Adrian Franklin
It is often imagined that tourism is a unique form of social space, distinguishable, broadly, from the everyday (MacCannell 1976), the world of work (Urry 1990) and the serious governmental and business concerns of the social centre (Shields 1990). Such‘touristic’ places on the so-called social margin were deemed to be sociologically distinguishable as ludic places (Rojek 1993;
Shields 1990), or as merely ritual locations of recreation, social reproduction and transition (see Franklin 2003 and 2009 for a discussion of this). Worse, some, have argued that tourism creates and transits through, many forms of non-place; of airports, aircraft, route ways, resorts etc., (Auge 1995) and ‘spaces of travel’ that are neither the social centre nor yet the social margin (Urry 2000).
All of this creates, and indeed maintains a view, commonly held outside scholarly circles, that tourism and its social-spatial contexts are somehow less important, less crucial, less politically charged than other activities and their social-spatial contexts. This is the only possible explanation for its relative obscurity in French intellectual life (Doquet and Evrard 2008), for example, or indeed why elsewhere it is confined to a substantive and operational form of commerce (Franklin and Crang 2001).
For some time there has been a strand of research that politicises tourism, particularly from the point of view of those host peoples, islands and localities who have been adversely affected by the arrival and operation of tourism in their localities or where the arrival of tourism has created a new politics and economy around tourism as a dominant economic industry (Smith 1989). Although significant, this has not spawned a more general concern to understand how tourism at a broader and more fundamental level is deeply politicised, deeply informed by political and ethical concerns of the mainstream and plays a role in the enactment of important social and political change in modern societies. If anything, such studies, laudable as they are, perpetuate the view of tourism on the social margin.
Taking the example of the curious history of our desire to visit, be among and in various ways consume nature, this chapter seeks to show how the tourism impulse and the anthro-pology of tourism has been deeply infected by major social and political currents in modernity, and how it has been, rather than an epiphenomenon of questionable intellectual importance, a central means of enacting and realising a range of important new projects of humanity. As Keith Thomas (1983) ably showed, the drive to experience ‘nature’ is neither an inevitable nor a
universal characteristic of humanity, although we can agree with Raymond Williams (1992) when he alerts us to the very common way in which nature is appealed to as a source of inspiration and guidance for social order. Only in the absence of a rigorous survey of the anthropology of nature could anyone envisage biophilia as universal.
Given this, and its potential to deliver opposed and contested interpretations, the exact manner by which we comport ourselves before nature can drive a politics of nature tourism with very radical and wide-ranging consequences. This chapter aims to outline the main ways this politics has framed the development of nature tourism. The historic scope of this reaches back to formative ideas in early modern Europe, particularly in England, which is something of a cradle of tourism. It establishes the sense of social order that was formed around a religious idiom of nature, with both moral and social implications for behaviour and practice but also as a deeply embedded cultural space of belonging. The notion of travel to it was barely relevant to a largely rural society living cheek-by-jowl with the natural world, but it did lay the foundations for subsequent travel and visitation when that culture moved to the city and developed modern sensibilities that were seen to oppose an older natural order. This then situates the origins and arrival of Romanticism and its critique of modernity through, once again, the idiom of nature.
Romanticism not only created a sense of pilgrimage and redemption around visits to nature, it also invoked a politics of protection and conservation, which sat awkwardly with the demo-cratising currents of an emerging tourism culture. Seen through the early twentieth-century form of tourism, dominated largely by a motorised middle class, the politics of Romanticism built an accommodation around a set of national institutions, the model of which was the National Trust. In this way, participation in nature was patriotic and also supportive of an apparatus of conservation. Through the mid-twentieth century this celebration of rural England enrolled more and more enthusiasts and as car ownership expanded, a new perception, of nature being overwhelmed by tourists, was added to a new politics of nature. This environmental view of nature framed around the critique of modernity as a toxic danger to something much wider and more abstract than a sacred temple of nature, the English countryside.
