Traveler vs Tourist: The Debate


The literature we have examined in this course stays very much in line with the discourse of travel. All of the women have been on a search, or a journey of sorts, in order to grow through or resolve the realities of their lives. Leaving behind the notion and structure of home and security is an essential part of the female travel experience, as opposed to the transplanting of that security into a different geographic location that comes along with tourism. Tourism is usually typified by a resort structure, a cottage get-away, or a short stint in a new metropolis to absorb their arts, culture, and resources. These 'trips' usually bring brief excitement, but aren't seen to be 'adventurous' or challenging in any sense. Travel, on the other hand, contains an element of surprise, a more vested interest in your surroundings, and the ability to leave behind one's familiar roles and social structures. There is a independence in travel because you tend not to belong to the culture you've entered, but you have consciously cut yourself off from your own. You begin to see things through a different lense, where as a tourist there is "you" at the centre being catered to by "others". Whether you are concerned about the reality of "their" lives becomes irrelevant because your sole purpose of being there is to exploit there hospitality. As a tourist you are not in a location where you need to be concerned about anyone else, the industry is constructed to satisfy your needs, your leisure, and your activities. It is this self-centred 'armpit' of travel, and all those unable to consciously differentiate, that give the concept of 'tourist' such negative connotations.

The scholarly distinction between the traveler/tourist, however, is highly flawed. As I eluded to above, it is generally thought that travelers unlike tourists, are "nonexploitive" visitors, motivated not by the lazy desire for instant entertainment but by the hard-won battle to satisfy their insatiable curiosity about other countries and people. As, Dean MacCannell and James Buzard have demonstrated, this distinction has been manipulated by the tourist industry to serve its own commercial ends. For MacCannell, travelers' seemingly plaintive need to dissociate themselves from "mere" tourists function as a strategy of self-exemption, whereby they displace their guilt for interfering with, and adversely changing, the cultures through which they travel onto tourists; see themselves as contributing toward the well-being of those cultures rather than as exploiting them for their own benefit; and view themselves as open-minded inquirers rather than as pleasure-seeking guests.

It seems then that as a traveler you are either in or your out. In Marielle Risse's article, "White Knee Socks Versus Photojournalist Vests: Distinguishing Between Travelers and Tourists" the distinction is made as follows:

Differentiating between travelers and all lower life forms based on (usually arbitrary) levels of physical toughness is one of the five most popular means, in the works I've examined, to solidify the boundary between travelers and tourists. The other four are how much the person knows about the country visited, how much money the person has, where the person is traveling, and when the person is traveling. (Travel Culture 42)

Each of these five deciding factors show up throughout travel narratives and writing about travel narratives, most notably in Paul Fussell's Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Yet despite the wide range of attempts to divide travelers from tourists, a division between the two groups is difficult.

Mark Cocker in Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing states that "travelers thrive on the alien, the unexpected, even the uncomfortable and challenging". Fussell justifies this position by discussing the word's history: "travel is work. Etymologically a traveler is one who suffers travail, a word deriving in its turn from Latin tripalium, a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body" (Fussell 39). In Representing Reality: Readings in Literary Nonfiction, John Warnock, less gruesomely, makes the same claim:

[T]he traveler on the "package tour" runs the risk of sacrificing the essence of the experience of travel. The word travel has the same root as travail, and it implies something other than the experience of consumer satisfaction. It implies effort and risk, and not just physical effort and risk. Travel is action, not passive motion. (Warnock 39)

The issue then become how do we define "misadventure", "suffering", and "action"?

The careful separating of traveler and tourist by respective wealth is most often stated in terms of "time": travelers can linger, while tourists are on a schedule. As Alistair Reid states in a similar manner, "tourists have a home to go to, and a date of departure" (Reid 9). There seems to be a slight flaw in this argument considering we see hordes of young people trekking off with their backpacks (myself included!) to Europe on 'shoestring' budgets. John Keats provides an echoing response: "candor compels me to say that the culture they [western travelers] enjoy on five dollars a day is not the culture of Europe (or South America, Southeast Asia, Nepal, etc..), it is the universal culture of poverty with a foreign accent" (Keats 7).

