Asia on tour - T. Winter et al.

TIM WINTER, PEGGY TEO & T.C. CHANG, eds.

Asia on tour. Exploring the rise of Asian tourism

London: Routledge, 2009.

 xvi, 360pp. ISBN 0-415-46086-7, pb £21.59

Reviewed by V.T. King, University of Leeds

In reviewer’s jargon this book is ‘timely’ or perhaps even more to the point ‘long-awaited’.  I wish I had had a hand in co-editing it. Many of us who have been involved in Asian tourism studies during the past couple of decades have been bemoaning, with some notable exceptions like Nelson Graburn’s study of Japanese tourism (1983), the lack of research on domestic tourism in Asia and intra-Asian tourist flows. The statistical material available has been telling us for some time that a significant characteristic of tourism in Asia is that it is increasingly locally generated. More especially the rapid increase in mainland Chinese tourism within and beyond the PRC has forced us to redirect our attention away from West-East transactions to interactions between Asians.

In their introductory essay the editors address one of the major issues in the examination of Asians at play through the striking image of a ‘muscular’ Japanese male tourist wearing white Speedos and soaking up the sun on a beach in Phuket (pp. 13). We are told that this image was used to advertise a conference on the theme ‘Of Asian Origin: rethinking tourism in contemporary Asia’ under the auspices of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in September 2006 from which this edited book has emerged. Rather than the popular representations of international tourism of tanned and healthy Caucasian females in bikinis, and those of Western tourists splayed out or strolling on palm-fringed beaches and playing in white-surfed clear blue waters, the image of a beach- and sun-loving Asian challenges, according to the editors, dominant assumptions about encounters between Western guests and Asian hosts.  More than this, so it is argued, the shift of focus to Asians on tour in Asia requires us ‘to ask unfamiliar and important questions’, and more pressingly ‘to address the analytical imbalances that characterize tourism studies today’ (p. 2).

There is much to ponder and excite in this volume which comprises 21 chapters with the addition of a ‘rethinking tourism’ editorial introduction and a concluding contribution from Tim Winter on the ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, theme of ‘recasting tourism theory towards an Asian future’. Edited books emerging from conferences are often problematically disparate, so, to help the reader, the editors structure the proceedings into five sections: ‘Challenging conventions’; ‘Emerging markets, (re)scripting places’; ‘National imaginings and tourism development’; ‘Revis(it)ing heritage: Dissonance or harmony?’; and finally ‘Tourism and new social networks’. There are contributors well known to the tourism studies constituency within Asia and more widely: aside from the editors, C. Michael Hall, Maribeth Erb, Nelson Graburn, Sidney Cheung and Pal Nyiri, and also relative newcomers, several of them at the time of writing, doctoral candidates, including Audrey Bochaton, Charles Carroll, Jenny Chio, and Bertrand Lefebvre.

In order to press ahead with the project to ‘localise’ tourism studies and to challenge Western ethnocentrism we might have anticipated that a volume on Asian tourists in Asia would have been produced predominantly by Asian observers. The hoary old issue of the distinctions between the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’, ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, and the ‘local’ and ‘global’ and the need to overcome them surfaces particularly in this kind of enterprise. However, only about half the contributors are Asian, and most of them hail from either Singapore or the Chinese-speaking areas of East Asia; even then the majority of the researchers, Western and non-Western, received their research training in North America and Europe. What is more, apart from Singaporeans writing on Singapore and one chapter on Thailand co-authored by Prasit Leepreecha, there is nothing from local researchers working on the major parts of Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos); and sadly, no Japanese tells us about Japanese tourists and tourism. 