As a new political idiom of nature, environment detached English (as other) cultures from specific relationships with particular kinds of species, landscapes and ways of life, and rendered it into a global, universal and totalising entity, both bigger, more powerful and yet more remote from experience. Rather like the Godfigure of the Christian worldview, environment required mediation from ritual specialists, and environment empowered a newly politicised scientific fraternity to become, as Bauman (1992) astutely observes,‘legislators’ – people who govern and order the world by virtue of their expertise. In turn, the expertise of scientists required an alli-ance with and mediation through those with economic and political power, and hence the clear sense of nation leadership and consensus around countryside was not really possible for envir-onment. Because poetical leaders required a policy objective to be distilled from the always-vague discourse of risk emanating from science (Furedi 2005), the notion of sustainability became the new objective that governed our primary relationship with nature. As Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue, this created yet another politics built around a notion of nature as a separate domain from humanity, and one to be protected against the predations of humanity, generally.
From approximately the 1980s until the present a neo-liberal nature tourism can be discerned with the following qualities: an aesthetic of nature as delicate and facing multiple anthropogenic dangers and risks; a larger visiting public informed less from traditional nature associations or the benefits of nature to humanity than by information relating to the risks they pose to nature through their visitation; consistent with this, an increasing willingness to be separated from the nature they visit and submission to an escalating bureaucracy of regulation and other forms of Adrian Franklin
external and self-discipline; a concomitant willingness to pay for more commodified forms of nature tourism where nature is packaged less as trails of discovery and more as ecotourism experiences or‘encounters’ (highly packaged, circumscribed, regulated and controlled episodes of sustainable contact with increasing emphasis on ecological and environmental political objectives) (Dickens 2004; Bulbeck 2000; Desmond 1999).
Being with nature and the Christian worldview
I want to begin this section by re-examining how the Christian worldview of nature came to involve certain consequences for our relationship with it, but also, how its aesthetic, ethical and economicfields are still in operation (although in entirely unacknowledged, ‘taken for granted’
forms). It is a re-examination, mostly of Keith Thomas’ (1983) masterful treatment of this subject, at least in the case of England from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. Any anthropologist worth their salt will agree with Claude Levi-Strauss’ (1962: 89) dictum that
‘animal (and other natural forms) are good to think’, by which he meant that it is a universal feature of our species to form basic understandings of themselves in relation to the natural world around them; not least drawing on an understanding of the natural world to determine what is properly human (Tester 1992). It follows then, that such understandings often lie at the centre of social and political change. As Thomas (1983: 17) himself remarks:‘The subject also has a great deal to offer historians, for it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves’.
The Christian worldview of nature as it manifested itself to thinkers and writers in Tudor and Stuart England was informed by Aristotle in that nature was understood to be a functional facility made largely for the sake of humankind. Nature’s design was purposeful and directed to specific forms of use by humans and was executed by a talented higher authority in that it was economic and sparingly achieved through its use of resources and detail. This provided a fra-mework with which the Bible might be interpreted and this gave way to what has become known as the design theory of creation but also in political and ethical terms the Great Chain of Being, as there was not only the question of design in nature but also of precedent and rights.
The Christian worldview of nature was also loosely mapped onto pagan beliefs and under-standings, which, because of the directions given to Augustine, the first Christian missionary sent from Rome, were not discouraged or damned out of court. Rather, Augustine was told to try to insert Christianity into pre-existing forms of religion rather than replace them. This then accounts for the other tradition, at least in England, of a natural world that was enchanted:
landscapes were animated by a variety of powers and agents, which provided a means of understanding not only the external world of non-humans but also much of what happened to humans. As with many other pre-modern cultures, the ethical, social and political world of humans was continuous with those of other species and forms, and there existed an overarching order that governed all life (Franklin 2002: 39–60). Something like that system of thought gave rise, again in the English tradition, to the Mother Naturefigure as the spirit of nature itself, in addition to the many semi-autonomous powers belonging to individual species (hence a hare lip in a human was attributed to a hare crossing the path of a pregnant woman).
This enchanted world of humans in nature was a generous, social system rather than some-thing to be feared, and, because of the required reciprocities between the elements, there were many human obligations to maintain and look after the world around them. An obvious example is the practice, still alive today although mostly misunderstood, of bringing elements of the forest into the home during the deepest and coldest period of winter. Logs and branches of trees were brought in the home to keep their spirits alive during the coldest periods (today Viewing nature politically
called Yule Logs). The magical mistletoe, holly and ivy (that inexplicably fruits out of season) were also given shelter at this time and are still used to decorate the home at Christmas. The fact that these pagan practices were rolled into Christian rituals at Christmas shows the hybridity of English religious practices. However, the notion of responsibility for, and connection to, nature did not entirely die, nor did a multitude of other pagan beliefs and practices despite subsequently becoming the subject of religious oppression. The fact that it is possible to trace a continuous line of such folk practices and its welling up in literature, prose and poetry illustrates how it has continued to work into the present (Thomas 1983).
