An Essay in Social and Cultural Psychology
Introduction
Leisure travel has
become a multi-million dollar industry. Yet, there is an irony here.
Travel, in a twentieth- and twenty-first century context is rarely
relaxing or stress-free, but still the notion of travel tends to be
associated with going on holiday, free time and unwinding from the
tensions and concerns of the everyday. It could be argued that
recuperation from the travails of the workplace would best be
achieved in the comfort of the home, in familiar surroundings, at a
pace suited to an individual's constitution and personality. Instead,
the modern holidaymaker is socially conditioned to relate a break
from work and career with subjection to the stimulus of a different
environment and new experiences. Until the second decade of the
twenty first century, when experts and politicians concerned with the
economic austerity in Britain in, advocated so-called 'stay-cations',
that is travelling relatively short distances within the British
Isles and staying in self-catering accommodation, holiday parks or on
designated campsites, vacations were popularly taken abroad where
different cultures are deemed to add positively to the holiday
experience. This strangeness of the unaccustomed creates a
psychological sense of otherness in the individual which produces
symptoms similar to those experienced in victims of major traumatic
events such as the loss of home, belongings and, often, their sense
of identity through war, fire, flood, environmental or
weather-related catastrophes. It induces, in the individual, albeit
temporarily, a feeling of depersonalisation. In this essay I argue
that leisure travel is an act of deliberate and voluntary people
displacement and examine some of the psychological effects on
individuals born from the socio-economic, socio-political efficacy of
an industry which has grown so vast it is now feared to have serious
environmental consequences.
The Psychology of Voluntary Displacement
They say that
anticipation is often greater than the event. When people plan a
holiday and then count down the period until they close their office
door or shed their work clothes for the last time they mostly look
forward to the things they imagine doing once they reach their
destination. They take little account of the stress involved in
getting there. The journey is rarely without incident. Think of the
misery of shlepping luggage along miles of corridor in airports or
train stations, the hours spent queuing at check-in or passport
control, the convoluted, sometimes invasive, security checks before
being allowed to board one's chosen means of transport. Consider the
inconvenience of unscheduled delays and/or missed connections. For
those particularly unlucky to suffer lost or misplaced baggage there
is the additional worry of tracking down belongings. All this is
hardly a healthy way in which to recover from the routines and
tensions of the average workplace. Yet, each year millions of us
choose to forgo the comfort and familiarity of our homes and subject
ourselves to these inconveniences in the belief that when we return
we will feel mentally and physically rejuvenated. Most importantly,
we anticipate being able to relate our travel and holiday experiences
– good, bad or indifferent – to our friends, neighbours and work
colleagues. The ability to do so deems us 'one of the crowd'. It
places us within the social arena we consider appropriate to our
class and circumstances. It aligns us with our most basic human
instinct: to be sheep-like.
Walk down the
streets of any city, holiday resort or sea port during the summer
months and it will not take you long to notice the tourists; those
foreign to the place they are in. They are unmistakably
holidaymakers. The vacant expressions on their faces, the way they
dress, rucksacks on their backs, the camera slung
around their neck. They carry an air of feeling lost, an obvious
aura of being outside their comfort zone. In shops, restaurants and
hotels they struggle with foreign currency and a language they have
difficulty in speaking and understanding. A smile is rarely in
evidence. There is, about the holidaymaker. a sense of abject
loneliness; an aloneness which has nothing to do with whether the
individual is in the company of others or on his own. It is an air,
arguably, of which he is not himself conscious, but which expresses
itself through his body language. An astute observer may notice the
wavering walk, as though the individual is slightly tipsy, the
unfocused gaze as he looks about at unfamiliar scenes. This is due to
the overstimulation of his spatial awareness. Too many unaccustomed
impressions impinge on his brain at once. It, hence, struggles to
process this onslaught of information not previously recorded and
stored in the memory. The effect is similar to motion sickness
without the nausea, although occasionally it may induce a slight
headache. Furthermore, the unfamiliar surroundings and loss of normal
routine risk creating or exacerbating existing tensions between
family members or travel companions. This phenomenon, too, can
occasionally be observed in public when heightened emotions overwhelm
a party of holidaymakers and tensions erupt outside the privacy of
their accommodation or other private space.
