THE ETHNOGRAPHER / TOURIST IN INDONESIA

Edward M. Bruner
University of Illinois
In ALLCOCK, John, BRUNER, Edward M & LANFANT, Marie-Francoise
(orgs.).International Tourism: Identity and Change, Anthropological and
Sociological Studies. Londres: Sage Publications, 1995.
Introduction
We have problematized the identity of the native peoples who
become the object of the tourist gaze, caught as they are in the paradoxical
predicament of encouraging tourism as a route to economic development
but realizing at the same time that tourists want to see undeveloped
primitive peoples. The more modern the locals become the less interest
they have for the Occidental tourist. Tourists come from the outside to see
the exotic; from the inside, tourism is viewed as modernization. Tourism
thrives on difference; why should the tourists travel thousands of miles and
spend thousands of dollars to view a Third World culture essentially similar
to their own? This necessity for primitiveness may lead the indigenous
people to mask their real selves and to devise performances to satisfy the
tourist quest for the exotic Other (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Bruner 1989).
The consequences this predicament may have for the native self have been
discussed elsewhere (Bruner 1991).
We have also problematized the role of the tourist (see Amirou, this
volume), but where we have done the least in tourism studies is to analyze
the identity of those who study tourism, the researchers. We study the
voyeurism of the tourist but not the voyeurism of the researcher studying
tourists (Walkerdine 1986). In many fields, including anthropology, we no
longer regard the research scientist as a politically detached objective
observer who studies other peoples from a neutral position. In recent years
we have become very aware of the multiple ways that our narrative
structures, writing practices, academic conventions, and ideological stances
penetrate our professional practice (Bruner 1984, 1986, 1989, Clifford and
Marcus 1986, Marcus and Fischer 1986). We realize that the scientist does
not have a fixed monolithic or unified self but is rather a product of an
historical era, a disciplinary perspective, a life situation, and that these
historical and social factors have a bearing on the production of scientific
research. Rather than factor out the personal from the scientific, recent
ethnographers have celebrated it (Narayan 1989, Lavie 1990, Kondo 1990).

In this paper I discuss my experiences serving as a tour guide to

Indonesia for affluent American tourists. My focus will be on the identity
of the researcher as well as on the tourists. Although the setting is
Indonesia, the paper is more about Americans than Indonesians, and as
such is more a contribution to studies of Western culture than to studies of
Southeast Asia. As an ethnographer working as a guide for tourists, I was
also led to reflect on the similarities and differences between ethnography
and tourism, both Western discursive practices, and these reflections will
constitute the concluding thrust of the paper.
The Ethnographer as Tour Guide
My rationale for becoming a tour guide was to gather data for a
comparative study of tourist productions. A key difficulty in studying
tourists is methodological - the tourists move so fast through the sites that it
is hard to keep up with them. The problem is not one of gaining rapport,
for the tourists are accessible, but the problem is one of finding an
opportunity for an extended conversation. It is relatively easy to begin a
discussion but in the middle of a sentence the tour leader announces that
the group is moving on to the next site, and your informant has
disappeared. Further, tourists become a group in their area of origin, in
New York, or Tokyo, or Paris. They travel together, eat their meals
together for the duration of the tour, and become a tightly knit social group,
not necessarily a cohesive one, but a traveling social unit, sharing the
adventures and the trials of a common journey. I felt that the only way for
me to enter into tourist discourse would be to join the tour group. As a
guide, I would be an insider and I could observe how the tourists actually
experienced the sites and events to which they were exposed. I would be
there, on the bus with the tourists immediately after a performance to
observe their reactions, or I could sit with them at breakfast during a
discussion about the itinerary for the day. We have generalizations in the
literature about tourist motivations, that they are on a sacred journey
(Graburn 1977), on a quest for their authentic self (MacCannell 1976), or
that tourism is play (Cohen 1984), but little systematic observation on the
tourists' own reactions and interpretations.
Of course, I could have accomplished the same objective by
becoming a tourist, but that would have been a prohibitively expensive
alternative, especially as my focus of interest was American and European
tourists who travel to Third World countries. By becoming a guide, my
expenses were paid by the commercial tour agency that hired me and in
addition, I received a fee of $200 per participant. I led the Indonesian tour
two times, in March 1986, and again in March 1987. On the first tour there
were 7 tourists and on the second there were 13, so I earned $1400 and