These antecedent themes to modern attitudes and practices toward nature provide the social base for a number of ways in which nature became aestheticised and thus desired as a place in which to visit or spend time. The most obvious one, which is often missed, is the pastorale landscape. In this aesthetic tradition, which has Greek, Roman and British forms, it is the balanced sense of cohabitation of human and non-human elements that is crucial. Here is the twin injunction on humans to live in balance and harmony with the benevolent and giving natural order, on the one hand, and on the other, not to stay too long in the city where this balance and healthiness is easily lost to other harmful impulses, like business and politics. In the early nineteenth century this is apparent in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where the balance of nature and artifice in ‘good’ estates such as Pemberley are ‘keys to the social virtue of their owners’ (Bodenheimer 1981: 605). Keith Thomas (1983: 245–7) has assembled a procession of literary references to an association commonly held in Tudor England, that their towns were associated with vice and the countryside virtue. According to Thomas the‘classical convention that country dwellers were not just healthier, but morally more admirable than those who lived in the city, was a conspicuous literary theme in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (Thomas 1983: 246).
In its English manifestation as‘countryside’, the pastoral landscape seems to have had a con-tinuous and sustained life as the aesthetic heart of the country. We know this for two reasons. It is unquestionable, for example, that the social elites of Tudor and Stuart England showed a distinct preference for living in the countryside, on their agricultural estates, and even when better transport made wintering in the cities possible, they always returned in the summer (ibid.:
247). Thus, even when the city-based intellectual elites of early modern England felt nature to be backward, unpleasant and even disgusting, a view that was generalised in Hobbes’ view of the State of Nature as‘nasty, brutish and short’, the balance of opinion at least across the edu-cated classes was otherwise. For the uneduedu-cated rural peasantry there is only indirect evidence, albeit compelling. The first is the obvious despair that many felt when the countryside was cleared of their presence following the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies. A more poignant register of their values and aesthetics comes via the unusual route of housing research. According to Darnton, the nineteenth-century gardenless courts that were built for many rural migrants were common enough in mainland Europe, but, in England, builders and developers soon realised that renters had a distinct preference for the small villa style row cottages that boasted tiny front and rear garden spaces. Eventually, such was this preference that court building was largely abandoned and these small gardens of England eventually amounted to a space the size of Somerset. The gardens were very telling as they carried on the tradition of rural cottage gardens, and, in effect, became a means by which the country was taken into the city, at least as the most immediate space around most dwellings.
Thus, it seems that although we may talk about many shifts and changes in the aesthetic sensibilities that governed how we viewed and visited the natural world; it also makes some sense to take stock of important continuities. The arrival of the Romantic sensibility, for example, that introduced an aesthetic for wilderness spaces beyond the cultivated countryside, Adrian Franklin
although important, may have been exaggerated in its appeal and cultural penetration beyond small, educated, artistic elites. Even for most people who had left the countryside for a life in industrial cities, it was true that most did not live far from the rural fringe and that these rural fringes were favoured spaces of leisure (Franklin 2002: 83–131). It was also true that extensive railway links provided the means to visit the countryside, often back to places of origin where the visitor still had relatives and friends. The travel posters issued by London Transport provide an important window on where Londoners travelled to for day trips and holidays. Not only is it the case that the southern countryside dominates these destinations of preference, but also that new areas of the city werefirst colonised as countryside commuter villages by London Underground (Green 1990).
Macnaghten and Urry (1998) have shown how in the twentieth century the notion of the English countryside was further entrenched politically as a largely‘endangered’ entity of national significance, pointing up how it was thus socially constructed, but it was also true that for aes-thetic, cultural and ethnic reasons, the English countryside was already embedded in the sensi-bilities and practices of a large number of English people, as well as in their literature and art.
