Educar las habilidades sociales como factor de calidad de la convivencia escolar

This section was originally to be called ‘The walrus and the carpenter’ after Lewis Carroll’s (1971) imaginary to make the point that in the usual accounts of tourism, the ‘the tourist and the researcher’ are as unlikely companions. One outcome of taking account of the social relations of tourism knowledge is the relevance that comes to bear on the relationship

between tourists and researchers, and in particular the double-act of performing both tourism researcher and tourist. This invents, according to circumstance a social bind, a hybrid actor or individual co-performance that leads to ambivalence or a set of negotiations that are not often made explicit in tourism discourse. This double-act occurs not only in private, ‘behind the scenes’ when editing books, it is also performed in the practice of becoming a tourist to get among tourists to understand tourism. While often anthropologists and some geographers have a special place in their thinking for ‘hosts’, and that management theorists often pay attention to ‘the industry’, it still common among all of these to practice a degree of tourism to do their work. When this basic circumstance is added to those researchers who share a

27 _{Latour describes reflexivity as a ‘tricky term’ with “an interesting meaning when given to actors and objects}

and a deleterious one when taken as an epistemological virtue protecting the [social scientist] from a breach of objectivity” (2005:33).

37 fascination and special attachment to tourists, the balance starts to tilt towards the

tourist.29Consequently:

One of the amazing things about tourism is being ‘stuck in a lift’ isn’t about tourism until somebody says they’re on holiday.30

An enduring, and well-liked practice among tourism researchers is the travel to where tourists go, to locate and research tourism.31 This practice first enabled and still underpins the

discovery of tourism as something separated on the margins of work and home-life, and of making tourists the ‘obvious subjects’ of tourism. To be able to speak of centres and margins, there must be a perspective-centre from which to locate a margin and as Chapter One has identified, this perspective-centre is historically ‘tourists’ whose sense of inversion and travel away came to constitute a distribution outwards or ‘escape’ from a more routinised, tourist producing centre. What is often missing from this logically grounded argument is that this same practice of being a tourist also came to define the experience of researching tourism (see Picken 2006). In becoming a tourist to both locate and understand what tourism is, the researcher highlights the practical as well as historical ease with which tourism came to be known as something ‘outside’ the usual experience of the tourist.

From this point of view our task is to think of tourism in terms of the motives and preferences of the type of human being who, according to Boyer (1972:7), first emerged in the Western world in the 18th _{century (Nash 1981: 460).}32

To understand how this practicality came about conventional wisdom about ‘catching thieves’ is helpful. ‘To catch a thief’ it is necessary to become one and this ontological basis for knowing that still motivates detective work has had a similar kind of use in tourism research. For tourism researchers, like catchers-of-thieves the subject is ‘out there’ on the move and not particularly amenable to being caught. So the tourism researcher often takes to the world in much the same way as a tourist does to both locate and better know about them.

29 _{See Smith’s (1977) edited volume and see Chan (2000) for a geographical review of this.} 30 _{A field trip observation made after confronting this possibility (Hobart 2007).}

31 _{Some have been frank enough to make the seemingly ‘less scientific’ observation that travel to places of}

leisure and pleasure is part of what attracts tourism scholarship (Hall 2005).

32 _{There are also Eurocentric and Western-centric themes involved in this (see Harraway 1991 in Humberstone}

2004: 119) that are only recently being addressed in the field of tourism (see Cohen 1988:372 and Franklin 2009:66).

38 Through this shared practice comes a tacit agreement or ‘knowing’ between the tourist and researcher - that the world is now more distinctly two worlds, divided by degrees of

separation from what is usual. This ‘working relationship’ helps to ‘tilt the balance’ by establishing and maintaining a link between ‘what tourism is and does’ which is the domain of the researcher, and ‘what tourists are and do’ which is the domain of the tourist.

MacCannell (1976:177) perhaps unwittingly exposes this relationship in The Tourist where he notes that the researcher and tourist:

[...] stare at each other across the human community, each one copying the methods of the other as he attempts to synthesise modern and traditional elements in a new holistic understanding of the human community and its place in the modern world.

This illustrates not only a ‘visible relation’ between the researcher and the tourist, but also a clear proximity between the world the researcher sees and the world the tourist sees (after Pred, 1995:17).33 MacCannell describes the methods of the tourist who is seeking authenticity as though they legitimise or at least mutually reinforce the methods of the researcher who has been interpreted to be:

[...] as much of a sightseer as the tourist in his desire to make present to himself a conceptual schema which would give him immediate access to a certain authenticity (the ‘real nature’ of his object of study) (Van Den Abbeele 1980:13).

