102 SOCIO-CULTURAL DISCOURSES IN TOURISM – Contributions by Alexandra Witte
102 SOCIO-CULTURAL DISCOURSES IN TOURISM – Contributions by Alexandra Witte
“It is thus not truth that varies with social, psychological, and cultural contexts but the symbols we construct in our unequally effective attempts to grasp it.”
(Geertz, 1973, p. 212)
Reading Geertz’s ‘The Interpretation of Cultures’, the assertion that whatever we come to know, we will know only through the prism of our participants’ and our own social and cultural understandings, and will only come to understand incompletely, struck a chord I had not fully realised I struggled with up to that point. For my Master’s dissertation, I had investigated the motivations and behaviours of Chinese students’ travelling around Europe. It was an attempt to marry my previous degree in Sinology to my tourism degree. I was fascinated by the narratives of familial and social pressure that emerged within my participant’s destination choices, and by their stories of resistance and/or compliance with what they reported to be widely held attitudes about how to travel Europe ‘correctly’. Quite naively, I sought to explain my findings through the lens of the Grand Tours of Europe of the 18th and 19th century, rather than seeking to situate my participants’ experiences explicitly within contemporary Chinese culture and society. It was only during my PhD research, once again connected to China, that I engaged with more critical readings and understandings of how cultural and social discourses and symbolisms inform human practice, experience, and values.
I have carried this interest in how wider social and cultural lifeworlds are reflected and/or challenged within tourism and mobilities forward into my research ever since. The following is intended to offer a brief overview of two different researches, which have been connected by this interest. The first pertains to my research on walking tourism in China, while the second discusses gendered experiences of travel in China. While on the face of it quite different areas of research, in both cases, key contributions lie within the furthering of our understandings of the influence social, cultural, and political discourses in contemporary China have on tourism, leisure and mobilities. These researches, thus, also explicitly sought to expand tourism research on non-Western contexts, paying attention to the unique socio-cultural frameworks in which tourism in this part of the world is contextualised.
Cultural Perspectives of walking tourism on China’s Tea Horse Road
My PhD research studied walking tourism on China’s Ancient Tea Horse Road using a mobile approach to ethnography following domestic and international tourists along the trails of this old caravan route. While conducting a preliminary literature review, it became clear that research on walking, hiking, trekking, rambling and other sub-types of this activity had generally centred on (Anglo-) Western countries or source markets. Particularly, specific trails and routes appeared to capture