traveller's rant #3

The long way around to a simple point: there is much talk among backpackers of discovering 'untouristed' locations. A place is thought to lose its authenticity, become somehow less 'real', when the wheelie-bagging group tours arrive. Alot of this can be dismissed as simple snobbery, but there is also a kind of colonial holdover, with galavanting young Westerners keen to find a nostalgic version of a mythologized culture preserved intact and unsullied somewhere, exclusively for their viewing enjoyment...a crystalized culture that is -hopefully- naively capitalist and therefore cheap. This leads to 'indigenous tourist camps' springing up everywhere, where locals are paid a pittance to dress up and 'act traditional' for bus upon sweaty bus. Tourists get a satisfying photo of a woman with giant lip rings; she will use the extra money (if she's lucky) to pay for a satellite dish in a mud-floored thatch hut. So what we get is the illusion of tradition.

But culture isn't static. The priest accepting morning puja offerings while checking cricket scores on his cellphone is as authenticly 'Indian' as the young tough on the bus in gangster knock-offs memorizing Eminem. People who seek out 'untouristy' places miss the point: it is precisely where cultures collide, where ancient Hindu paganism (for example) meets Coca-Cola and they thrash around in the muck for a bit, that any sort of 'authenticity' develops.

But: "Oh, what about the McDonaldization of the world? What about the West's creeping, insatiable drive to turn diversity into monoculture? And ohmygod what about capitalism!?" I call bullshit. As low-fruit examples: I've seen kids in Nike shirts pushing goats through fields to slaughter. I've seen countless shrines dedicated to innumerable dieties decorated with ghee, sandalwood paste, milk, popcans, car-hood ornaments, plastic soldiers, banana leaves, flowers, movie posters, and all kinds of cultural effluvia. The sky-is-falling monoculture fear is, I suspect, perpetrated by folks with their own political agendas who refuse to aknowledge the dynamism and resilience inherent in non-Western cultures. That shit ABSORBS, man. That shit sucks up Coca-Cola and spits it out as Hanuman the Monkey God's favourite bitch. And the undercurrent of the argument is more menacing: the foriegn culture, it is inferred, is too weak/slow/dull/backward to protect itself from the great power we have unleashed...now only we, as the creators, can go back in and decide what is 'good' for another people and culture. We must save them. They're helpless.

So yeah, its an entirely new-wave colonial position masquerading as lefty social concern, and obviously full of much crap...just like trying to avoid touristy places cuz you're such a cultural explorer...

sjj