Foreigners, fakes and flycatchers: stereotypes, social encounters and the problem of discomfort on the street in Arusha, Tanzania

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to research on the interrelations between urban tourism, travelling and landscapes. It shows how young visitors to the tourism-reliant city of Arusha, northern Tanzania, experience and interpret discomfiting encounters with street sellers by drawing on stereotypes circulating in guidebooks, online forums and in the tourism industry. In turn, such re-interpreted encounters are increasingly seen as problematic for the city’s development of urban tourism. Design/methodology/approach The author draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with tourist-product street sellers in Arusha and Moshi, Tanzania in 2015–2017. With detail-oriented focus on social interaction and communication, the author has used participant observation and interviews to understand the perspectives and actions involved. Complementing this, the author draws on interviews with tour companies and local authorities to connect everyday occurrences with broader political, economic and urban transformations. Findings This paper explores the interrelation between changing urban landscapes, gentrification and burgeoning urban tourism by highlighting not only how streets are created and sought to be re-created but how also re-interpreted stories and stereotypes fundamentally influence how it is understood by local authorities. As the consumption of place, shopping and foreigners’ experiences take centre stage in Arusha’s urban development project, practices and people that are re-interpreted as causes of discomfort, become objects of ordering and discipline. Originality/value This paper emphasizes that the social encounters beyond dichotomies of host–guest relationships are a fruitful and important means of investigating how “encounters” connect space to power, the street to urban planning and mundane on-the-street interactions to processes of transformation and gentrification. This paper presents a reading of “landscapes” not as a text, but as a series of encounters that catch our attention when and where they break our norms, or the norms of others.

Travelling and travelled landscapes: imaginations, politics and mobilities of tourism: introduction to the special issue

“…The narratives also vary between different stakeholders and can sometimes clash. Loeng (2020) shows that Western tourists' narrations about their encounters with street sellers in Tanzania perpetuate the negative stereotypes about some members of the local community, raising questions about who is considered a legitimate cocreator of a particular landscape and by whom. The imaginations and narrations have strong links with the notions of belonging, as the tourist landscapes can also be stages where national and group identity, nostalgia, politics and identity politics are played out and performed.…”