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  The tourist community as a social and political laboratory

Prof. Bernard DEBARBIEUX - Director of the TEO Laboratory, Institute of Alpine Geography, Grenoble University, France

 

 

Which are the social groups who today mix within tourist destinations ? What is a local society in a tourist region ? How is the local authority and political legitimacy viewed in these locations ? These are questions to which we often think we have the answers all wrapped up.

In industrial or post-industrial countries, the most common answers to these questions, inherited from days gone by and incidentally, quite ideological, constitute more problems than the relevant elements of analysis today. We would like to demonstrate this here by looking at the consequences of this analysis in the area of local politics.

Traditionally, the question of social relations in tourist resorts is brought back to the relationships held by tourists with the local inhabitants. The latter, long since referred to as natives or autochthonous, were essentially designed, in accordance with the etymology of these two terms, according to their local ancestry and the age of this ancestry. The former were mainly considered vehicles for urban culture and the leisure-oriented society. For the former then, leisure, revenue and short breaks, sometimes restricted to simple visits and sometimes "circular movements" as the original "tour" practice suggests. For the latter group, labour, the long duration of successive generations, the on-site quasi-geological sedimentation, the slow construction of landscapes and the patient development of traditions.

Stereotype for stereotype : no match.

Although this view did match a certain reality in the early days of tourist development, it seems more and more caricatured and obsolete today.

Caricatures

Speaking of caricatures, the iconography and historiography of tourist destinations have both had their hours of glory. How many stereotypes for natives (the gentle brute, the proud mountain dweller, the keeper of tradition, the primitive people etc.) and how many tourist stereotypes have adorned the more or less promotional and more or less analytical documents !

This caricaturisation of the native has prospered all the better since it contributed to the development of images and tourist products to which tourists are said to be partial. This caricaturisation of the tourist has served just as much to define mass consumption type products as to expose the minor and major failings of these fleeting visitors to tourist locations. Stereotypes are therefore not only a commodity for thought; they also serve to structure the tourist activity itself. And, in return, they have certainly influenced the relationships established with one another, at the risk of founding social relations on social representations that do not represent anyone. The defiance shown by permanent residents with.regard to the classification as "autochthonous" and the matching defiance shown by the visitors to the term "tourist", are probably signs of the inadequate nature of these binary and often Manichean representations.

In this context, the relations in question, when perceived as a social problem, liken tourism or the tourist culture to a disturbance of local societies.

Obsolescence

The obsolescence of these representations forms another of their limitations, all the more serious because it endures. To see this, it is simply a matter of comparing the social and cultural situations observed today. So what is observed today ?

1. The fact that both tourist and native increasingly balk at recognising themselves in the terms has already been pointed out. The experiences and identities of those referred to by this type of label are undoubtedly far more complex than the stereotyped images would have us believe. This merits discussion in a little more detail.

2. Tourist practices differ enormously and to such an extent as to complicate the task of those seeking to define the thing itself. The holiday model, extremely convenient as it is easy to identify, is past. So-called tourist holidays are becoming shorter, splitting up and multiplying. Distinctions, though sometimes poor, can be made in their motivations and conditions, between the day trip, spending the weekend with friends and the courtesy visit to grandparents or a cousin. There will certainly always be visitors from afar who love to take a week's holiday. That however is a condition which does not necessarily hold a fascination for others. In other words, the tourist is no longer an interchangeable being. And what is more, he increasingly dislikes being seen as such.

3. Some tourists tend to turn into locals. Their holidays become longer and are repeated ; more and more frequently they see the benefit of owning accommodation in which to spend these repetitive breaks. And sometimes, the swaps its "secondary" status to become the "primary" residence. He who has long been accounted for as a tourist becomes an official resident and sometimes even a citizen of the area. Or perhaps his residence, long since secondary, becomes the primary residence for the next generation or the next occupant. We are beginning to gauge the amplitude of this phenomenon within the closest tourist regions to major urban areas (the Alps, certain parts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, the central German mountains etc.). The reduction of working hours in France and the increasing incidence of working from home in many European countries are there for a purpose.

4. From their point of view, the local populations, long perceived as homogenous, are filled with extremely dissimilar groups: there, we come across families still said to be of local roots, as though their identity is summed up by this metaphor of secular taking root; we also see there new residents come to find work and earn money, in a nutshell, to take advantage of the intense monetary circulation which characterises this type of place; and there are those who have simply moved to these parts because of things discovered when they were tourists.

5. Add to that the fact that then the "natives" from here become, at some point, tourists there ; then, the roles reverse and the city dwellers, Parisians on the banks of the Seine, Romans on their balconies, become the involuntary subjects of the tourist clichés which they themselves previously perpetuated.

