domingo, 28 de junho de 2009
terça-feira, 23 de junho de 2009
Historical Context
In 1838 Stendhal uses the French term “touriste”[1] to define the traveller as the protagonist of the Grand Tour, at the time a popular trend within the aristocracy. This Grand Tour was seen as the way to broaden the formation of one’s youth, by experiencing the sensual pleasures of these journeys. This rite of passage disclosed to the young tourist not only the geography of a classical Europe, but also the unknown boundaries of his world side by side with its unusual populations and fabulous landscapes, in themselves a testimony of the mythological origin of the world. This by turn gave way to the creation of popular legends, children stories and travel diaries. The dream like element of “exoticism” served as a counterpoint to the industrialized civilization, transforming its core by affecting the history of two inseparable notions, labour and leisure.
As such, leisure activities follow a certain social rule that start with the practice of personal enrichment for an individual progress (in which the tour is its ritual expression) and the less respectful distractions are represented in the ephemeral pleasures provided, for example, by the sun and the sea.
This otium cum dignitate, exclusive to the social elites, sees itself threatened with the emergence of mass leisure which arrived with the railways and a labour system that allow the proletarian class to recharge its energy with a change of scenery. With this therapeutic environment free of time constraints and the popularization of the trip (particularly with the railway) we get to the invention and popularization of the beach, first used for a medical purpose, but later turned into a place of recreation, providing a sensual and erotic leisure, transforming the swimmer and the traveller into a playful tourist creature, now worried with constructing and acting up an identity provided by the gratuitous freedom during spare time and, more specifically so while on holidays.
Leisure, in Portuguese “Lazer” (from the Latin licere, being illicit, to allow) represents the legitimisation of the expression farniente, a positive definition of free time in opposition to “otium”, that espouses the negativity of boredom and the weight of time during the slow hours. The freedom once silent, linked to the rural and religious ritual, is now redefined to address the industrialized world. Transported to the summer season, this silent freedom, assumes a Eden like condition in which the worker rediscovers his body and becomes the owner of Time returning to the places that contain his/her identity (the village, the country
house, the family, mother-nature, the founding monuments), all of this being strictly ritualized with the starting point of the trip, where the abandonment of the physical world to give place to one other that has the symbolic function of a forgotten paradise takes place. Social utopia - the national dream of modernity- reveals an aspiration for a collective good life, evoking images of a higher state of mind in the world that rapidly sees it perverted by the anathemas of progress. For example, the mechanisation of labour and the invention of an industrial suburb resulted in the imagery of a dark and gloomy comedy as opposed to the original dream of paradise, in which, this paradise is moved by the new order, the concept of free time and holidays, validating a emergent Industry of Tourism.
If by vocation and labour Man always finds possibilities of defining morality for oneself through an ascetic effort within society, the secular life, where success is the brand of choice (Max Weber), then we have to propose that tourism, as a social device for pleasure, shows this brand by presenting a commercial option for individual salvation, suggesting that the pleasure of the passing of time, a estate of grace diametrically opposed to the slow hours of Otium.
The tourist resort, as an archetype of well-being and the address of the blessed, calls for an idyllic state of nature simultaneously lost and close, sophisticated and inaccessible. This model of leisure, justified at times by the protection of the ecosystem by sumptuous elitism, closes itself in a set of tensions of which the tourist becomes its expression. While immune, alienated, free and interested, but mostly happy, the tourists enter on the scene anywhere in the world, converting the world into a performative space.
In Everybody Hates a Tourist – motto for this thematic reflection – it’s the tourist that is visited in its open cage, as a living example of the post-modern fauna.
[1]Mémoires d’un touriste
As such, leisure activities follow a certain social rule that start with the practice of personal enrichment for an individual progress (in which the tour is its ritual expression) and the less respectful distractions are represented in the ephemeral pleasures provided, for example, by the sun and the sea.
This otium cum dignitate, exclusive to the social elites, sees itself threatened with the emergence of mass leisure which arrived with the railways and a labour system that allow the proletarian class to recharge its energy with a change of scenery. With this therapeutic environment free of time constraints and the popularization of the trip (particularly with the railway) we get to the invention and popularization of the beach, first used for a medical purpose, but later turned into a place of recreation, providing a sensual and erotic leisure, transforming the swimmer and the traveller into a playful tourist creature, now worried with constructing and acting up an identity provided by the gratuitous freedom during spare time and, more specifically so while on holidays.
Leisure, in Portuguese “Lazer” (from the Latin licere, being illicit, to allow) represents the legitimisation of the expression farniente, a positive definition of free time in opposition to “otium”, that espouses the negativity of boredom and the weight of time during the slow hours. The freedom once silent, linked to the rural and religious ritual, is now redefined to address the industrialized world. Transported to the summer season, this silent freedom, assumes a Eden like condition in which the worker rediscovers his body and becomes the owner of Time returning to the places that contain his/her identity (the village, the country
house, the family, mother-nature, the founding monuments), all of this being strictly ritualized with the starting point of the trip, where the abandonment of the physical world to give place to one other that has the symbolic function of a forgotten paradise takes place. Social utopia - the national dream of modernity- reveals an aspiration for a collective good life, evoking images of a higher state of mind in the world that rapidly sees it perverted by the anathemas of progress. For example, the mechanisation of labour and the invention of an industrial suburb resulted in the imagery of a dark and gloomy comedy as opposed to the original dream of paradise, in which, this paradise is moved by the new order, the concept of free time and holidays, validating a emergent Industry of Tourism.
If by vocation and labour Man always finds possibilities of defining morality for oneself through an ascetic effort within society, the secular life, where success is the brand of choice (Max Weber), then we have to propose that tourism, as a social device for pleasure, shows this brand by presenting a commercial option for individual salvation, suggesting that the pleasure of the passing of time, a estate of grace diametrically opposed to the slow hours of Otium.
The tourist resort, as an archetype of well-being and the address of the blessed, calls for an idyllic state of nature simultaneously lost and close, sophisticated and inaccessible. This model of leisure, justified at times by the protection of the ecosystem by sumptuous elitism, closes itself in a set of tensions of which the tourist becomes its expression. While immune, alienated, free and interested, but mostly happy, the tourists enter on the scene anywhere in the world, converting the world into a performative space.
In Everybody Hates a Tourist – motto for this thematic reflection – it’s the tourist that is visited in its open cage, as a living example of the post-modern fauna.
[1]Mémoires d’un touriste
Etiquetas:
grand tour,
lazer,
ócio,
turismo
quinta-feira, 11 de junho de 2009
sábado, 6 de junho de 2009
quinta-feira, 4 de junho de 2009
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