Tourism and Culture

Tourism and culture are very much intertwined. How to go about explaining the relationship between them??  How do they affect each other?? It can be in the sense of visitors experiencing new cultures or the social impact of tourism on the culture of a destination. The give and take between culture and tourism is mutual with it being a two-way process. It involves both internal and external dynamics with many complexities.

At first sight, tourism appears to be a prime mechanism by which cultural influences are diffused and assimilated as it involves the large scale movement of people from place to place, often involving the crossing of national boundaries. It also involves people consuming narratives of place, which encapsulate certain cultural values. Tourism always involves some form of   ‘cultural contact’.

When a person goes to a place, whether just nearby or halfway across the world, he finds himself in a different environment from that that of his own. As tourists cross border in the literal sense, they also cross cultural barriers. They have preconceived ideas about a place, formed from a variety of means be it books, media or just hearsay.  Tourists bring with them not only a set of expectations and perceptions about their destination, but also their own cultural preferences and forms of behavior, their own forms of indigenous knowledge. Such cross border movements are by nature temporary, and contacts between hosts and guests are transitory. Each side views the other as a generalized type, as the opportunities to develop for social interaction are generally limited.

For a long time, in absence of much inter-people interaction, the West and the East had such impressions of each other. The West saw the other as not so developed but being magical and mystical. Their ‘other worldly’ charm had a certain appeal and the East was termed as the Orient. For example India was known as ‘the land of snake charmers’ in the ancient times, but that image has changed for real now with the increasing globalization. On the other hand, the East too had a certain image of the developed world as being overly materialistic with lack of traditional values.

We all have our individual geographical imaginations and these are formed from a variety of factors – sex, age, class, ethnicity, culture, the media and many others. These differing geographical imaginations emphasize that representations are socially constructed and that there is an array of factors contributing to our understanding of the world.