Radical hospitality and the antidote to tourism | Chris Christou
This is an interview I had with Chris Christou a couple of months ago. Chris and I have been collaborating together for the past four years on intercultural exchanges, tours, and also reflecting on our position towards the concept of “buen vivir” of peasant communities in latin america. Chris is the host of “The end of tourism” podcast and main facilitator of Oaxaca Profundo Sessions.
Vinik Juré. Most of the time we take tourism for granted, but traveling hasn’t always been like this. What is the origin of tourism as we know it?
Chris Christou. So, the history of tourism, at least modern tourism, runs some 300 to 400 years old. It began in what today is Britain, Europe. Those trips are referred to as the Grand Tours. They were particular kinds of trips undertaken by elite males, usually in adolescence. They were educational and to a large degree secular trips to the places that were considered at the time the cultural capitals of Europe. Paris had its fashion, food and etiquette; whereas Rome and Venice had architecture, history and philosophy. There are a lot of other cities involved but those were the main places. The most important reason for going was to educate oneself in the context of an aristocratic elite male identity, and what that identity meant.
And then, slowly, over the course of time during the 19th century rail travel expanded. In the 20th century, there was a massive expansion of long-distance and cheap travel: passenger airlines, boats, I should say the steam engine boat. This basically opened up the world to tourism. Although there was tourism before WWII it largely happened as a peacetime industry. So the international infrastructure to move wartime industry was converted into peacetime transportation. This allowed tourism to begin throughout most western nation states.
Over the last 70 years we see this expanding to all corners of the world.
VJ. What are the consequences of a tourism model born out of industrialization and war?
CC. So yeah, global tourism couldn't have existed without war infrastructure. It had to come from somewhere. It had to have an inheritance or a lineage. We could say that if war was the economy of bad times, tourism is the economy of peacetime, but they're not separate. One comes out of the other. That infrastructure began 400 years ago with the beginning of the Grand Tours. At the same time, the global pathways came out of empire, of war. As it did with the Romans thousands of years ago and every other empire you could imagine.
Historically, tourism has been what I like to call the trojan horse of globalization. Economically, tourism is the world's largest industry because it incorporates many other industries like transportation, accommodation, food. Culturally, tourism can be a way for people to showcase their culture, their traditions, their foodways, their lifeways. One of the consequences of tourism, and especially the search for culture, is that the first casualty in that search is the thing that tourists go in search of. In other words, people's manner of wanting to find culture and places, often means that they subvert the very thing that would educate them by virtue of their presence on the scene.
It happens because of local people and tourists. The former wish to share their culture, the latter arrive to experience it. Most of the time, tourists can't understand the long term consequences of their presence in the scene. Tourists do not stick around long enough to witness their consequence in that place. Local people find this difficult to consciously see and inhabit when it takes generations to occur. If it doesn't take generations, which is often the case today, I wonder about the real heartbreak and that is necessary among local people to take into consideration that they are also responsible for those consequences. I.e. the transformation of their culture into spectacle, into souvenirs, into products.
VJ. There are mixed feelings about tourism for people with liberal values. In large part it is clearly a source of economic growth. But it can also be a tool to exploit land, customs and values for capital exploitation. What are the characteristics of current conventional tourism?
CC. People who go on prepackaged all-inclusive styles of vacations are the majority of tourists in the world. The majority of tourists are usually traveling for a week or 10 days. They're usually going on planned trips by tourism agencies. Basically, in these trips people shoot off in airplanes halfway across the world. They arrive generally as complete strangers to each place, but usually with a kind of protective bubble. This might be the hotel they're staying at or a guide, someone who will translate for them and take them out throughout the course of the week.
This conventional tourism, as you call it, generates a huge amount of money. The money usually goes into the hands of the elite, the owners of the hotels who also own the restaurants. Businesses build a lot of alliances over the years among other agencies that are willing to pay commissions to keep doing that. Most of the largest players in the industry are not local in relation to the places that tourists go to. That's not to say that local parties don't exist. Many times, those in charge are the local elite.
It's important to point out that the ways in which the tourism industry is created and maintained by ensuring thatthe vast majority of the people in the place are excluded, economically, culturally. So, tourists only see a very small amount of what a culture is like. Often those images are stereotypes. For example, a lot of Western people like to go to Jamaica because they think it's a place where all they do is smoke pot, and listen to Bob Marley. But that's obviously not the case. The tourism industry largely funnels money to develop these stereotypical images to get tourists to come to these places, specifically for this false image of a place. Then they funnel the tourist dollar through businesses that support only the industry. So there's very few independent economies that are supported by the tourism industry itself.
