One of the most interesting things of our assumptions on common sense are given in those situations where we express them as sensations instead of ideas. An interesting example is the topic of foods, something we talked about in previous posts (for example, here). Let’s take the case of the guinea pig (cuy or cuis in some countries), a recurrent topic in this blog. The fact that a lot of people doesn’t want to eat it -in particular, for its appereance, it looks like some sort of a rat- is not expressed in a structured idea -such as “I won’t eat it because I’m a vegetarian”. Rather, it’s exposed as repugnance; that is, a physical sensation unable to be translated into words, and which in common sense terms would be understood as ’something natural’.

In fact, this sensation is far from being natural, since every social group or ‘culture’ -this expression being so ‘commoditied’- classifies what’s eatable in different forms. It is interesting how we somatize a cultural aspect in a way that the rejection of certain types of food ends up being a sensation, unable to be expressed through language, which tends to be interpreted as the ‘most normal’ way of reaction towards certain foods.

That guinea pig meat is delicious, quite lean and very much like oher meats eaten in other places of Latin America -such as chicken- don’t seem to matter. What’s important is the aspect of the food. This point applies to other traditional dishes in Latin America, such as rostro asado in Oruro (that’s a roasted lamb head), ants in Colombia, monkey meat and worms in certain zones of the peruvian forest. Feel free to add other dishes you know in the comments.

In the case of the guinea pig, there are other things to add, like the fact that in the peruvian highlands not only it is considered a delicious dish, but its consumption is usually reserved for important celebrations for the family group. This concept of the guinea pig as a special food differs greatly from the reactions of disgust of those who wouldn’t think of trying the meat, even when they do eat poultry and veal at home.

The photo of the guinea pig, above, was taken from the Puno photo album published in Traveler Hat.

A note published by Guardian Unlimited analyzes the topic of academic blogs, one that interests me for a long time now. It is known that every time more college teachers have blogs, but some are still reticent to this phenomenom. One of the main reasons is fear to be copied. That is, that someone will steal from us some very relevant idea which we planned on using in our works. This excuse is lame; the truth is that relevant ideas do not abound in academic contexts and, usually, its publication in a blog is enough to establish our author status. If someone steals an idea, a post, some text we publish in our site, there’ll always be a reader or someone who will tell us about it. It only takes an e-mail to have the blogger delete the stolen or copied post.

The note in Guardian Unlimited cites the case of Break of day in the Trenches, a blog by Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who follows the development of her thesis. I’ve once had a similar idea, mounting a blog that followed the development of my own Master program thesis on blogs and journalism. But the truth is, I have very little time and two jobs, and keeping two blogs is more than enough.

The note cites the excellent Purse Lips Square Jam by Anne Galloway and the famous Crooked Timber. It’s worth to read it, mainly because it’s not common for a media to cover this kind of issues.

Analysis about tourism, at least from the social sciences field, usually have a very recurrent point: one that establishes relations among the forms in which modernity colonized everyday life by establishing areas of specialization clearly differentiated. Thus, it separated work from leisure, in time and space. The period of leisure and vacations was reserved for a time of the year -summer- at clearly established places. For social agents, both experiences were clearly divided; chores and activities that took place in every space and time differred substantially.

This model has become decadent in hands of the process of undifferentiation the we’re going through. Progressively, the areas of knowledge that in modernity and fordism were clearly separated, have gained a tendency to mix. The processes of labor flexibilization and the new forms of specialization allow for employees to take vacations at any time and gives them a multitasking function. At the same way, touristic spaces are getting closer to those destined to the same everyday tasks. Tourists use the same spaces than workers and employees.

Anyways, we have to avoid being too categorical on these appreciations. It’s one thing that social theory had emphasized the topic of undifferentiation even further, and another that these processes became strictly new. Paris, for example, has always been a city were quotidian and tourism aspects have always been together. Despite this, we can observe a qualitative profounding of this process in the last 25 years. Part of this process of ‘touristification’ of city spaces go together with strategies of recovery of certain parts of urban spaces, impulsing the creation of districts specialized in gastronomy or amusement, a tendency well marked in the last decade -in Buenos Aires it has, as main exponents, zones such as Las Cañitas or Palermo Hollywood.

