The "exotic other"

What draws a tourist to a foreign land? I've been mulling over this question after attending the unveiling ceremony of the Madaba Tourism Enterprise Development Project (MTEDP). Four tourism products were introduced at the event including a number of new and improved tourism businesses.

Madaba is ancient. It stretches way back to biblical times and beyond. It is best known for its Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics, especially a large Byzantine-era mosaic map of Palestine and the Nile delta.

The City of Mosaics is in a bit of disrepair. There is traffic congestion, a lack of green space and no real outdoor area for children to play in or citizens to enjoy. So Madaba is getting a face lift. Unfortunately (a mon avis), the greater reason for this augmentation is geared towards making the city more attractive and accessible to tourists. In many ways, I think the reference to cosmetic surgery is apt in that it portrays the superficiality, the constructed reality, of what the city is becoming. Quoted from an informational video of the MTEDP, "Developing tourism human resources depends on people being aware of how tourists expect them to behave."

Madaba is being used as a guinea pig for a more expansive project in Jordan. I shutter to think that what is happening in Madaba could eventually be the fate of many Jordanian communities. The ultimate goal of the project is to increase the visiting period of a tourist from a few hours to several days, so that the city may reap the benefits of the cash flow exchange. The many side effects are problematic, however and of course, the project is funded by USAID.

I don't want this post to be misleading or one-sided, although I have no illusions that it won't be. The tourism project does benefit some of the citizens. I interviewed several of the Madaba entrepreneurs the project was supporting. One man owned the first hotel in the city, the Mariam Hotel. While still family run, it was growing exponentially. He was extremely excited about the advent of responsible tourism in the area and the chance for tourists to experience and understand rural life in the Hashemite Kingdom. He truly believed, and cited examples, of how tourism was breaking down cultural barriers. Another woman who owned the Virgina Mary Mosaic Workshop had been a housewife eager to find work outside the home, but unable financially to support herself. The project offered her a chance to create her own mosaic store where she employs women from the community. As her business grows, she has plans to expand the workshop to help women entrepreneurs in the area as well as employ handicapped women.

Furthermore, in conjunction with the tourism project, some 36 architecture and urban planning students from Germany, Iraq, Palestine and Jordan are working on a joint planning workshop to develop an integrated spatial planning programme seeking to bring an end to the city's increasing urban problems. Quoted in the Oct. 31, 2007 issue of the Jordan Times about the spatial planning project: “What we are trying to come up with is how to develop Madaba’s historical context while at the same time respecting its traditions,” Cooperation Project Manager Christa Reicher explained.

But like the MTEDP, the spatial planning project is reconstructing the city to cater to the needs of tourists. That same article states "Several Madaba citizens expressed their discontent with the local authorities, telling the students that the municipality prioritises tourism, while disregarding their needs." This complaint is visible in the new and improved tourism businesses that were beginning to line the streets

The new shops resembled a planned community in the US. We've all been to those mind-numbing phenomenons where the McDonald's is the same building as the Van Maur's, all the colors are some soothing mauve or dark green, store front signs the same height and in the same style, the streets impeccably clean and eerily quiet, the shrubs perfectly manicured and you nervously lock your doors and roll up your windows because any minute 20 identical children are going to march up to you car in synchronization and control your thoughts. Because you're in the village of the damned. You're in suburbia on steroids.

So why, why, would a tourist want to leave the US and come to the Middle East only to find themselves in a planned community again? Morag McKerron in Neo-Tribes and Traditional Tribes: Identity Construction and Interaction of Tourists and Highland People in a Village in Northern Thailand theorizes about the desires of a tourist: "Hetherington argues that the reason for the existence of these neo-tribes [term used for tourist groups] is as a reaction to the disruption and fragmentation of present day postmodern society. Paradoxically, according to Foucault (1984), everyday living is usually conducted in controlled environments. Modern day tourists, therefore, could be seeking both the excitement of breaking away from the rigidity of the identities performed in the ‘real world’ of the tourist’s home, and looking for the emotional bonding to be found in communities. On holiday, they are looking for what they lack at
home."

But in Madaba, what they are finding is home. The exterior of the buildings in Madaba are a stipulation of USAID. You wouldn't get the grant and the technical support unless you conformed to their wishes. They have to have the same wood, the same block letters and the same green overhang. As well, businesses have to move to new sections of the town, so that similar shops were in clusters. We passed one shop bearing it's original facade, squished between two renovations. My USAID tour guide quickly ushered us past the proprietor, explaining that he was waiting until the last minute to move, i.e. he didn't want to move but eventually, the city would leave him with no choice.
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So what is the nature of a tourist? What are we seeking when we leave the comforts of home to explore the "unknown"? To view the "exotic other"? It's a question that has been plaguing me since my days in Hungary, reading about ethical tourism and wondering how far that extends. It's a huge question. There are many types of tourists and tourism. But I have found that one thing is true in all instances: tourism is a privilege. McKerron notes, "the overwhelming majority of trekking tourists are Caucasian. Although it is well known that millions of Asians and Africans have lived for many generations in Europe and America, it is apparent that they do not choose to holiday in developing countries or visit people who live in more‘primitive’ ways than those of their home nation. The question arises as to the possibility of a legacy from the colonial era affecting the tourists who visit primitive people today. Edward Bruner (1996) argues that tourists are seeking an un-contaminated pre-colonial past, which in itself argues the awareness of colonialism. Bruner suggests that the socalled primitive culture presented for tourist consumption today is a fantasy land of western imagery. Tourists do not, says Bruner, travel to experience the new postcolonial subject (ibid, p.160). Furthermore, he points out that the ‘other’, the postcolonial subject, has already travelled in the opposite direction, and is established in the West, but is seen there as a social problem, and kept hidden. Bruner argues that the elite Western tourist travels to ‘exotic’ lands to view a disembodied and hypothetical other as if visiting a theatre, and to capture them on camera, echoing as an orientalist stereotype the precolonial explorers and their adventures and conquests of the past."

So what are we (and by we I mean Americans in my soci-economic class) doing when we visit a foreign city, travel the world for a year, move to another country? We are obviously enacting the power of our social status and our educational bracket, enjoying it and we are learning. But what are we disrupting? What changes are we inadvertently responsible for? And why aren't more of us staying home to learn? And what happens when city after city is transformed in order to accommodate, to attract, the tourist?When a small minority of people are commoditised by a powerful majority?