Paper short abstract:

The aim of the paper is to analyze intercultural relations and cultural change generated by tourism in a postcolonial power relations context while taking into account the agency and subjectivity of both tourist and their ‘hosts’. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in India.

Paper long abstract:

The project I currently conduct, dedicated to power relations and strategies of authenticity in tourism in India, aims to go beyond the tendency in socio-cultural research of analysing tourism to postcolonial countries through the binary opposition of domination and subordination as a source of commodification of culture and instrumentalisation of relations. From the very beginning of social study of tourism, researchers have been interpreting tourism as a form of imperialism (Nash 1978), and tourists as 'the Golden Hordes' that culturally dominate and economically exploit the 'Peripheries of Pleasure' (Turner, Ash 1975).

While power relations inscribed into tourism are undoubtedly part of colonial legacies, this binary approach risks simplification and discursive objectification of both tourists and their 'hosts' by denying them agency and subjectivity. Overcoming this approach will give us insight into complex and dynamic relations taking place between the two groups on the level of everyday interactions. I believe this is possible by combining 'mobile tourism ethnographies' (Haldrup, Larsen 2010) that allow us following tourists' imaginaries and the ways they are confronted with its object, as well as the ways those who are imagined deal with the expectations towards them, on the one hand, with analytical concepts developed within postcolonial theory - such as hybrid identities, Orientalism, self-Orientalisation or mimicry - on the other.

The aim of the paper is to show both visitors and the members of visited communities as skilled players who - although trapped in power relations - employ varied and nuanced strategies in fulfilling their own needs.