After such a long, and often snobbish, debate there are those that do attempt to rise above tourist bashing. But, this is usually by individuals who truly believe they are travelers but due to time constraints sometimes act as a tourist. Gabriel Garcia Marquez states:

I don't know where the shame of being a tourist comes from. I've heard many friends in full touristic swing say that they don't want to mix with other tourists, not realizing that even though they don't mix with them, they are just as much tourists as the others. When I visit a place and haven't enough time to get to know it more than superficially, I unashamedly assume my role as tourist. I like to join the lightning tours in which guides explain everything you see out of the window -"On your right and left, ladies and gentlemen..."-one of the reasons being that then I know once and for all everything I needn't bother to see when I go out later on my own. (Best of Granta 3)

How does one forge the distinction of "traveler" for oneself? Jan Morris's article "Sick of the Tourist Roller-Coaster" is an excellent example of the linguistic and logical knot we get tied up in when trying to solve this puzzle. Morris states:

I spend half my life traveling, and mass tourism pursues me wherever I go. Pursues you, you may object? Are you not a tourist too? Well, yes. Every traveler is a tourist of sorts, and as a write about places I can justly be accused of encouraging tourism myself. But in really wishing, like most of us, that the opportunities to travel could be limited to a congenial few, I may be self. But I am not hypocritical. It is the volume of tourism, not tourism itself, that is making is a curse rather than a benefit to mankind. (Morris 21)

This limiting of the number of people who may travel is a very self-centred comment. As people, and women, interested in travel we are quite aware of the amount of anti-tourist rhetoric available for examination. As Dean MacCannell points out:

The error of the anti-tourist is they tend to be one-sided and in bad faith. They point out the tawdry side of tourism and the ways it can spoil human community, while hiding from themselves the essentially touristic nature of their own cultural expeditions to the "true" sights; their own favorite flower market in southern France, for example, of their favorite room at the National Gallery...Anti-tourists are against these other tourists spoiling their own touristic enjoyments which they conceive in moralistic terms as a "right" to have a highly personalized and unimpeded access to culture and the modern social reality. (MacCannell 164)

MacCannell puts "true" in quotation marks because he rejects the premise that there is a difference between what the traveler sees and what the tourist sees. The argument has run as follows: travelers experience real hardships, know the language of the country they are visiting, and have enough money to take their time. Now we hear that travelers only go to "true" places. Tourists, by implication, go to "false" places. But who then decides what is "true" or not?

If tourism, then, continues in its popularity and if is not distinguishable from travel by a person's physical capabilities, linguistic knowledge, money, or location, is there any real difference between travelers and tourists? Venturing into the thicket of definitions, I offer this: travelers make all the logistic decisions about their trip; tourists don't. A traveler, thus, is the active centre of the journey. Travelers may not necessarily want to be at that particular rat-infested hotel, but they recognize that the journey itself makes the bad parts, if there are any, worthwhile. Tourists, as I use the term without negative implications, follow someone else's agenda; they go. See, and learn as the tour guide, in the form of a person or book, sees fit. There is no need to get lost socially, physically, or linguistically as they have structure in place to do the interpreting, arranging, or decoding for them. For example, after weeks of traveling around Eastern Europe on my own, I decided to join a bus tour of Salzburg and the Lake region in Austria. I was a tourist, unabashedly following the orders of the guide, and if nothing else I saw more and learned more than I would have had I been alone.

I believe W. Scott Olsen has the best idea. He writes in "A Tourist's Petition" that he hopes:

that someday we will all be Tourist. I do not mean to say that every one of us will in some fashion need to visit the place on our personal maps still labelled terra incognita, camera straps slung over our necks. Rather, it is my hope that we will recognize that coming home after a day at work is, in its essence, the same thing as walking a wilderness road for the first time. When I go home this evening, the light will have changed...Tourism, in the good sense I want it to mean, does not begin with the first outbound plane ticket, or the second. Each day creates a new terra incognita out of the whole universe, each morning a new and unexplored venue for the Tourist. To be a Tourist in the way I mean is to learn a new way of seeing freshness, a way to value even the smallest and most perfunctory actions of our days. (Olsen 73,74)

As Risse points out, you could substitute "traveler" for "tourist" in the above quote and the meaning would not change (Travel Culture 49). Perhaps the difficulty in defining the absolute difference between these two concepts lies in the fact that they are, and can be, used interchangeably. Perhaps, then, we can learn to avoided relocating the tourist to the doghouse as someone not worth addressing. Most all of us are curious, but how we behave and learn are quite different.


Introduction
Photogallery of 'Travelers' & 'Tourists'
Works Cited and Further Readings...
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