Before entering the field, I have speculated the possibility of my informants critically examining their role and act of viewing. Drawing from MacCannell, I have postulated that my informants should be able to see the power relations embedded in their tourist gaze and their subjectification in tourism. As suggested by MacCannell, a second gaze can occur as a function of Urry’s tourist gaze. This second gaze, which has in view the Foucauldian subject or Urry’s tourists, is always aware that
“something is being concealed from it” and that “there is something missing from every picture, from every look or glance.” As such, according to MacCannell’s gaze, seeing is not always believing. This view is indeed apparent in the responses of a few of my informants:
I know that some of these backpacking places are as contrived as the Disneylands. But I am still interested to come and see how exactly they are
staged and organised. How the show is performed by tourism workers and fellow backpackers. But of course, I don’t tell everyone this for it will spoil the mood. Everyone loves to think that they are having the real thing and when you travel with someone who claims he is critical and says everything is inauthentic and contrived for tourism, it can be quite a spoil sport. But now that you asked and since you are doing research on this, I think you will not mind my ‘theory’! (Ah Keng, 25)
Sometimes when I dive, I think about human impacts on the dive sites. You know there is a huge industry, this whole scuba diving thing. Maybe you should do a research on this. We (scuba diving tourists) are made to think we are consuming these places in an environmentally-friendly way and you have these endless beach clean-ups and reef conservation projects organised by dive operators but we know the whole thing is just a circus act. How many times have we seen divers stepping on corals or banging their air tanks into the reefs?
When we dive, our impacts and the state of coral health are always hidden from us. These are things we are not supposed to see! (Pei Lin, 27)
Behaving like ‘ethnographers’ on these tours, these informants show that they are intelligent subjects who think and consume tourism site/sights critically. While critical tourists received little or no training in the social sciences, and are not tasked with writing duties, Galani-Moutafi’s (2000) claim that tourists and travellers are necessarily less critical and less reflexive than self-proclaimed ethnographers is unfair.
Informants such as Ah Keng and Pei Lin are competent geographers and ethnographers. While consuming tourism places and landscapes, they are engaged in their everyday theorisations. They possessed not just the ‘touristy’ gaze of Urry but also the critical second gaze MacCannell suggested. On their adventure tours, they were able to ‘step out’ from their subject positions to gaze upon their own touristy act of gazing upon adventure landscapes and therefore, at the same time, critically examine them/themselves. However, as suggested by Ah Keng, these second gaze often goes unmentioned for they hold the potential to ruin the travelling mood of co-travellers. Other than extended conversations with Ah Keng and Pei Lin which yielded the two quotes, I have difficulty identifying this second gaze from many of my other informants. I have at times doubted my own ethnographic practice but it might well be that these second gaze is hidden and rarely spoken about because informants want to stay sociable and to ensure that the tour remains fun.
5.4 Conclusion
I have sought to understand the tourist gaze of Singapore adventure tourists by considering adventure tours as environmental “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988) organised by adventurism and the workings of the visual in these tours.
Towards this end, I have subjected myself to the same environmental technologies and
“geographical practices of self” (Matless, 1994) as my informants by actively participating in their adventures. Like Cohen, I do not believe that the tourism experience can be illustrated and explained using “an endless number of surveys on
tourist ‘motivation’” (1979: 23). Instead, I relied on ethnographic accounts as well as extended and candid dialogues with informants from 5 adventure groups during the conduct of their adventure tours. I have investigated Singapore adventure tourists’
“geographical practices of self” and their use of adventure tours as an environmental technology of the self. Adventure tours are observed to be environmental devices that permit them to effect, on their own or with the guidance of professionals, reconditioning operations on their bodies and selves. To do this, my informants’
experiences and performances of adventure tours have been likened to ‘scheduled workouts’ in ‘outdoor gymnasiums’. Instead of being avenues to achieve freedom and escape, as suggested by the adventure tourism industry and some preceding research, I have demonstrated that adventure tours are also technologies and schemes co-opted to for their own self-government.
The various ways of collecting visual signs during adventure tours, the types of signs collected and the roles this ‘shopping’ for visual signs played in the constitution of these adventure tours have also been described. While the main focus of this chapter has been on explicating the specific role of adventurism, I have also demonstrated how the visual worthiness of these ‘distinctive’ landscapes too was sometimes sufficient to motivate some of my informants performance of adventure travels. The adventure tourist gaze, this chapter has argued, is embodied, environmental and governmental. However, in arguing for the work of government in adventure tours is not to suggest that self-government is situated and confined in the sites, spaces and environments of adventure recreation, pursuits and travels. In the
next chapter, I proceed to investigate the effects of self-government and adventurism upon my informants’ homecoming, paying attention to their post-trip adventure narrations.