Those of us who work in the social science field, with such a chaotic subject as tourism, tend to focus on representations. That is, our concern are the forms on which certain practices can legitimate, become common, articulate with particular interests. But in our field there’s a tendency to extralimit on the understanding of the world as a representation, simply.

Below, a text of the antropologist Radcliffe-Brown, taken from a chapter of Renato Rosaldo’s Cultura y Verdad (culture and truth), “Después del objetivismo” (after the objectivism):

“When two friends or relatives meet after being apart, the interrupted social relation betweeen them is about to renovate itself. This social relation implies or depends on the existence of a specific link of solidarity between them. The ritual of crying (along with the subsecuent exchange of presents) is the affirmation of this link. The ritual, one should remember, is mandatory, forces the participants to act as if they felt certain emotions and, to some degree, it creates these emotions between them.”

Another text taken from Rosaldo’s, this time it belongs to the antropologist Jack Goody:

“We expect on a man to show great grief for the death of a young child”

Rosaldo is very clear on his critics to this kind of descriptions, which tend to conceive emotional situations as mere rituals that “represent” pain. ¿Don’t people get emotional when they see a loved one after a long time? ¿What does he mean by “we expect” on a man to cry for his dead son? What’s interesting is that these etnografic descriptions are applied only to other societies. An antropologist would never describe the pain of an american parent as “it is a given thing that he has to show as if he felt pain”. We take for granted that he feels the pain. This is an interesting example of how do certain etnocentric clasifications operate: they describe the other in a way that it would be unacceptable to apply to our clasifications of what’s real.

Rosaldo’s statement goes even further: ¿why do we validate the etnographic method as a way to describe the others if, when we read an etnography about our own group, we find it untrue, even unreal? There are several ways to address the question. We can argue that the analyst’s language is not the same of the group he analyzes. On the other hand, we can recognize that, in many cases, we apply categories of world comprehension to the group of study that we’d never use in our own group. Understanding any sign of pain as a simple representation of pain is one of them. Analyzing the others, taking into consideration our group as the parameter of what’s normal, is another.

Just like with language, social sciences have serious difficulties when referring to and describing emotions. It’s good to aknowledge this limitation. What’s bad is trying to replace emotions by representations, simply because the latter aren’t easier to formalize and analyze.

Bibliography:
Rosald, Renato (1991) “Después del objetivismo” in Cultura y Verdad. Nueva Propuesta de Análisis Social. México, Grijalbo.

For a long time, capitalism was based on property rights over physical assets. However, tourism was never too affected by this matter. The sale of “packages”, transportation and hotel acommodations implied that a company possesed physical assets that would not sell but “lend” for a limited period of time. They charged for the “right to access” to temporary possession of a bus seat, a hotel room, the entrance to a determined place.

But tourism is not alone in this. As Jerome Rifkin in La era del acceso says, the whole economy has begun to transform into a huge field ruled by the charge of “access right”. Things that used to be sold permanently, today are being reached by the concept of leasing. In America, for example, a good percentage of the population rents a car from a certain company, pay per month, and after a determined period of time, get a new model. Instead of the definitive transfer of property, we find here a service based on periodic payments.

Something similar is trying to be replicated by companies that sell music through the internet. Before, buying an album meant its content was our property. Now, online stores lend songs: we can pay monthly to download a certain amount of songs, but if we stop paying, all the material becomes useless. Then, what’s relevant is that we can afford our monthly payments. Companies assure themselves fixed incomes and, of course, a lot more money to distribute.

In tourism, as we said before, none of this is new; access rights have always been charged for. But lately, we’ve seen how more and more things are touristified, turned attractive within a segmented market, thus being seen as part of the market supply. Museums of all kinds, tourist-oriented offers diversified to the maximum: it’s almost impossible to think what kind of human experience can not be seen or treated as merchandise.

Experience, at least in the touristic field, has long been commercialized as merchandise. The great news of this last decade is the vast extension of practices that could be merchandised by the industry, converted into packages, centered in a stage that treats the relation between the industry, natives and tourists only in function to its commercial profit.

One of the strongest tendencies in the Internet is tagging. It consists of a method of classification that allows the users to identify files trough key words and then share this knowledge with the rest of net users. In no long, a huge base of knowledge is built, classified not by machines but by the intelligence of thousands of people. The first application to use this method intensively was Del.Icio.Us, but today there are many excellent examples of tagging that go beyond social bookmarks, such as Flickr.

Within the academic world, two sites are intensively using tagging as a method to build databases related to different disciplines. The first one is CiteULike, in which users can store the url of academic papers and documents found in the Internet for later easy finding. There’s a huge number of registers and the search by key word gives an interesting number of results. There’s also an interesting functionality: the possibility to export registers to Bibtex or Endnote format, used to generate bibliography databases and relatively common among the academics.

One of the inconvenients is that many of stored papers belong to pay-to-access magazines. Of course, if you’re logging in from an american college that pays for the service this is not an inconvenience, but from this side of the world it is an important access barrier. The restricted access of this academic publications is seriously affecting the impact and circulation of ideas within the academic circle. They’re making money, of course, but -I ask myself- at what future cost?

An example of the functioning of CiteULike can be seen at this site, which reunites contributions to the tag tourism. You can find more here: turismo; travel.

Another site is Connotea. Visually less attractive, it has the same functioning method of CiteULike: users classify contents trough key words, that help to reunite the contents on specific pages. At least for now, it has a lot less in content than its competitor, as you can see in the tags tourism and travel. Also, it has less academic articles and it lacks the export to Bibtex or EndNote function.

In both cases, they give us RSS feeds for every one of the tags generated. If you’re interested in adding them to your RSS clients, such as Bloglines or Feedreader, here go the URLs:

Connotea Travel Tag
Connotea Tourism Tag
CiteULike Travel Tag
CiteULike Viajes Tag
CiteULike Tourism Tag

By the way, both services provide bookmarklets that can be placed at the personal bar of Firefox, Opera or at Internet Explorer links. This way, we can save an address into a paper with just a click.