$2600. On both tours, however, my wife accompanied me as she always

does on ethnological field trips, and we had to pay for her expenses, at cost.
As the Indonesia tour, including both air fare and land package, cost about
$4200 per person, we actually lost money.
The Tourists
As there are many types of tours and tourists (Cohen 1984), I will
describe the nature of my particular Indonesian tour. Briefly, it was an
upscale version of what has been called cultural or educational tourism
(Mintz 1977, Graburn 1983). The agency advertised that their tours were
led by "noted scholars," a reading list had been distributed in advance, and
the front page of the tourist brochure for Indonesia presented a biographical
sketch of my academic qualifications stressing that I was an anthropology
professor, had conducted three years of field work in Indonesia, and spoke
the language. One way to put it was that the tour agency was not only
selling Indonesia, they were selling me, at least in my capacity as a scholar.
Another way to put it was that tourism had co-opted ethnography. This was
a tour with a tour guide professor and tourist students, ostensibly there to
learn. It was comparable, in the advertising and in the tourist view, to the
tours organized by universities for their alumni or by museums for their
sponsors. Many anthropologists have led such tours but few mention it and
even fewer write about it or incorporate the experience into their academic
discourse. The participants, however, were very aware of the special nature
of their tour. One woman said about another group that they were mere
tourists, for they didn't even have their own academic lecturer. Another
remarked that he would never go with one of those tour groups that cover
all Asia in a few weeks, moving from Hong Kong, to Singapore, to
Bangkok, and to Bali, for a brief 3 days in each locality. Our group, it was
claimed, by spending 3 weeks in one country was able to explore Indonesia
in depth. In 3 weeks!
Combining the 1986 and the 1987 populations yields a sociological
profile of the tourists. They were older; the average age was about 50.
Seven of the 20 were women who had been divorced or widowed and who
were traveling alone. Nine were men or women who had previously
worked but who were now retired. If, as MacCannell (1976) says, tourists
are alienated beings who lead such shallow and inauthentic lives that they
have to seek authenticity elsewhere, one would never know it from these
tourists. They were well educated - 19 of the 20 had received a college
education, and most were from a successful professional or business class,
wealthy enough to afford a $4200 three week vacation. There were
physicians, business executives, a lawyer, an engineer, a medical school
professor, and even a retired Phd in sociology.

I felt comfortable with these affluent tourists in part because of the

similarities in our life experiences. Like the tourists, my wife and I were
older college educated professionals, and we too talked about our children.
Relationships between persons of similar socio-economic and generational
levels may be more comfortable as so much is shared. Personally, I found
the tourists to be intelligent, adventuresome, and hardy souls. Some had
previously organized their own trips, but they preferred the group tour as it
took the hassle out of travel, especially in Third World countries. They
appreciated that everything was arranged in advance, that no time was lost
enroute, that the accommodations were first class, and that it was a learning
experience. Most enjoyed the companionship of others on the group tour,
and for many of the single travelers this was a key factor. Some of the
older single women were afraid to travel by themselves and were very
dependent on the group and on the tour leader. I recorded tourist dreams,
and one woman dreamed that she and I were together on the tour bus, that I
stopped off at a photography store to buy more film, but I did not return.
After a frantic search to find her tour guide, she finally located me in an old
church, much to her relief. When I asked what she felt during the dream,
the woman replied that she felt terror at being alone and abandoned.
Dreams may be read at many levels, of course, but in this dream the
manifest content reveals the woman's dependency on the tour group and the
emotional force of that dependency.
Many of the tourists had became international travelers at a
particular stage in their life cycle, when they had the leisure time and the
money, especially after retirement, or after losing a spouse. One woman
told me that her husband, recently retired from a lucrative medical practice,
was dragging her all over the world, on one tour after another, as if to make
up for the missed vacations during busy working years. Another relatively
young woman in her forties, just divorced, explained that she was going on
tours because to live the good life was the best revenge.
Every one of the 20 tourists had been on previous tours, and 10 of
the 20 had been on other tours with the same travel agency. All of the
tourists, then, were experienced travelers, many went regularly on one or
two organized tours a year, and some had been doing so for decades.
Tourism was part of their life style. This was an unexpected finding for
me, although it has been reported by others (Foster 1986). Much of the
conversation on tour was about tours - an experience in Zimbabwe, the
time the children went along on the trip to East Africa, what happened
when the bus broke down in Burma, a tour taken last year with Society
Expeditions or Abercrombie & Kent, or what it was like when China was
just opened to tourism. There was competition within the group as to who
had gone to the most exotic places, and who had gone to China first. The