Also, by the way, there are very interesting relations between the growing mobility of capital and production -with manufacturing going to third parties, such as China- and the processes of change and reconversion of tourism of ex-industrial cities -a topic we’ve discussed in this and this entry.

As you can see, the topic of the relation between changes in the conception of space, time and production in fordism and postfordism can be linked to the general changes in the touristic market. But, since it’s a complex and fairly extense topic, we’ll continue to develop it along the next entries.

The first time I went to Mar del Plata, 1979, when I was 9, I went to the syndicate hotel of my parent’s guild: textile trade union. There were two weeks, in which we had to dinner at a stablished time and respect the schedule. The same thing happened in the city, the most popular and traditional beach in Argentina. There were huge lines for everything, it was like if the entire country decided to head for the beach, where by midday was so crowded you couldn’t fit a pin in the sand, which boiled under the summer sun.

The memories I kept from that trip are not the best: to me, Mar del Plata seems an ugly an uncomfortable place, above all, crowded with people, to the point that I never went back. Marplatenses, don’t get mad, don’t leave insults in the comments, I promise to go back, it’s time to leave my childhood traumas behind. Remember, it’s about my memories, not the objective beauty of the city, or how well you manage the subject of tourism.

Without me wanting to, I’ve had contact with vacational fordism in all its splendor. The one that mobilizes a large number of people to the same places. In this case, the argentinean coast. To manage such a number of tourists requires the intensive use of planification strategies for hotel occupation, food time schedules and spaces, which at the end seems a lot similar to those of people’s everyday life. Fordism stood out for its rigid schedules, repetitive works, concentration of masses in the same place at the same time. And when people went on vacation, they followed the same scheme.

I’ve always had a trouble with accepting as obvious the model of ‘now, in the summer, we’re heading for the coast’. Maybe the childhood trauma has moved me to take the backpacker path: in the summer I headed for Bolivia, Peru, the North of Argentina, anywhere but the usual vacational centers. I even felt uncomfortable when I met a bunch of people in a ‘tourist’ plan, as sometimes happened in Cafayate.

Are Fordist touristic enclaves in decadence? If I glance at my travel practices, and most of my friend’s, I feel tempted to say yes. That we don’t like to go every year to the same place, that we wouldn’t think of buying an appartment at the beach, that as much as possible, we prefer not to visit crowded places. But when I look at the statistics of the latest summer in Argentina and see how the coast burst in its number of tourists, I find it hard to easily assume that my travel practices can be generalized to the rest of the tourist market. It is clear that at the time of choosing where to go for vacations, people opt for what they can afford. An, in many cases, the choice is limited to relatively cheap destinations, where the wide supply of lodging and transportation allows for the existence of affordable prices.

But still, I can’t deal with it: when I think of those images of the boiling beach and people making long lines to eat, I feel the urge to be eating boiling soup in a chilly corner of the argentinean north. Same way as I never got used to work under a fordist regime, it’s going to be difficult for me to be happy with a vacation model that characterizes for crowded places and strict schedules.

The sofisticated travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler dedicates an interesting note to the topic of Low-Fare Revolution. That is, the merging of a growing number of cheap travel deals, in transportation and lodging as well. Unfortunately, for those of us who live in the third world, for now, the consequences of the phenomenom are limited to the north american, asian and european market, although I know of a few low-fare airlines operating in Brasil, Uruguay and Argentina -something we already talked about in a previous post.

In the case of some routes between Asia and Europe, the fall of ticket fares has been really dramatic, going from an average of $300 down to $108, sometimes with incredible ’sales’ of something over $25. But not everything is nice: the note tell us how, as part of the plan to reduce costs, cheap airlines have eliminated almost completely food and accomodations during the flight. Besides, they are very strict in penalizing excess baggage. Everything they do just to save fuel.

The note can be found at this site.

In terms of Pierre Bourdieu, What makes the cultural capital of a traveler? To begin with, and quite obviously, it’s necessary to establish the body that will allow us to build a minimum capital of entry to this field, and it consists on travelling at least a few times. It’s not about going to the beach, in a tourist plan; but it’s necessary to visit less usual destinations or to use transportation forms closer to those of the backpacker or his lifestyle. Remember that a good part of the representations that a traveler has of himself are also strategies of differentiation respect to the tourist.