Having said this, the country coverage is reasonable, though of course, with the importance of trans-national movements and encounters and the problems of defining ‘Asian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Singaporean’, ‘Indian’ and so on this issue of nationality is perhaps of less significance (and see Winter, p. 321). In addition to chapters on Asia in general (Michael Hall on Asian identity and regionalism; Peggy Teo on tourism knowledge formation in Asia), there are predictably chapters on Chinese tourism including Chinese tourists to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand (Pal Nyiri), to Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam (Chan Yuk Wah), and to Tibet (Robert Shepherd); Chinese domestic tourism [Jenny Chio] and domestic back-packers [Francis Kek Gee Lim]. Other chapters with reference to East Asia include film-induced tourism in Korea (Youngmin Choe); domestic tourism in Japan (Nelson Graburn); food and domestic tourism in Hong Kong (Sidney Cheung); and young Taiwanese tourists and photography (Joyce Hsiu-Yen Yeh). Chapters on Southeast Asia comprise one on souvenirs in Cambodia (Tim Winter); boutique hotels in Singapore (Peggy Teo and T.C. Chang); Asian medical tourism in Thailand (Audrey Bochaton and Bertrand Lefebvre); domestic tourism in northern Thailand (Olivier Evrard and Prasit Leepreecha); domestic tourism in eastern Indonesia (Maribeth Erb); Indian tourists in Bali (K. Thirumaran); domestic tourism in Vietnam (Jamie Gillen); and Lao tourists in Thailand (Charles Carroll). Finally, there are two chapters on South Asia (Ayurvedic tourism in Kerala [Denise Spitzer]; and domestic tourism in Kashmir [Shalini Panjabi]).

The attraction of this volume is the wide range of empirical material to which we now have access on Asians at leisure in Asia, their characteristics, behaviour, motivations and their socio-cultural effects, and the implications of the growth of local tourism for citizenship and identities. This is the strength of the volume, and on that basis it will certainly become a standard reference work in the multidisciplinary field of tourism studies. However, the editors also make great claims for the possibilities of rethinking and reconceptualising our perspectives and analyses of tourism, which, they argue, have been bedevilled by the continuing preoccupation with Western tourism and, by the universalistic assumptions about ‘the tourist’ which have been generated by these Western geographic and cultural biases (Winter’s ‘Anglo-Western centrism’).  This seems to be the less successful aspect of the volume in that the concepts and orientations which have been constructed by Western observers (like MacCannell, Urry, Turner and Ash and the contributors to Valene Smith’s Hosts and guests) have long been debated, revised, and by some discarded, and the culturally relative, pluralistic, complex character of tourists and tourism firmly established.  Tim Winter’s concluding comments, though well taken, do not seem to give us a clear direction in seeking out alternative discourses (see, for example, pp. 322-23), nor does Peggy Teo’s search for  other ‘tourism truths’ (pp. 34-51). 

Reminiscent of the very early post-war debates about the importance of moving away from Western-centred perspectives and constructing autonomous or domestic histories of Southeast Asia, we can of course agree with Winter and others that we need ‘to centre’ scholarship from Asia, write histories of Asian tourism, build institutional support in Asia for the critical study of Asian tourism, address the imbalances between particular countries in Asia, and feed critical thinking into policy-making. However, the development of ‘grounded theory and alternative discourses’, as Winter himself notes, appears to be ‘the trickiest issue of all’ (p. 322). We can appreciate that local hosts may hold different perceptions of tourists of different nationalities, though not in all circumstances; that tourists of different ethnicities and different types may have different motivations, expectations and interests, and organise their visits in different ways; that various notions of modernity, ‘self’, status and power are generated, captured and reflected upon in the Asian tourism experience; that Asian visitors to other Asian countries may form different images of their hosts than Western tourists; that encounters between tourists and hosts who share broadly the same culture should be thought of in terms of a paradigm of ‘cultural affinity’ rather than one which focuses on difference and the exotic; that in domestic tourism the interaction between national and ethnic, local and provincial identities frequently comes into play; that distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are more permeable, fluid and ambiguous than originally assumed; and that in a globalising and increasingly cosmopolitan world the distinctions between the domestic and the foreign are ‘no longer isomorphic’ (Graburn, p. 195). But do these considerations amount to theoretical and discursive innovations?

The editors themselves are uncertain whether Asian tourism experiences are ‘qualitatively different’ and are ‘creating a series of distinct, even unique, cultural forms’ (p.9).  On the basis of what is provided for us in this volume I would venture to suggest that, rather than new paradigms and alternative discourses, we can continue to address these encounters and experiences in terms of the concepts and paradigms currently available to us, although of course, where necessary, with suitable cross-cultural and contextual modification.