conversation reflected and constructed a tourist culture, a subculture of

educational tours taken by a leisured class.
I gained some insight into this culture when one day at lunch I
asked, who did they show their photographs to when they returned home?
The question elicited some uneasiness and a few quiet smiles. What I
learned was that they showed their slides to their children, possibly to a
close friend or relative, but that in general not many people wanted to see
their slides or even to hear about the trip, at least not hear about it in any
detail. The tourists lacked a home audience, and their most significant
others, if I may use that phrase, were tourists like themselves. As this
group of others was constituted on tour, as an interest group, there was
throughout the three week period continual animated conversation not so
much about Indonesia as about tourism. By the middle of the first week the
travelers had consulted one another about where to go on the next tour.
What these tourists shared was an interest in tours, and one way to find a
meaningful social group to share their interest was to go on another tour.
Or to attend a reunion. In November 1985, before leading the
Indonesia tours, I was a guide on a tour to Thailand and Burma sponsored
by an organization in Chicago. It was also an educational three week tour,
and the sociological profile of the participants was similar to the profile of
the Indonesian tour groups. Some months after our return, the Sullivans, a
popular couple on the Thailand-Burma trip sent us an invitation to come to
a tourist reunion on a Sunday at their home in the suburbs of Chicago. The
husband was a retired military officer who had a second career as an
executive in a bank, the wife owned a woman's clothing shop, and as a
couple they were intelligent, witty, friendly, and fun to be with. Of course,
my wife and I were delighted to go, for we had never attended a tourist
reunion before. What would it be like? What would we do? More detailed
instructions followed, and we learned that in the morning there would be
only eight people from the Thailand-Burma tour - the Sullivans, the
Bruners, and two other couples. One of the other husbands owned a
factory that made electric motors, and one was a physician. There were at
least four additional people from the Chicago area who had been on the
tour and who could have been invited, but were not, possibly because all
four were single, and of these, two were elderly widows.
The Sullivans told us to bring our slides and the morning was spent
viewing each others' photographs. If anyone had a particularly striking
photo, others would ask for a copy, but in fact there was considerable
similarity in the images, possibly because on tour everyone usually took
photographs at the same time, when the bus stopped. There were many
romantic images of buffalo in the rice fields, of saffron-robed monks, of
smiling Third World children, and of Buddhist temples. Another reason for
the similarity was the influence of National Geographic magazine. While

on tour, copies of the National Geographic coverage of the country would

circulate among the tourists, and this happened on both the ThailandBurma tour and on the two Indonesia trips. Apparently it was a common
practice on educational tours. The Sullivans later informed me that they
saved old copies of National Geographic - they had a huge stack in the
basement - and before each trip would look up the issue of the country to
be visited, which provided a model of the kind of images they would seek.
The slide show was over by noon, and the reunion took a different turn.
Persons who had traveled with the Sullivans on other tours came at
noon for a buffet lunch, and those of us who had been there in the morning
joined the larger group. As many of the people were known only to the
Sullivans and were strangers to each other, each person was asked to fill
out a name tag, and after listing their name, to list the tours taken with the
Sullivans. My tag, for example, was "Ed Bruner, Thailand-Burma", but
other tags might list, after the person's name, the East African Safari tour,
the Walking tour in Germany, the English Countryside tour, or whatever
trips the person had taken with the Sullivans. Thus, the mark of ones'
identity was a name, which was expected, followed by a listing of tours,
which shows the importance this group attached to tourism. The walls of
the home were covered with photographs grouped together not by theme
but by tour, and much of the conversation concerned tours taken or
anticipated. A sense of consumerism and consumption pervaded the air, as
one person after another told stories of experiences in exotic places.
The centerpiece of the buffet table was quite remarkable, as it
contained a number of the souvenirs the Sullivans had purchased on their
many trips. There was a cloth from India. A mask from Africa, Chinese
pottery, a Bavarian-type Swiss clock, a Maasai spear, a German beer mug,
Thai temple bells, an Australian boomerang, and a Mekonde statue. I was
pleased to see this centerpiece, for I had never known what tourists did
with all the souvenirs they bought. The display reminded me of Mullaney's
(1983:43) description of a 16th century European wonder cabinet: "what
comes to reside in a wonder-cabinet are, in the most reified sense of the
phrase, strange things: tokens of alien cultures, reduced to the status of
sheer objects, stripped of cultural and human contexts." The objects
survive the period and the context that produce them. A wonder-cabinet
has absolutely no classificatory principle at work except that the items
contained within it are all strange objects, whereas museum exhibits have
some unifying theme, such as objects of a particular type or from a certain
geographical area of the world. The classificatory principle at work in the
centerpiece was that all the objects had been collected on tour, by the
Sullivans. Not only the objects in the centerpiece but the guests themselves
were classified by tour, which demonstrates the importance of the tour.
Each object in the centerpiece served as a reminder of a particular tour, and

