What is it about?

Long before we arrive somewhere, we already have ideas about what that place and its people will be like. These expectations come from films, photographs, advertising, travel stories, guidebooks, social media and many other sources. This article calls these shared ideas“tourism imaginaries” and explores how they circulate around the world. Such imaginaries help inspire people to travel and influence what tourists expect to see and experience. But they also affect how destinations and local people present themselves to visitors. Using examples from Indonesia and Tanzania, the article shows that tourism imaginaries are not harmless fantasies. They can reproduce old stereotypes and unequal relationships, but they can also be questioned, adapted and changed through encounters between tourists and the people they meet.

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Why is it important?

Tourism is often discussed as an industry involving travel, accommodation, attractions and economic exchange. This article highlights something less tangible but equally powerful: tourism depends on imagination. People rarely choose destinations without already having images and stories about them in mind. Tourism businesses actively draw upon such ideas, while destinations and tourism workers learn to anticipate and sometimes perform what visitors expect. This matters because many apparently innocent tourism images have long histories. Representations of places as exotic, timeless, untouched, sensual or primitive may draw upon stereotypes inherited from colonialism and other unequal encounters. When these images are repeated through advertising, popular culture, guidebooks and tourism performances, they can influence how entire places and populations are perceived. The article therefore shows that imaginaries are not simply ideas inside people's heads. They have consequences in the real world. They shape identities, tourism practices, places and relationships between visitors and local communities. At the same time, the article avoids portraying tourists or local people as passive victims of these representations. Tourism imaginaries circulate, but they are also translated, negotiated, contested and transformed along the way. Understanding how this happens offers tourism researchers and practitioners an opportunity not only to recognize persistent stereotypes, but also to develop alternative stories and representations that encourage more equitable and meaningful encounters.

Perspectives

For me, one of the enduring fascinations of tourism is that we travel not only through geographical space, but also through worlds of imagination. Long before reaching a destination, we have encountered stories, images and expectations about it. Some are obvious, while others have become so familiar that we barely recognize them as culturally or historically produced. What interested me when writing this article was precisely the power of these imaginaries to travel. An image of an exotic paradise, an “authentic” traditional community or an untouched landscape can circulate for decades, sometimes centuries, moving between literature, art, film, advertising, guidebooks, tourist photographs and everyday conversations. Along the way, its origins may become almost impossible to recognize. Yet the image continues to influence what people expect to encounter. My ethnographic research in Indonesia and Tanzania also made clear to me that this process is never entirely one-directional. The people whom tourists come to see know something about tourists' expectations. Tour guides and other tourism workers interpret those expectations, sometimes reproduce them, sometimes play with them, and sometimes distance themselves from the identities they are expected to represent. This makes the tourism encounter much more complex than a simple opposition between powerful visitors and passive locals. At the same time, I do not think we should underestimate the power of inherited imaginaries. Some representations make particular differences seem natural and timeless. They may even require people to appear less mobile, less modern or less cosmopolitan than they actually are in order to satisfy tourist expectations of “authenticity.” This is where imagination intersects very directly with questions of mobility, identity and inequality. For me, the challenge is therefore not to imagine tourism without imaginaries. That would be impossible. The challenge is to become more conscious of the imaginaries through which we see others, to understand where these ideas come from, and to create space for alternative ways of imagining people and places.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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This page is a summary of: Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach, Annals of Tourism Research, April 2012, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2011.10.004.
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