Now, having traveled a lot, would that be enough? Of course not. It’s essential to reinforce this capital of the traveler, to take some other initiatives: to elaborate stories on travels; to focus in economic enterprises related to the transfer; to build an interesting network of contacts, obtained thanks to the trips to different cities and countries. This last point is interesting, since it’s linked to the topic of social capital; the idea of how to exploit this contacts network with the objective of getting to know better the places one visit -by having a closer contact to the natives- and even saving in lodging, by having a place to stay.

As we can see, the traveler’s capital is an intricated net related to his practical needs. In one side, to build a social capital, a net of relations with people; a cultural capital, the knowledge of certain places of the world and forms of transportation, so as to move around more efficiently; and an economic capital, the need to count on the necessary amount of money to be able to split time between travel, buying objects and afford the expenses of taking pictures and videos.

I know some people will say: doesn’t it sound way too rational? where are the enthusiasm for moving around that characterizes travelers? Well, that’s part of his capital, too. A traveler will very unlikely be known as such if he lacks enthusiasm -or, at least, some fondness- when telling the stories of his trips by certain countries. Or if he doesn’t read the reality of his environment and compares it with other realities he’s seen in other places. Or if he doesn’t elaborate stories from the objects he’s bought in his trips or the pictures he’s taken.

Or, to put it in terms of those conversations one has seen, so many times: the affirmations of many people on how they would be unable to travel under slightly adverse conditions. “If I don’t count on a comfortable hotel and good roads, then I just won’t travel”, these convinced tourists would say. The traveler, simply, can’t help to smile first, and then observe slightly indifferent this kind of statement. Deep down, he knows, the downsides of the trips are forgotten in the long term, and what’s left is not the awful roads we ride on a really old bus, or the nights we spent under the rain in the middle of nowhere. More likely, what subsist are the memories of why we traveled to those places and what we saw in there. What took us to get to our destination is part of the anecdote, but not the center of the story. If anything, it adds a plus to the trip.

To travel is not everything, the products related to the trip, its form of incorporing movement to its life is also essential. At the end, some people make of the journey even a stageset at home, where they hang ornaments bought in far away locations, maps, pictures of his trips and, eventually, other memorabilia, such as beer bottle’s labels, posters, old passports and other documents. Not only a traveler on the road, also a traveler at home.

Today I got a message through the list of iGUST, of tourism and geography, about the begging of a research work on the relations between tourism and poverty, which is being conduced by Regina Scheyvens at Massey University at New Zealand. Basically, the interest is focused on the topic of pro-poor tourism, or tours offered to first world habitants by several countries, where they can be directly in contact with environments where very poor people live. This is the presentation in the e-mail, where they describe what they’re looking to analyze and the works they’re interested in receiving: “I am keen to organise a session which includes both conceptual pieces on poverty and tourism and case studies (e.g. favela or ghetto tours; justice tours involving development work). There is poverty throughout the world, so contributions need not to be limited to those working on ‘third world’ issuesâ€?.

A few months ago, some argentinean media covered the case of what they called turismo piquetero or “picketeer tourism”. Basically, it said how some young europeans lived for a while with a family member of an organisation of picketeers and, transitorily, being part of unemployment protests marchs that are actually taking place in Argentina. Surely, there must be other similar experiences; if someone knows of any, leave your comment.

We have long talked about the problem of what can be touristified. The tragedy, landscapes, history, and even poverty -something few would have believed- can be touristified in the name of the search of an authentic experience of contact with others. For those of us who are eskeptical about this search of authenticity -not because we believe it’s fake, but because we understand that rather than something authentic, there are practices and different ways of living it- the interesting point is how can living in poverty be aestheticised. It’s obvious that even this can be put in scene: several small populations in Latin America know perfectly how to present themselves as authentic in front of an auditorium of tourists, antropologists and government officers. This implies the strategic use of clothes, ornaments and an environment set or preserved to this visitors, who understand that authentic is, precisely, what they consider authentic. The funniest thing is that, later, they complain on how they saw was just a show.

Instead of giving an aesthetic treatment, poverty deserves to be resolved. Of course, we all know that. Meanwhile, some simply opt for the mounting of a scenery, in touristic terms. And the truth is, it’s a good thing to have a research work on what are the discursive strategies used to build and rebuild these representations.