Alter-Nomad: On Tourism

Travel fascinates people. Everyone loves traveling, or at least, the perception of travel as a vacation. It’s not uncommon to see travel listed as a hobby in resumes, or in Tinder bios, as if it defines us. As a consequence of globalization, it is appreciated on the job market and perceived as a mandatory step toward success. Students go abroad. Job relocation packages are getting increasingly common. The most fortunate spend their weekends and holidays in retreats, in the countryside, or in a chalet. Travel is a social enabler fed by digital networks. This demand for mobility became an industry with mass tourism being one of the results.

Tourism appeared during the 18th century to describe young bourgeois traveling around France to perfect their education. From a historical point of view, tourism is a practice performed by the elite, probably inspired by the medieval wandering journeymen who learned their craft by moving from one town to another. Modern tourism followed the Great Explorations era. Tourists travel out of curiosity and idleness, to seek entertainment. Only the most privileged can sustain the cost of traveling. From a historical point of view, a tourist, a modern traveler, is a social identity used to signal success.

Travel is romanticized for social or commercial purposes. Digital nomads have little in common with historical nomads, but the term “nomad” sounds better than “all-year-long tourist”. Reality is not as glamorous. Tourism is an industry taking many shapes: entertainment travel, cultural travel, business trips… each targeting a specific niche of consumers. For example, humanitarian trips are profitable businesses relying on popular dreams and right-thinking desires (esteem needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). Travel has become a consumable: we travel as we eat. A strategy to acquire pictures and be seen, that demands planning. Tourism often is “à la carte”, starting from a “Things To Do” list every tourist follows religiously to gorge on information and dumbed-down postcard-like landscapes. Travel as an extra-ordinary experience to perform things that would not have been possible on a regular day. To Deleuze, this kind of travel is a “cheap break”[@abecedaire], far from the transcendence tourists like to imagine. A modern traveler is closer from the tourist cliché, an explorer’s empty shell.

Tourism has something of voyeurism. The modern traveler tends to give priority to pictures over words, to cameras over talks. When we travel, we look for something, consciously or not. It is an initiatory quest where everyone is looking for his own Eldorado: an identity change, how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, “be native in another country and a tourist at home, […] to restore meaning to one’s own existence”. As we saw previously with the examples of Oedipus, Ulysses, and Achilles, identity is at the center of every travel. Oedipus wants to change his identity to avoid a curse. Ulysses wants to get back to his previous life of father and king. Achilles embraces who he is, no matter the consequences. A touristalker cannot challenge her own identity, because she experiences difference throughout a lens, rather than by understanding the locals who incarnate this difference. Everyone becomes an obstacle to each other: some tourists put their own freedom above others without taking into account the consequences of their acts.

I was in Bangkok last month. Tourism is both the best and worst thing happening to the Kingdom. Sex has become an industry you can witness everywhere. The hordes of tourists are never-ending. Bangkok is so polluted the air irritates your nose and eyes if you stay outside for too long. On the other hand, tourism is a major sector in Thaïland, among the biggest economic contributors with +15% of the country’s GDP. Needless to say, I felt way better out of the city center and far away from the tourist attractions living the life of a regular thaï working man. Point is, contemporary travel is paradoxical. Traveling taught me all of our actions have an impact. What is apparently harmless can be harmful to others in ways we do not anticipate. Bali comes to me as the perfect illustration of tourism gone wrong. The Butterfly Effect is real - this is why we must consider an ethic of travel.