The politics of Romanticism
Despite the foregoing it is probably acceptable to identify a tipping point in the aesthetic and political sensibilities of nature wrought by the Romantic Movement. The Romantic conception of nature and its connection to a moral and political order was, after all, extremely different. The key change was in identifying the principal mode of production as out of balance with aesthetic and traditional relationships between nature and society. Whereas prior to the capitalist mode of production, people lived on the land and had established a largely sustainable relationship with nature, the capitalist mode of agricultural production alongside an unquenchable demand for forest and other natural resources from industrial capitalism was clearly unsustainable, aesthetically moribund and destroying traditional relationships.
In many ways Romanticism represents a shift from the quasi-religious folk knowledge base at the heart of traditional relationships with nature and towards a more intellectualised means of knowing, principally through imagination, art and language. Much though the romantics cherished folk knowledges, folklore and traditional crafts, and much though they liked to see the presence of traditional forms of humanity on the landscape (dry-stone walls, hedges and cottages for example), they were not a traditional folk revival but an intellectual middle class elite, albeit influential and quirky.
To begin with, as Tester (1992) reminds us, the Romantics were a relatively small and sin-gular circle of artistic and intellectual outsiders. Neither outcast by the formal cultural and poli-tical mainstream, nor descended from the cultural margins themselves, their outsider status derived mostly from a wish not to engage in politics directly but indirectly, through their artistic and creative works as well as by example, by identifying a new way to live with nature, outside the landscapes sullied by industry and industrial-styled agriculture. Walking, open-air sketching, nature study and climbing were all championed by Romantic enthusiasts.
By the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the English countryside had been massively changed through modernisation and expansion. The highly disturbing impact of steam technology, hitherto confined to despised factories in industrial towns, had found agri-cultural applications and the charming obscurity of its quiet backwaters had been opened up by the violating penetration of railway expansion – which the Romantics painted as a deranged monster destroying the world.
In this way, the spatial remoteness (and hence distinctiveness) of countryside was diminished as well as being aesthetically and morally sullied. By rejecting large swathes of countryside, the Viewing nature politically
Romantics were, in effect, identifying that the pastoral as a morally balanced entity had been compromised, and we begin to hear‘end of nature’ tones in their creative projects.
As the pastoral landscapes abutted most towns and cities, we can sense the notion of proper nature having shifted to those places beyond their hinterlands and away from their influence. Given that any semblance of balance was now impossible between nature and modern agriculture, the former countryside slipped back from its aesthetic and moral centrality and was replaced by a very different conception of nature: that which was untouched and unsullied by mankind. Hence the notion of wilderness was, if not invented, upgraded and enshrined in an astonishing canon of literary and artistic works, new lifestyles and modes of comportment in natural areas. Now, the tension balance between nature and artifice was replaced by an aesthetic of nature in the raw, an untrammelled nature that was free to show a side rarely ever seen: a landscape devoid of human presence. Much of this‘human absence’ was in itself a product of political, moral and legal processes in which former peasants, cottagers, crofters and others had been slowly removed or discouraged from staying in ancient upland and remote homelands, grouse moors, highland estates and mountain ranges. In colonial America, Australia and Africa, such wilderness areas, many enshrined as National Parks were predicated on the removal and relocation of indigenous peoples who once hunted and gathered there (Turnball 1972; Löfgren 1989; Cronon 1998; Franklin 2006).
New sensibilities such as these grew to appreciate not balance but overwhelming power; the push of nature as witnessed by storm, glacier, rapid and eruption. Nature shifted its location to the outer, remote and highland margins, to isolated and (if possible) dangerous coastal locations;
to exotic colonial locations cleared of desert people, arctic hunters, mountain, island and forest people. In a sense, Romantics were lured into an aesthetic of nature without humanity, rather than alongside it, as it had always been, and this ushered in a sense of nature as privileged, deserving and prior, as well as being sacred.
When this sensibility was combined with the beginnings of‘risk society’ in the 1960s, with the sense that mankind was destroying not just favoured landscapes but the environment itself, this idealised separation of nature from humanity became more entrenched and was translated into a more regulated and controlled humanity, particularly when visiting rare and endangered ecosystems protected across the globe. Nature was commodified into hived-off and themed visiting spaces as well as protected from direct contact and impact (Dickens 2004).
