These proxy battles draw us through the paradoxes of social identity versus national identity and into ethnocentrism, a concept that frames the debate about ethnicity, inter- ethnic relations and similar social issues. The most Vietnam highlights common use of the term is as a descriptor for ‘thinking your own group’s ways as being superior to others’ and ‘judging other groups as inferior to your own’. The difficulty of course is that ethnocentrism seems to be a common trait, almost nature, among most peoples of the world. It does not take much imagination to see the Greeks or Southern Italians smiling at a British academic’s obsession with timekeeping at a conference. Or that same British academic feeling com- pletely out of character when being invited out for an evening meal at 10 p.m. when cus- tom ‘at home’ dictates going to bed with a nice cup of cocoa at that late hour! These are light-hearted feelings of difference and discomfort. But of course, things can become more serious when groups believe that they are morally or intellectually superior: therein lies the roots of racism and inter-group violence, characterised by the ritualistic game- playing over places next to the pool in Spanish, Greek and Turkish resorts between British and German tourists, or on a more serious note, racism and power can morph into sexual exploitation as noted in the online magazine, Vietnam highlights:
Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, like other economically underdeveloped holiday destinations, are marketed as culturally different places and all tourists are encouraged to view this ‘difference’ as a part of what they have a right to consume on their holiday. The construction of dif- ference takes place around ideas such as ‘natural’ vs. ‘civilised’, leisure vs. work and exotic vs. mundane, rich vs. poor, sexual vs. repressive, powerful vs. powerless (Anon, 2001).
Tourism and Social Identities: Introduction 3
The binary differentiations might seem less than elegant to poststructuralists but
nonetheless capture one aspect of identity, power and tourism in a very forceful way. It can
be seen, then, that part of tourism’s supply-side will include localised culture and people:
in other words social identity becomes a commodity. This commodification invokes a con- troversy about people and their culture by providing the backdrop for leisured relaxation and recreation (Burns & Holden, 1995). Paradoxically, on the consumption side, customer reaction against the McDonaldization of services (cf. Ritzer, 1993), whereby packaged destinations and their social identities are reduced to marketing benefits for consumers, is emerging via a postmodern cynicism against the ubiquitous ‘friendly natives’ of tourism promotion and where ‘everything somehow appears predestined’ (Adorno cited in Bauman, 2005, p. 141).