Although the human
brain, when healthy, is conditioned to react quickly to changes, the
unexpected, or necessary adjustments in the position of the body
(stepping out of the path of an oncoming car, for example), it is not
sufficiently prepared to absorb and process the barrage of new
impressions – sights, sounds, smells. Experiencing a strange
location for the first time, taking in and adjusting to, unaccustomed
surroundings when one is mentally in relaxed holiday 'mode' is
different from situations in which an individual anticipates his
reactions to be challenged, both mentally and physically. When
preparing to go to, say, football training, or other sports game, a
mental readying occurs through the anticipatory thought processes,
inducing the production of adrenalin within the body. This
unconscious instinct can be traced back to our hunter-gatherer
ancestors whose mental and physical reactions were trained to cope
with the unpredictability involved in hunting down the next meal. It
is a cerebral preparation that is not present in the relaxed
holidaymaker whose perceptual responses are slower and less alert
than in his daily life when he has schedules to keep to and
appointments to get to on time. The absence of the need to maintain
this alertness is, therefore, replaced by a sense of otherness when
the quietened mind is overstimulated. This, in turn, produces the
feelings already described: depersonalisation, confusion, impaired
spatial awareness and sometimes even mild distress. These are all
symptoms which can be witnessed in people who have been forcibly
displaced. Additionally, these stresses, although present, tend to
reside in the unconscious part of the mind, rather than the
conscious. The increased feelings of uncertainty and otherness may
not only exacerbate tensions between families or travelling parties,
as already mentioned, but may cause an individual to express
long-held resentments (such as grievances about family dynamics,
rivalries, jealousies) which, until this time, he has kept to himself
without intending ever to reveal them, least of all in a holiday
environment, but which the unconscious stress of the unfamiliar
brings forth before the individual has a chance to stop himself.
Since society has
conditioned us to believe that travel 'broadens the mind', is
therefore 'good for us' and is meant to be something we enjoy many of
us spend the annual holiday 'pretending'; a behaviour which may or
nay not occur consciously. The impact of unconscious displacement
upon the individual's sense of spatial awareness extends, also, to
his sense of self-awareness. Signs that we are 'faking' it
-- not only to those in whose company we are, but to ourselves as
well -- are the loud voicing of opinions and nervous, forced or
inappropriate, laughter. We may experience feelings of nervousness
or unease which common sense tells us is unjustified as there is no
obvious danger, but it is basic human instinct to be alert to
possible perils, particularly in territory that is unknown to us.
Once again, there is the uncanniness by which we experience
sensations of otherness, because we feel lost or displaced from what
we know, while at the same time there is a nagging sense, just
beneath our consciousness, that we need to be ultra-aware. We may
evidence traits, doubts or insecurities we didn't even know we
possess since they don't reveal themselves to our conscious mind when
we feel secure in our 'home' environment. As Julia Kristeva, the
Bulgarian-French philosopher and sociologist, explains in Strangers
to Ourselves,
her study on psychological otherness (1991 : 1):
..... the
foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the
space that wrecks our
abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.
In other words, we
wear different 'masks' according to the situation in which we find
ourselves. Mostly we are not even aware of the changes we undergo to
present these different 'faces'. Perhaps an even more astute analysis
of how our unconscious is always prepared for possible 'evil' is the
one the French philosopher and culturist, Jean Baudrillard (1929
- 2007), gives in his text, The Transparency of Evil
(1990, tr. 1993 : 174):-
Never being
oneself - but never being alienated either: coming from without to inscribe oneself
on the figure of the Other, within that strange form from elsewhere, that secret form
which orders not only chains of events but also existences in their
singularity.
