Although acknowledging that there are several more variants that require exploration (e.g., retailing, travelling by train), this chapter has examined three types of tourism nostalgia of the noughties. Yet even based on a limited number of cases, it is possible to evaluate the phenomenon by inducing its essential characteristics. By way of conclusion, this assess-ment is conducted under the following headings: imagination versus reality, motivational appeal, and millennial moments.
Imagination Versus Reality
Nostalgia tourism that provides an alternative to the present does so by recourse to an imagined past, a version of reality that people carry around in their heads. This observation is true for the Indian palace that screens outside surrounding poverty, for in-the-footsteps tours that are carefully zoned to remove references to contemporary surroundings, or for themed attractions that are instances of hyper-reality.
Nostalgia tourism is thus the very antithesis of reality tourism. It stands at the opposite end of the continuum of the sort of tourism promoted by Global Exchange9that takes its clientele into such places as the Gaza Strip,
9 This California-based company that began in 1988 today conducts up to 80 trips a year, each lasting from 7 to 14 days, at prices ranging from US$850 to US$4000. The educational aim is to show its clients via face-to-face confrontation how they contribute to global prob-lems and to suggest ways that they can contribute to positive change. Among its most popular tours, and the only one to an area of the developed world, is that to Northern Ireland. Now in its tenth year, it allows customers to participate in the Orange Order marches, the West Belfast Festival, to meet political representatives of all political parties and released political prisoners, even to take up B&B accommodation with families in the Falls Road (Global Exchange, 2003).
Haiti, and Cuba to witness firsthand the abuse of human rights (Langton, 1998; Purdy, 1998). Nostalgia tourism is not concerned with such matters;
in fact, it studiously ignores them.
Motivational Appeal
From what has been seen already, and given the hazards of political labelling, it is clear that nostalgia tourism is more likely to appeal to an ideology that is conservative rather than liberal. By definition, a conserv-ative wishes to preserve all that is wholesome from the past, whereas a liberal is more intent on change. Postmodernism itself is also said to be conservative in outlook, and its pastiche-like touristic theming in Disney and its imitators is indicative of this trend. There is thus a certain indul-gence associated with nostalgia tourism, one that approvingly believes that the past is good for you rather than ‘a poison that kills by cloying’—
a more puritanical disapproving position (Nicolson, 1998a).
It should also be evident that nostalgia tourism appeals more to those who can afford to indulge in it. Although reminiscing is of course a free activity, actual participation in touristic pursuits that evoke the past can be quite expensive. The cost of staying in a stately home or going to a theme park with all the family would be ruled out for most proletarian discretionary incomes. So, too, would be the associated expenses. English Heritage, for instance, reckons that for every £8 million it takes in entrance fees it brings in another £6 million from its gift shops (Leslie, 1998).
Nostalgia tourism, like most forms of special interest tourism, may thus be said to be middle-class oriented.
Nostalgia tourism can additionally appeal more to the elderly (Davis, 1979; Swarbrooke, 1997) than to the young, if only because the former has a richer data bank of memories with a longer time span. A loss of status among retirees may also encourage backward glimpses to the past, just as a sense of lack of future may lead to a retrieval of worth from yester-year (Davis, 1979). Even so, those of more tender yester-years can and do expe-rience nostalgia, particularly in such rites of passage as going to a new school, entry into adolescence, and so on where nostalgia thrives on tran-sition (Davis, 1979). Also related, it is important to realise that it is not so much a question of how long ago an event occurred, as it is how indi-viduals contrast it with present circumstances (Davis, 1979).
Then, too, there is a certain narcissism or amour propre (Davis, 1979) con-nected with nostalgia, one that may appear to the psychocentric person-ality (Plog, 1977). Here self-approval is cultivated in order to make the present seem less frightening (i.e., an experience of flow as opposed to schizophrenic timelessness) (Davis, 1979).
Arguably, too, because nostalgia thrives where identity is threatened, it may be experienced to a greater degree by men than by women. Male 48 Global Tourism
roles and statuses are often more sharply demarcated with respect to occu-pation, geographical location, reference groups, and lifestyle (Davis, 1979). For that reason, it may not simply have been a lapsus calami that the parador brochure addressed itself solely to males.
Millennial Moments
As each year draws to a close and a new year dawns, thoughts turn to change and to the making of fresh resolutions. Such a trend is even more pronounced at the turn of a century and the entry into its first decade. At the same time, however, this can be a period of the greatest anxiety, when the continuity of identity is most threatened. Here, then, it becomes nec-essary to establish appreciative stances of former selves and to eradicate from memory unpleasant and shameful experiences. It is correspondingly essential to rediscover and rehabilitate ‘marginal, fugitive and eccentric facets of earlier selves’ in order to assert, ‘look how far I’ve come’ and
‘how well equipped I am to deal with challenges of the present’ (Davis, 1979). Nostalgia responds to this existential tension in the subject.
Tourism can also alleviate such anxiety in its language of promotion.
It is not sufficient simply to provide luxury accommodation, playful pilgrimage, and themed attractions. It must strike a resonance with the corresponding personalities of nostalgia prone clients. In such a manner, Croatia is now advertised as ‘the Mediterranean as it used to be’ (Croatia Tourist Board, 2003) and Scotland is still marketed as a romantic land of mists, glens, landscapes, and castles ‘as people want to find it’ (Elsworth, 1998a). As for Cool Britannia, well, in the words of a spokesman for the English Tourist Board, Debbie Waite, ‘While we are very excited about the production of a new face of Britain, we do need to make sure it goes hand in hand with our history and heritage’ (Elsworth, 1998b).
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