While this is not to suggest that the kind of “unsystematic travellers’ reports” of the tourist are the same as the reports of those who research them (Redfield 1985: 98), it is to suggest that an overlap in the methods of each means the experience of being a tourist is often inseparable from the experience of researching tourism.

33 _{This will develop into two related arguments. The first that tourism research is both performed itself and}

39 Likened to the “same restless Western spirit with which the founders of the social sciences were concerned” (Carroll 1980 in Crick 1989:310), both constructive and critical accounts of tourism make oblique references to this. Constructive accounts carry a sense of the tourist as a “social theorist avant la lettre” (Van Den Abbeele 1980:9) and critical accounts regard tourism theory as simply “mirroring popular ideas about the subject” (Pearce 1982: 147). In either case the tourism researcher assimilates to varying degrees the “perspectival seeing of a tourist” (Favero 2007: 52) and this produces perhaps a more primitive ‘tourist gaze’ than the one so convincingly added later (Urry 1990). Both tourist and researcher are accused of using ‘representations of the Other’ as a “context for the mediation and experience of modernity” (Galani-Moutafi 2000:215) and even the antipathy noted among some researchers towards tourists has been interpreted as a reaction “to protect their own brand of tourism” (Van Den Abbeele 1980:12). As ‘distant relatives’ and even a “sub-category of the tourist” (Crick 2002: 27) they are often categorised together by locals (Nunez 1978 in Crick 1989:311), and some have even been proposed as “tourists par excellence” (Van Den Abbeele 1980:13). The hyphen has been noted and the difference between the two has been one of “degree, not kind” (Strain 2003: 213).

Taking notice of the embodied dimension of tourism research makes apparent that there are shared practices between researchers and tourists and from these a shared ontology, or at least a communitas is able to exist between them without very much ‘thought’. This shared

ontology makes it less controversial, or more plainly evident to claim that when tourism is away-from-home, it is the tourists' home that is referred to; when tourism is outside the everyday, it is the tourists' everyday that determines this and when tourism is considered leisure it is the tourists' leisure that is signified (Franklin 2003: 27). It follows that tourist places are constituted in places easily understood as ‘abroad’, or ‘elsewhere’ and that these are inhabited by ‘hosts’ (who host researchers as well). These margins not only differentiate the landscape, but also facilitate experiences that are like rituals and inversions so that tourist places are also constituted ‘liminal’. Characterised as a “variable and mobile cluster of elements experienced as absent” (Nava, 2002:90), this absenteeism is to be located in the being of tourist who’s experience is partly shared by tourism researchers. In this manner:

How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave him [either of them] the conviction that there really

40 exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds (Durkheim 1976: 218 in Franklin 2003: 134).

The relationship between tourist and researcher is bound to a set of commonalities that

involve a common conviction or impression of the world and a common way of making sense of it. When the body is added to this there are also common practices and these are

identifiable in processes like ‘tourist skilling’ (Franklin 2003: 70-72). Emphasising the skills that are required to become a tourist points to the question of ‘doing’ and this removes the inevitability of the ‘inevitability’ of becoming a tourist or an inherent ‘travel urge’ (see Clifford 1986). The need to ‘learn how to be a tourist’ and before this, to learn to be willing to learn how to be a tourist means that ‘becoming a tourist’ and ‘becoming a good one’ involves ‘interpellation’ and ‘work’, or ‘willingly learning the skills’ (Franklin 2003 and 2004). These “repertoires of performance” (Franklin 2009:76) give evidence of the social labour of tourism, where even becoming something so ‘obviously becoming’ as a tourist is an outcome of variously organised social engineering.34 Since research often involves the same practices of travelling, being accommodated and negotiating strangeness for example, these ‘repertoires of performance’ are not escaped by researchers but are also part of the deal of researching tourism.

This double-sided world that makes practical sense and is shared by this group of people is both the cause and effect of theories “grounded in the theorising of tourists” (Van Den Abbeele 1980:12) and “typologies and dynamic models that fit tourist behaviour perhaps all too well” (MacCannell 2001:23). This characterisation of tourism comes at least in part of the social and practical relations between bodies that have the effect of ‘splitting the world in two’. Through this both researchers and tourists are drawn into the reality that at the core of tourism is the planning, execution and experience of degrees of separation. Consequently, when the mythical Harlequin Emperor returns from his journeys away, he reports that:

Elsewhere, then, is never like here, no part resembles any other, no province could be compared to this or that one, and all cultures are different (Serres 1997: xiv).