Baudrillard argues
here the notion that we are, in fact, permanently displaced, because
we become alienated from ourselves when we feel ourselves challenged,
not only in our day-to-day associations, but particularly in
situations of genuine, potential or perceived danger. Both,
Kristeva's and Baudrillard's theories accord with Freud's idea of the
interchangeability of an individual's ego with his id as a form of
self-preservation and protection; a basic human need (Bocock,
2002 : 73). The unconscious ability to transmute our personas between
the 'inward' and the 'outward' represents an intuitive power and
self-knowledge within and of ourselves through which we secret our
fears and which enables us to face the adversaries and challenges in
our lives.
The Power of Travel Companies
They appeal to us
incessantly, on television, in newspapers and magazines, on the
radio, via social media. The alluring adverts designed to send our
minds into a spin. Barely is one holiday behind us and the
experiences stored in the part of our brain where they are easily
accessible to spill out again whenever we meet someone prepared to
listen to our joys and woes -- the azure skies and gorgeous white
sandy beaches; the five-hour flight delay, the crowded, stuffy
airports, the airline running out of bottled drinking water, amid the
35 degree heat -- when we are assailed by seductive offers for the
coming season. As we indulge in the daily ritual of reading our
favourite red-top during a break from our shift on the factory floor
or sitting in our shoebox-sized offices uselessly pushing papers
around our desk, obsessively checking emails and playing computer
patience whilst pretending to be getting on with meaningful work, our
imagination is tickled with the adverts from travel companies which
appear alongside our Google searches and we find ourselves talking
about and even planning our next vacation. We tell ourselves that in
two, three, six months or a year we'll be more than ready for a break
from the exertions (real or imagined) of the job. We tell ourselves
that just like our hard-working colleagues we deserve to 'get away
from it all', not only because we need to recharge our energy levels,
both mental and physical, but above all, because we need to be seen
as having the same aspirations as everyone else in order to ensure
that we retain our desired place in the social circles in which we
move.
The travel companies
know all about human behaviour. It is their knowledge of it which
the travel industry is largely based upon: our unconscious ambition
to be like our neighbours, like our work colleagues. It is the power
they have over the consumer. The French philosopher and historian,
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1985) equated knowledge (in this case about
human behaviour) with power. The power here lies in the specific ways
travel companies market holidays in order to provoke consumers into
believing their very existence depends on taking the type of
vacations being so seductively promoted. The power travel companies
employ is a form of psychological manipulation. A manipulation of the
human unconscious mind which Freud called Psychodynamics, that
is “the dynamic interaction between the id, ego and
superego” (Ahles, 2004 : 1 - 2).
Foucault was aware
that power frequently has negative associations (such as the
repression of the weak or vulnerable or the forbidding policies of a
dictatorship) and he advocated the need to 'turn around' our
predisposition to view the concept of power in this way. Instead:-
..... we should
try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively,
really and
materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces,
energies,
materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection
in
its material
instance as a constitution of subjects. (Foucault, 1980 : 97)
In other words,
Foucault believed power should be employed positively for the good of
society, to 'progress' towards economic, material wealth and personal
fulfilment. It is this concept of power which travel companies exhort
to promote their businesses and attract customers.
Travel companies
promote package holidays as an easy and carefree way to 'get away',
tricking customers into believing that, because they are being saved
the time and bother of holiday-planning they are being done a
favour, leaving them free to get on with their lives until the very
day they begin their holiday. In truth, however, the travel companies
are in control. They have the power to introduce changes to flights,
accommodation, and so forth, at short notice while not allowing
customers to request alterations or cancellations without incurring
additional costs.
Forced versus voluntary displacement
Historically, forced
displacement occurred as a result of war or persecution of some kind.
