Organizer: Kathryn Besio, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Chair: John Cusick, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Discussant: Miriam Sharma, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Whether it is a biosphere reserve or Waikiki beach, tourist destinations are manufactured for travelers' consumption. However carefully these destinations are packaged, travelers create meaning within these places that reinforce, contest, and invent self and their understanding of the biophysical environment. Research into the representation of place construction suggests the involvement of various actors in defining and describing the inter-relations between human activity and the places they visit.
The organization of this panel reflects a geographic concern with places and the multiplicity of voices producing meaning for traveler destinations. Presenters investigate the roles of academic communities, adventure travelers, migrant laborers, and tour promoters to demonstrate the variety of place meanings and implications for visitor and resident in case studies from Asia and Hawai'i. John Cusick's paper addresses conflicting images of protected areas as research sites and travel destinations vs. residential use areas in Japan and Hawai'i. In the second paper, Kathryn Besio analyzes tourist representations of children in Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal; she looks closely at the geographic metaphors that marginalize peoples and places as "other." The third paper by Mary Beth Mills focuses on the production and negotiation of social identity through tourist events and destinations among self-consciously "modern" Thai migrant workers in the course of religious and pleasure outings. The panel closes with a critical look at tourist maps, as Drew Kapp analyzes cartographic production of Hawai'i tourist destinations for Asian and North American audiences.
Resolving Conflicts Between Nature Conservation and Nature Tourism: A Comparative
of Yakushima, Japan, and Maui, Hawai'i
John Cusick, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
This paper compares the effectiveness of protected area management on the islands of Yakushima, Japan, and Maui, Hawai'i, in resolving conflicts between the goals of nature conservation and the promotion of nature tourism. The overlap of resident, researcher, and visitor activities threatens environmental diversity in and adjacent to protected areas, and may impact the quality of the relationship between protected area management and residents, scientific research, and visitors.
Conflict resolution is essential for effective management of protected areas (i.e., national parks). Failure to mediate between incompatible user patterns may result in environmental degradation. One method to prevent conflict and degradation is to designate areas for specific user activities. This is particularly important in internationally-recognized protected areas (i.e., World Heritage Areas, Biosphere Reserves) where transmission of environmental diversity to future generations is the primary management objective.
Three issues are considered to evaluate the effectiveness of protected area management in each site: the involvement of local residents; the protection of scientific field research sites; and the development of visitor facilities. A review of protected area management responses is presented with regard to shared objectives of conserving environmental diversity for future generations. Comparative analysis of Yakushima and Maui illuminates common themes in protected area management as well as differences in management response to conflict.
AnOther Space on the Margin: Children and Tourists in Nepal
Kathryn Besio, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Each year, adventure travelers "get away from it all" and set out for remote and "isolated" places at the "margins of the earth." These travelers search not only for adventure, but also interaction with people living in apparent isolation from the modern world. Just as Westerners "discovered" the New World, they now explore "remote" mountain areas and the livelihoods of those who live there. The peoples that inhabit these isolated regions are represented as primitive, or innocent of the modern world. Isolation thus becomes a spatial corollary to temporal notions of primitivism. International adventure tourism, as a means of development preserves these tropes of isolation and innocence as a discursive strategy to sell a colonial Khumbu to a postmodern clientele.
Examining travelogue, mountaineering accounts, and contemporary adventure travel promotional materials since 1953, this paper analyzes these discursive practices over time. I focus specifically on how these texts use geographic metaphors of isolation to locate Khumbu Sherpas in an Other place. Looking at the space of childhood and lives of children, we see the invention of a remote and innocent Sherpa that reflects postcolonial interests in modernization and development. International adventure travel is the most important form of international development in the Khumbu. The production of this "isolated" region as a tourist destination impacts the lives of Sherpas and their children as they define self and the tourist landscape.
Merit-Makers and Sight-Seers: The Cultural Politics of Working Class Tourism in
Thailand
Mary Beth Mills, Colby College
Young women and men moving from village communities into the capital city of Bangkok provide the cheap labor that has fueled Thailand's rapid economic growth. But the low wages and low status that migrants experience as urban laborers little resemble the seductive images of "modern" city life that dominate Thai popular culture. Marginalized within the urban setting, many migrant workers participate in varied forms of "pleasure outings" (pay thiaw )through which they can lay claim (if only temporarily) to key symbols of status and cultural value. This paper examines an especially popular form of excursion, the thoot phaa paa, a Buddhist ceremonial trip involving donations made to a temple, usually in the organizers' home community. Ritual merit-making constitutes the initial and most explicit focus of these events, but migrant workers' thoot phaa paa invariably include numerous sightseeing detours along the way. These destinations may be temples or other religious sites but they are just as likely to be national parks, waterfalls, or manmade monuments such as hydroelectric dams. As tourists at these sites, workers can access powerful signs and symbols of "modern" Thai identity and status. Thus thoot phaa paa trips allow migrants to assert their continuing loyalty to rural communities of origin while at the same time contesting their material and ideological marginalization within the dominant Thai cultural hierarchy.
The Cartoonography of Paradise: Pictorial Tourist Maps of Hawai'I
Drew Kapp, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
To shape the itinerary of nearly seven million visitors to Hawai'i, the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau together with airlines, hotels, and businesses, has produced pictorial tourist maps featuring particular attractions throughout the Islands. These cartographic representations not only inform the travel decisions of the visitors, but also create a hierarchy of places through emphasis, isolation, or omission from the face of the map. In general, these maps stand in for Hawai'i, a place in which distance, shape, and size are distorted, a place constituted wholly of a limited selection of "points of interest" and lines of transit between them. This paper focuses on the maps' contribution to the reproduction of the myth of Hawai'i as nothing more than a recreational paradise, trivializing indigenous culture, and finally reducing Hawai'i to an amusing cartoon.
As pictorial tourist maps, they occupy unstable territory between implied geographic authority, and market creation and drive. They bridge the ontology of the map as functional and artistic: guiding and charming simultaneously. In response to the influx of East Asian visitors, map makers are designing maps that target this audience. Not only does the language differ from North American oriented pictorial maps, but so the images themselves, the information and even style. This practice simultaneously acknowledges the cultural character of the audience and also reinforces culturally specific representations of Hawai'i.