Thus, to sum up, local and recreational practices are diversifying, as are the identities of those enjoying them. Under these conditions, the tourist destination is no longer the simple location we like to imagine, the simple location where settled residents rub shoulders with hurried and wealthy travellers. The tourist destination has become a complex social environment, a laboratory where multiple mobilities mix with multiple identities, different methods of working with leisure and the primary with the secondary, in a complex manner. Those who meticulously accept the imaginary roles of the tourist and the native are fewer and fewer. The differences are becoming less marked; the subtleties are becoming more distinct. Today, it is more a matter of being more or less resident, more or less transient, more or less primary, more or less secondary, more or less legitimate and more or less intruding.

From that, I conclude that it is perhaps time to rethink our collective identities and our social roles in view of these changing tourist, professional and residential practices. More generally, I think that what we are seeing in and around these tourist practices is just one indication among others of deeper and more fundamental changes affecting our societies as a whole. The very nature of tourist activities and destinations however enables us to see there a place favourable to this type of indication and therefore a laboratory well suited to their observation and analysis.

Live together, appoint representatives

The foregoing analysis has numerous implications. Here, we will concentrate on the political implications as this is the subject of the present round table.

In France, as in many other democratic countries, members of the local councils, in particular the mayor, are elected by their fellow citizens. The definitions and criteria vary from country to country but generally, the recurrent criterion is that of residence. When the status of and reasons for residence differ from person to person however, when the images are blurred, the sense of delegation is complicated. The mayor of a tourist town and its councillors are elected by an electorate that is more heterogeneous the older its tourism traditions and the larger the town. The electorate puts descendants from families that have lived there for generations side by side with new arrivals and secondary residents of various nationalities.

The election of a municipal council for a tourist town is today no longer as much a question of families, those entitled to demand the authochthony after the fashion of the Inuits from Nunawuk or the Australian aborigines. An electoral roll which lists only this electorate and is based purely on legitimacy and the long duration of local roots is doomed to failure all the more because the town is a tourist one.

Electing a council is less and less a question of family, of clans sometimes, and more and more a question of places and people who have very different relations to the place : for some, this town is full of heritage and family memories; for others, it represents leisure and a living environment and for others still, a place of economic and financial opportunities. This is however a challenge facing numerous municipalities: confronting the growing diversity of relations that residents have with their place of civic residence.

New ways of looking at the "general good" and the role of town councils

The new societies of tourist towns would undoubtedly benefit, in order to truly be a society, from working to identify the new "general good" appropriate for them. This general good can not be perceived purely in terms of national heritage: the true collective heritage, that which supposes an experience of a past and a memory lived by can only be enjoyed by descendants of the oldest families living there. Although the interest sometimes shown by the new arrivals in this inherited heritage is obvious, to them it remains an abstract idea which does not immerse them fully in these local societies as they remain spectators. Neither can this general good be perceived solely in terms of the type of resource developed by companies as a growing number of residents (the recently installed retired, residents that work in neighbouring towns etc.) are not part of this local economic system. The true general good lies in the environment, the living environment and the landscape which is the common context for the lives of the residents.

This, in my opinion, is why local councillors would do well to perceive their role more and more as being of a territorial nature. The jurisdictions afforded them by legislative and administrative texts concern a clearly delimited area. Their electors are the residents of this same territory. And this same territory is what those residents share as naturally as possible. It is therefore in town councils' best interests to cultivate this primarily territorial role given to them and to acquire a growing range of territorial skills.

Cultivating the territorial skills of town councils for tourist communities

The territorial skills of town councils for tourist communities fall into three types. They concern :

1. the implementation or optimisation of an economic climate favourable to businesses.

2. the implementation or optimisation of tools, places and times for social exchange. This is a matter of enabling the various social groups comprising their electorate, but also travelling visitors, to interact and collaborate, where applicable, on collective projects.

3. the implementation and management of tools for functional territory management. Town planning, equipment, road infrastructures and educational establishments are all concrete forms of this management. Traditionally, they call to mind the duties and abilities of town councils in Europe.

4. the management of landscapes and the natural environment and living environment. The interest of town councils in these matters has been increasing for decades in Europe. Tourist towns are affected even more than others by this dimension of action as there it is a matter of tourist resources and residential capital gains for many groups to whose wellbeing they must contribute. Furthermore, for the oldest families, the landscape has true value in terms of cultural heritage.

These abilities correspond to the same areas of expertise generally recognised in local communities in Europe. Until now however they have been insufficiently developed due to the insufficient attention paid to them by the local authorities. All in all, they can make the tourist community, its material and symbolic resources, the associated values, the main speaker in the local political campaign and the legitimate speaker for this campaign territorial.insofar as it concerns all residents, regardless of their social characteristics. It then falls to each social group to work out, by distinguishing it, the type of relationship and the type of significance it creates with this territory.