The latter, often on the grounds of race or religion. During the
twentieth and twenty first centuries we have seen the emergence of
new forms of imposed displacement. So-called development-induced
displacement occurs where large areas are required for enhancement
projects to improve the existing infrastructure of a region, such as
the building of airports, roads, shopping malls, schools, leisure
centres, dams or the erection of wind farms. Disaster-induced
displacement covers both natural disasters – floods, hurricanes,
tsunamis, landslides, forest fires – and industrial calamities,
such as the accidental leaking of radioactivity or nuclear waste.
A specific form of
enforced displacement is euphemistically termed population
transfer, making it sound like a large group of people in a bus
station waiting for a connecting bus to take them on a grand
adventure. Tragically that it not the case, since this category of
displacement applies to instances of ethnic cleansing or the
forceful removal of unwanted people, such as communities of
travellers from greenfield sites.
I suggest that what
tourism, in general, and travel companies, more specifically, are
doing is selling a surrogate form of people displacement. Economies
depend on businesses and industries persuading the collective mind of
the people to desire products not only to sustain their every day
needs, but to fill their leisure time, too, the latter being, to a
large degree, experiences rather than material things. This is the
reason, for example, for the astonishing growth seen, in the last
thirty years or so, of leisure centres and city gyms. In the same
period tourism has burgeoned to such a fantastic degree that industry
analysts are concerned it is about to reach breaking point. The
infrastructures of holiday destinations of all types are unable to
cope with the sheer number of tourists increasing year on year. The
fragility of the ancient sites of old cities, like Amsterdam, Athens,
Barcelona, Venice or the neolithic archaeology of the Orkney Islands,
is severely threatened by the footfall of millions of visitors as
well as seriously disrupting daily life for the residents in these
locations. Yet, it appears the tourist industry is unwilling to call
time on its aggressive marketing and selling of holidays, thereby
actively encouraging the deliberate displacement of people in such
huge numbers that they are equivalent to entire populations. They
continue to exploit the mindset of the modern consumer who desires to
be like others in his social circle. The question is, which will come
first, the total breakdown of the travel industry or the dawning in
the collective public consciousness that, in following the ruthless
exploitation of mass tourism, it is not only inflicting serious
damage on the environment, but is also subjecting itself to potential
psychological harm with the deliberate, voluntary displacement to
foreign locations.
Conclusion
In this assessment
of the travel industry and mass tourism in the second decade of the
twenty first century my overarching question was whether tourism can
be considered to be a deliberate, voluntary form of people
displacement since certain behaviour witnessed in tourists in
location unfamiliar to them is similar to that seen in people who are
forcibly displaced through war, natural disasters or urban
development projects. I began by examining the socio-economic,
socio-political reasons for individuals taking holidays, the
psychological effects of the sense of displacement and otherness of
being in a strange place and, finally, I explored the ways in which
the travel industry has the power to exploit human behaviour and
continues to do so in spite of major concerns that mass tourism is at
breaking point. Will the industry still exist in a hundred years time
and what will our notion of travel look like then? How will the
consumer adapt? These are things we may ponder in the decades to
come.
Bibliography
Ahles, Scott, R.
(2004) Our Inner World: A Guide to
Psychodynamics and Psychotherapy. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baudrillard,
J. [1990] (1993) The Transparency of Evil. London:
Verso Publishing
trans. Benedict, J.
BBC,
Radio 4 (b/c 15.30hrs BST, 05 Sept.2017) Has
Tourism Reached Tipping Point?
'Costing
the Earth' (Series): London
Bocock,
R. (2002) Sigmund Freud.
London: Taylor & Francis e-Library edition
(a
division of Routledge)
Foucault,
M. (1980) Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977.
London:
Harvester Press
Freud, S. (2006) Freud: A Modern
Reader. London: Whurr Publishers (Series in
(ed. Perelberg,
R.J.) Psychoanalysis)
Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to
Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press
(tr. Roudiez, L.S.)
McHoul,
A. [1993] (2002) A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the
Subject.
& Grace, W. London and New York:
Taylor & Francis e-Library edition (a division
of Routledge)
http://www.forcedmigration.org/about/whatisfm/what-is-forced-migration
(accessed 16 September 2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment