies by Alison Johnston, Maureen Seneviratne, Frederick Noronha and Nicole Haeusler adds immensely to the to value of the book and its authenticity as a volume that seeks to balance theory and practice. Ron O’Grady’s post script “The end and the beginning” consolidates the book’s message for readers and for ECOT.

The most surprising aspect of the book, perhaps, is the poetry of Cecil Rajendra appended below each section. He narrates a deepening sense of alienation and an intensified experience of loss in the hyper-real consumerist world. The drastic scaling down of expectations and aspirations of fishers, farmers and folks at large caused by the disempowering imperatives of global tourism is innovatively captured in the deep and dark poetic imageries of emerging realities:

“The bulldozers, tractors
And tourists have moved
in with a vengeance;
hotels duty-free
shops, cafes and chalets
have sprung like fungi.

As the bewildered villagers
are pushed off their land
to make way for another
billion-dollar condominium
they begin to question
which was the greater burden:
Mashuri’s or our Century’s
Curse of dust and development?”

(Cecil Rajendra, “Lankawi, Mashuri and the 21st Century”)