41 Taking serious note of the practices associated with discourse brings to light the relationship tourism researchers have formed with tourists and how this influences what counts as tourism knowledge. Tourists are privileged insofar as they hold the subject position from which a definition for tourism develops and accordingly tourism is the outgrowth of the travelling masses. From this advantageous position of tourists on the margins the more transformative and transitory characteristics of tourism have emerged. 35 However, while tourists identify most with this definition of tourism, tourists and researchers alone do not make tourism happen.

2.3 Other social engagements

While becoming a tourist is an invaluable practice of researching tourism, tourists have never been the only subjects involved (Nash 1981: 465) which means there are other members in this society. There are also ‘hosts’ and those who make up the ‘tourism industry’ to act as ‘intermediaries’, ‘producers’ or ‘brokers’. These subjects are said to exist with tourists in a ‘tripartite’ (Cheong and Miller 2000) or ‘transactional’ (Nash 1981:465) relationship before the eyes of tourism research and this, alongside the researcher forms a makeshift society, the members of which can be assumed to variously subscribe to something held common.36 In this way they make up ‘the usual suspects’ of tourism discourse and comprise the main resources for explaining tourism, and they do this because when they engage with tourism they learn to variously ‘go along’ with a common idea about what tourism is.

The phrase ‘go along’ does not mean agreement about the experiences of tourism and its effects. It is rather as though hosts and the tourism industry are added to the contract between tourists and tourism researchers and this ‘touristic encounter’ (Nash 1981: 461) serves to actively ‘perform a definition’ of tourism. These performances negotiate agreement about what tourism is and this provides a basis for what each relevant group is in various ways dealing with while providing the grounds for plentiful disagreement or ‘plural meanings’ about what tourism does (Stronza 2001: 263). This provides the practical and intellectual conditions for a productive field of social scientific investigation (see Latour 1999 and 2005)

35 _{This is a deliberate suggestion that margins are also privileged spaces. See Bailey (1989) for a similar}

argument concerning leisure.

36 _{See Hollinshead (1998) on intermediaries; see Ateljevic (2000) and Shaw and Williams (2004) on producers}

42 where the formation of a society that supports a common understanding of what tourism is enables comment to be made on tourism behaviour, tourism effects and how these are produced (see Stronza 2001:262-265).37 It is in this sense that there is a partially designed ‘collusion’ among tourists, hosts, industry people and researchers that assists in performing not only tourism, but also explanations of tourism by endorsing a ‘tautology’ (Franklin 2004: 281) or ‘circular structure of referentiality’ (Van Den Abbeele 1980:9).

These social relations and practical arrangements enrol tourists, hosts, the industry and researchers together and these allow both the formation of ‘early tourism’ and its giving way to ‘contemporary tourism’. Tourism performs a break between the mainstay of an everyday life and a temporary life elsewhere (see Urry 1995: 4) and also performs the eventuality of this mainstay becoming unhinged. In a vastly expanded landscape that now looks ‘global’ the tourist and his/her entourages are ‘decentred’ and networked to multiple ‘horizontal and vertical integrations’ that more aptly stretch tourism across time and space to include those working-for-travel, travelling-for-work and those involved in a more general touristic way of life.38

Without a condition of separateness to rely upon, with less purely liminal experiences or complete production of ‘otherness’, attention shifts to the steadier ground that concedes tourism can happen ‘anywhere and anytime’. As a consequence there is less ‘confusion’ between the way “tourists see the world, and the way the world (or tourism in the world) really is or came about” (Franklin 2004:288). The extent to which this confusion is cleared up by the further enactment of a discontinuity is made questionable not only through the

archives (Chapter One) but also through the inability of a discontinuity to make the social arrangements that constitute ‘early tourism’ quite disappear. Amid the haste, motion and strangeness of contemporary lives, and even when university campuses themselves now offer guided tours, sell postcards of themselves and compete to host international events (Galani- Moutafi 2000: 211), the old fashioned way of performing tourism knowledge by travelling away to where tourists are still holds appeal and this is part of the stranger explanation for a ‘structural lag’ in the discourse. What has happened in response to contemporary, global

37 _{Even hosts, in many ways counter positioned in tourism definition, do not redefine what tourism is so much as}

respond to it or add to its consequences (see Smith’s 1977 collection for a clear example of this).

43 tourism society is that the kind and number of relations that are allowed to happen have changed.