The new nature tourism was to create spaces for a visiting public that only minimally encroached on wildness and separateness. Such spaces grew considerably after 1980, when a new neo-liberal political sensibility upheld individual liberties to travel, the conservation ethic and the role of small businesses in the revitalisation of de-industrialised rural economies around the world. Neo-liberal views on nature travel and tourism were also shaped by a variant of con-servational sentiments that Cartmill (1993) called‘Darwinian’. This belongs to that long tradi-tion of hunting and outdoor movements that believed that human health and well-being was destroyed by office work and city lifestyles. The solution to modern living therefore is to spend a long time in nature, shooting,fishing, being self-sufficient and learning woodcrafts. It has a major social base in the USA and Canada, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe and Australia, and this too drives a form of tourism that is often very opposed to the politics of‘non-contact’
with nature. It has been implicated in manyfierce political battles over nature and natural areas, and counts on some very influential political backers and organisations (Franklin 1999).
Neo-liberal nature tourism
In the 1980s the arrival of neo-liberal politics, the free market, individualism and the decline of state-lead organisation and provision did not usher in an immediate shift in thinking about the Adrian Franklin
politics of nature tourism. Being a child of conservative politics, neo-liberalism was intuitively conservative about nature herself. The conservative elites of the USA, the UK and Europe were, by inclination, an elite who had long usurped power and control over the countryside and had created very ample playgrounds from it, largely for their own purposes. Magazines like The Field continued in the 1980s to associate a social elite with the main forms of nature recreation, from riding, to hunting,fishing, walking, driving, tourism and gardening, as well as acquiring prop-erties to live in or holiday in natural settings. Additionally, a powerful sub-set of the middle classes aspired to a similar lifestyle and together they had very specific interests to maintain by keeping such‘nature leisurescapes’ intact.
Although many of the Romantic heroes were politically reclusive and inactive (and if any-thing, left wing) they, and their works, became championed by conservative culture. At the same time, the collapse of the left in post-1980s politics and the eventual political consensus around neo-liberal values (espoused by the Blair government in the UK and Clinton in the USA), saw a shift in political values away from what Inglehardt (1997) describes as the materi-alist politics of housing, income, food and consumables and towards a postmaterimateri-alist politics with concerns about the quality of life (human rights, sexuality, the quality of air, water and other environment issues). Hence, when environmentalism began to draw strength through the 1980s and into the 1990s, its support base was widely distributed. Nature and ecotourism were parti-cularly important as they fulfilled duties to protect and conserve the countryside and wilderness fringes, but also because they delivered jobs and employment to the massively restructured industrial economy of the outer regional areas, now facing poverty.
Indeed, the politics of nature and ecotourism in neo-liberal times hinged on the relationship between the deepening poverty of rural and third world regions (and the affluence and mobi-lities of the hub nations) and the absence of strong regional policy (Bauman 1998; Urry 2000).
Precisely because ecotourism could be delivered through countless thousands of new ecobusi-nesses, operating privately or in partnership with state or non-governmental organisations, nature tourism was quick to emerge and it emerged everywhere (Fennell 1999).
Increasingly, the state becomes less directly concerned with managing risk to nature directly and more involved as an information giver (Crook 1999), and also to partner private contractors in the nature tourism industry who thus became the disciplinary interface with tourists (Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Bulbeck 2000). This information is fed through to the individual who is required to make difficult decisions in the face of the confusing noise of conflicting claims, often from within science itself and this confusion is very evident in research on the nature tourist (Bulbeck 2000). Although nature maintained its therapeutic benefit to humanity in this period, the human benefits of travel to nature now took second place to the conservation ethic. In fact, the growth in tourism numbers meant that tourists were then interpreted as a threat to the true beneficiary of policy, nature herself. In addition to the self-disciplined individualism of informed choice, the tourist had to be disciplined by new social-spatial practices, designed to minimise damage and maintain spaces of separation; in effect, there was now a widespread apartheid in operation.
In order to fund this additional burden of human management and fulfil neo-liberal aims to reduce public spending, nature had to become more self-funding or commodified. Thus, although we saw an increasing regulation and control of human behaviour in natural areas, we also saw a proliferation of businesses that sell nature in this new controlled form, often with streams of funding making its way back to ‘natural’ or ecological ‘subjects’. Even so, their combined effect and the variable quality of delivery caused Martha Honey (2002: 24) to ques-tion their value as a human industry:‘Because the stakeholders have various goals, profit not the least of them, ecotourism is not a panacea for developing countries who might want to take advantage of their natural resources– in some cases ecotourism is not much better than mining’.
Viewing nature politically