VJ. As you say, it is not only about local owners. Sometimes the local elite is disregarded as playing a part in the system. Sometimes people don’t have a lot of arguments towards the local elite, but still in society there is a feeling of unrest. What about that?
CC. Tourism happens within an economic model. The places where culture still exists and the places where tourists come from all around the world have a specific capital model. Is one where most of the local people already live in. Which means that there is nothing that stops locals from doing to their own culture what foreigners do, in the form of extraction, whether that extraction be mineral, biological, or cultural extraction in the form of souvenirs. As unfortunate as it is to say, this includes learning experiences as well. The question inevitably becomes how can local people honor their traditions of hospitality without appropriating those traditions themselves, without turning into a spectacle for consumption?
VJ. Let's talk about to the notion of hospitality, which in a way is also the essence of tourism. People with honest intentions want to go to other places to learn from the experiences of other people. What about native people's hospitality, where does that fit in the system as a whole?
CC. In the English-speaking world the understanding of hospitality has largely become industrial. For example, I could say that I used to ‘work in hospitality’ in Canada. It means that I used to work in the hospitality industry. So there’s no distinction amongst people like me between hospitality and industry. That's often how it's referred to, as the hospitality industry. But I would suggest that that term is an oxymoron. I mean that those two things cannot exist together. As soon as you have industrial hospitality, actual lived hospitality no longer exists.
We can try to make the distinction between this and the standardized, globalized form of hospitality. I'll give you an example: I used to work for one of the largest hotel chains in the world. They would have training, manuals, and booklets that they would give to you on how to proceed 'hospitably' in that job. Those training manuals are the same everywhere in the world for that hotel chain, but translated into different languages. The reason for that is not simply standardization of technique. The notion of industrial hospitality comes from the customer. In that context, there isn’t anything that you're taught whether as a Canadian, a Mexican, a Chinese person of hospitality that is your own. It all comes from the notion that wherever tourists go they should get what they need and want in the exact same way. Expectation, always based on their expectations. Industry directs hospitality through this lens of comfort, a need of satisfaction or a need of gratification.
What’s beautiful and fascinating about meeting different cultures is that local hospitality is undertaken in order to honor the place of the guests, at the table or at the door of people.
There are always cultural differences between people. One can honor or ignore and corrupt those differences. What happens with community-led tourism or indigenous hospitality is that it is often unlimited in scope. I'm talking about the hospitality of our grandparents who were campesinos and farmers as well. I remember going back to my father's village for the very first time. I sat down with his aunt, a woman who I had never met before in my life. She opened her door to me, she prepared everything she could in that moment - food and drink. Even though we couldn't speak the same language she did this for me. Even though I was part of her extended family, and was very much a stranger still she did this for me. There's a sense of unlimited hospitality on the part of indigenous people, or rooted people. Tourists arrive with expectations of what that hospitality should look like, as well as expectations of what they should be receiving, and what they shouldn't be receiving.
Then, limitless hospitality meets limitless expectation, and something has to give. Something has to bend so that relationship doesn't break. This has been the history of modern tourism for 50 to 70 years. When indigenous people open up their doors to foreigners whether they be from other countries or the big city, those people arrive with expectations. Slowly, what happens is that local people have to start putting limits on their hospitality. Because if they don't, then the expectation of the foreigner will destroy those traditions. In the form of the hamburger, air conditioning, plumbing, bars. You name it.
Without having a lived memory of what radical or rooted hospitality looks like, tourists can't recognize it as such. Not as the people they’re visiting do. So there's this kind of battle between modern expectation and traditional hospitality. One has to give way to the other.
VJ. What would you say is the impact of the kind of tourism where we don't expect our hosts to have limits?
CC. These things are often discussed in terms of positive and negative impacts. The question that we have to ask is positive for who? for whom? positive for what? positive for when? positive for where? Because the things that create a benefit may be an economic benefit for people in the short-term.
