‘Like Playing a Game Where You Don't Know the Rules’: Investing Meaning in Intercultural Cash Transactions Between Tourists and Trobriand Islanders

Abstract

When tourists visit cultural tourism destinations, the primary form of interaction between visitors and local residents is in the exchange of money for material objects and performances. While purchase of cultural commodities in tourism contexts may appear to be simple market transactions, they are often in fact morally fraught sites of ambiguous interaction, invested with disparate meanings by different participants. Drawing on Bloch and Parry's (1989) analysis of the symbolism of money and its relationship to culturally constructed ideas about production, consumption, circulation, and exchange, this article examines the conflicting and contested views of cash transactions and other types of exchange in meetings between tourists and Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea. I argue that intercultural exchange in tourism is not necessarily a straightforward commodity exchange, but evokes social relations that are often quite differently conceptualized by the producers and consumers of touristic products.When I travel, I want to see daily life. When we went to [a certain Trobriand village] I didn't like it so much, because I felt like a customer instead of a visitor. Everyone had something they wanted to sell. (Douglas, 1 a retiree from the USA in his 70s, travelling on a group tour) ethnos, vol. 80:4, 2015 (pp. 448-471), http://dx.

Tourism bisnis and “making ples”: An ethnography of ni-Vanuatu bungalow and tour owners on Malekula

“…Recent anthropological works have brought tourism more or less to the centre of their arguments about mobility (Alexeyeff and Taylor 2016; Salazar 2010), environmental conservation (Walley 2004), paid employment (Gmelch 2012), art and material culture (Adams 2006), and indigenous entrepreneurship (Farrelly 2009). Some scholarship has explored the complex relationships between local and global that are illuminated and complicated through the study of tourism (Alexeyeff and Taylor 2016;Cole 2008;MacCarthy 2014;Scheyvens 2007;Trau 2012). This is where my research fits in, with an emphasis on local perspectives and relationships with ples and how this both shapes and is transformed by tourism.…”

“…MichelleMacCarthy (2014; conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Trobriand Island village tourism industry, and drew conclusions in her articles that sometimes strongly relate to my own findings on Malekula.MacCarthy (2016, 339) identifies what she sees as the major controversy of the concept authenticity: that it is used both as "an analytical concept employed by academics and as a trope employed by non-academics".MacCarthy (2016, 340) traces the history of authenticity in academic studies of tourism to Dean MacCannell's 1976 book The Tourist. MacCannell argued that tourism is a ritualised search for a purer way of life believed to be lost in modern society, and in another work he introduced the idea of a "staged back region" where tourists believe they are discovering a real and more intimate version of social life(MacCannell 1973, 596).…”

Tourism bisnis and “making ples”: An ethnography of ni-Vanuatu bungalow and tour owners on Malekula

“…Recent anthropological works have brought tourism more or less to the centre of their arguments about mobility (Alexeyeff and Taylor 2016; Salazar 2010), environmental conservation (Walley 2004), paid employment (Gmelch 2012), art and material culture (Adams 2006), and indigenous entrepreneurship (Farrelly 2009). Some scholarship has explored the complex relationships between local and global that are illuminated and complicated through the study of tourism (Alexeyeff and Taylor 2016;Cole 2008;MacCarthy 2014;Scheyvens 2007;Trau 2012). This is where my research fits in, with an emphasis on local perspectives and relationships with ples and how this both shapes and is transformed by tourism.…”

“…MichelleMacCarthy (2014; conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Trobriand Island village tourism industry, and drew conclusions in her articles that sometimes strongly relate to my own findings on Malekula.MacCarthy (2016, 339) identifies what she sees as the major controversy of the concept authenticity: that it is used both as "an analytical concept employed by academics and as a trope employed by non-academics".MacCarthy (2016, 340) traces the history of authenticity in academic studies of tourism to Dean MacCannell's 1976 book The Tourist. MacCannell argued that tourism is a ritualised search for a purer way of life believed to be lost in modern society, and in another work he introduced the idea of a "staged back region" where tourists believe they are discovering a real and more intimate version of social life(MacCannell 1973, 596).…”