Week 5 Reflection Journal

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Take a few minutes to reflect on what you have learned this week regarding the tourist gaze and how local residents perspectives may sometimes not be considered.
Include the following in your reflection:
What is the strongest insight you gained?
How will your new knowledge support your current or desired role in hospitality management?
The “tourist gaze” is explained by sociologist John Urry as the set of expectations that tourists place on local populations when they participate in heritage tourism, in the search for having an “authentic” experience. In response to tourist expectations and often cultural and racial stereotypes, local populations reflect back the “gaze” of the expectations of tourists in order to benefit financially.[7] Tourists cannot bear all of the blame for this process however, as the aggressively promoted marketing efforts of tour operators, popular media, and local governments all contribute to the production of the tourist “gaze”.[8] This gaze is often described as a destructive process, in which often important local cultural expressions are reduced to commodities, and these traditions fall out of favor with local populations.

Week 5 Reflection Journal

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They can also be destructive in that local populations become consumed by an economic process which values certain cultural expressions over others, and cultural themes that cannot be easily commodified fall out of favor and can be eventually lost. This gaze can also serve as a booster of ethnic identity, as it can revive cultural traditions that may have fallen out of favor under the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism. Because of the importance of tourist capital in many local societies, indigenous peoples are placed in a dynamic where cultural “authenticity” becomes something very tangible and necessary to achieve economic success. This “reconstruction of ethnicity” becomes important, because locals tend to act out cultural patterns and behaviors that they believe would satisfy tourists most.[9] The local populations play on stereotypes that Westerners have on their cultures, and seek to perform them as best they can to satisfy the consumer demand. The power that the “tourist gaze” has in supporting ethnic pride and identity can also be used to destroy ethnic pride and identity, in the cases where tourist expectations do not align with the everyday reality of local populations.

Week 5 Reflection Journal

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In the village of San Jose Succotz in Belize, local Mayan populations had given up many of their traditional practices and traditions.[10] However, because of their close proximity to ancient Maya ruins and the resultant tourist interest in their areas, the villagers began to go back into the past and recreate traditional Maya cultural patterns and traditions. In recreating these images, their identities were changed completely and they were placed back within an “ethnographic present” of classical Maya indigenous cultural expressions and land use patterns. Unfortunately, this ‘act’ also gives more savvy tourists the impression that the Maya are extinct, and their traditions are only being reenacted by local populations, obscuring the reality that there are over a million Maya alive today.[11]