I interviewed Deborah McLaren recently, she wrote this book 30 years ago about the impact of tourism. It was crazy to read that book during the pandemic because of the ideas she had written 30 years ago. Basically, she was trying to get people to realize what's going on and change their understanding. Nothing’s changed. She describes how, with tourism, you have this kind of honeymoon phase. Everything's beautiful and you're in love, and nothing could possibly change this. Then after a short time, things start to change. It's inevitable. In the first phase of tourism people are making a lot of money. They see all these potential and possible changes for the better in their culture and their communities. The second phase is when things start to reach a kind of peak or plateau. Things are still really good. But at the same time things don't really get better staying the same. You have growth, which means there's more people vying for the same economic benefits and more people coming in, more tourists. More changes in the culture, more changes in ecology and so on. Then you get to a point where there's too much competition. Suddenly, there's hostility. At first that hostility is often shared between local people. Something like, “you can't have your business 40 feet into the street.” "You’ve got to put limits on this." “Everyone's got to share in the profits, right?” And all that. There is too much competition. The place stops looking like itself and starts to look more like a shopping mall. Eventually people don't want to go there. The place loses its sheen, loses its shimmer, loses its vibrancy. Maybe there's less tourism. Finally, that hostility is aimed at tourists as well, because there's not enough of them or they don't want to spend their money in the way that they did in the past.
So that's one example of how there are these cycles that often go with the boom-and-bust of tourism, or the growth and diminishment cycles of economic growth or development in a place. The impacts are so wide-ranging that it's difficult to consider them all at once. We have the environmental impacts of traveling to a place. We have the environmental impacts of developing massive resort structures or hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, parking lots, airports, and all the rest.
VJ. What does this kind of development bring to native communities which have anoother understanding of nature and ecology?
CC. Development displaces local people. The vast majority of the time, there are already people living there in subsistence forms of living, meaning they don't need those things. They can't afford them either even if they wanted to. They live according to their means and what that place endows and entrusts them with. When that happens, people who have been farmers or fishermen for hundreds of years lose that. They lose land, time and the capacity to go fishing for their own lifestyle. All of a sudden, they're fishing for the restaurants, for the hotels. Not only that, they lose the spiritual ecology inherited from their ancestors regarding their relationships between themselves and their crops and their soils; between their manners of fishing, the fish and the ocean, and all of the ritual activities that would go on between the men and other men, between the women and other women and between the men and the women.
These thoughts and experiences of the world are co-opted into a way of turning people into homo economicus, essentially, a modern paying person. Culture is lost because of that. Most often, these are things that for most people took hundreds of years, if not thousands, to develop and maintain. So when these things are lost, they're not coming back. It's as simple as that. They're not coming back.
VJ. What do you mean by radical hospitality? Is it something like let's stop tourism? Or let's travel in another way, with other goals? Tell me.
CC. I made the inference earlier that what I call hospitality industry should be referred as industrial hospitality. To be clear about it, it is an oxymoron. I sometimes occupy the term radical hospitality as a kind of way of imagining or dreaming of industrial hospitality’s subversion. Something like its antidote. We have the word radical which means rooted, in place. To engage in radical hospitality means the capacity to be hospitable from your ways of being in place, of being rooted. It comes from your ways of being in community with people.
The question is not how, but where do you learn this? Consider that hospitality is always local in nature. It could never be taught unless you lived in the place it was crafted in. The manner of being hospitable in a place depends on your willingness to be there, and to live there, and to stay there.
It's also an antidote to globalization because it says that you can't export this. So when I speak about radical hospitality I do so very, very carefully. I understand that it's not another label to slap onto things and say this is “sustainable”, “green”, “regenerative”. We can’t do this because rooted hospitality means that you have to engage with the place, community and times that you're in and where you are, not elsewhere.
I spoke of radical, in its etymological roots. Literally meaning “in place.” The word hospitality comes to us from a very old word that once meant both “host” and “guest.” It described a relationship. A way of being with people in a place in which your manner of being hospitable depended on everyone around you being hospitable. Being a faithful witness, a good citizen to your place and time. That means you can't do that everywhere, you can't do that anywhere. You can only do it where you are.
And so, that profoundly and necessarily challenges the notions of industrial hospitality that says we can do this anywhere and it can be the same everywhere. Industrial hospitality is globalization by another name. Radical hospitality, learning your place, and learning your time is an antidote to that. Being in community, learning the neighborhood, and being willing to know what it means to be a guest in that place. Even if the neighbourhood is yours. That's the kind of resistance and resilience to globalization that I think is needed in our time.