the object served as the occasion for telling a story about the conditions in
which the object had been selected and purchased (Stewart 1984). It is
important to note that the concern was less with the intrinsic quality of the
object, such as how it might be used, or with the position of the object in
the indigenous culture, but rather with the circumstances involved in the
collection of the object by the Sullivans.
These data suggest that the tourists may have more of an
experience of the tour group than an experience of Indonesia. It would be
too extreme to say that the tourists go to Indonesia as an excuse for joining
a tour group. But rather than beginning with a desire to see Indonesia and
then deciding that the group tour was a convenient way to go, many
individual tourists first decide to go on tour and then select Indonesia. In
any case, there is no doubt that the cultural content, the knowledge of
Indonesia, is acquired within the context of the tour group, and this is one
of the most important things about the entire experience.
Ethnography and Tourism
We now ask, what did I learn as a tour guide to Indonesia and what
were the difficulties? My double role as a tour guide serving tourists, and
as an ethnographer studying them, placed me in an interstitial position
between touristic and ethnographic discourse, and I must admit that I had
not been aware of the ambiguities of the position in which I had placed
myself. As ethnographer I wanted to learn how tourists experienced the
sites, but as tour guide my task was to structure that experience through my
lectures and explanations. My talk mediated their experience and in a
sense, I found myself studying myself. Like the Kaluli shaman who create
the meaning they discover (Schieffelin 1992), I constructed for the tourists
the meaning of the sites and then I studied that meaning as if I had
discovered it. This is not as unusual in ethnographic research as it may at
first appear. Cassirer has noted that when we think we are exploring reality
we are merely engaging in a dialogue with our own symbolic systems
(Bruner 1986:150).
Even more disturbing, during the course of the journey through
Indonesia I would slip back and forth between the two discourses, the
touristic and the ethnographic, for I could not always keep them straight.
At times I experienced myself as pure tourist, gaping in awe at Borobudur,
the magnificent 8th century Buddhist monument in central Java, and at
other times I marshalled my reflexive acuity and carefully took notes on
tourist behavior. The same oscillation occurred in my photography. I took
photographs of Borobudur that must have been indistinguishable from any
tourist snapshot, but then I would turn my camera and photograph the
tourists taking photographs of Borobudur. Was I a closet ethnographer on

tour, or a closet tourist doing ethnography? Was Sidney Mintz correct, that
"we are all tourists" (1977:59)? The ambiguity of it all was upsetting.
Having found myself in this predicament, I was led to reflect on the
similarities and differences between tourism and ethnography, and
particularly to probe more deeply into my own experiences. Early in my
career my wife and I had lived in a Toba Batak village in North Sumatra
and were adopted into the Simandjuntak clan (Bruner 1957). I did rather
traditional ethnography of rural and urban social organization (Bruner
1963), and only later in the 1980s did my interests turn to tourism. In the
early 1970s, when modern mass tourism was rapidly developing in Bali, I
went on a few "vacations" there with my family, taking time off from
anthropological work I was then conducting in Java (Bruner 1972). We
stayed at tourist hotels or beach cottages in Sanur, and from what I
recollect, we behaved in ways essentially similar to other tourists in Bali. I
thoroughly enjoyed these Balinese family vacations. Thus, I have occupied
multiple roles in Indonesia, as ethnographer, as tourist, as ethnographer
studying tourism, and as tour guide, so I am an appropriate person to write
on this topic.
The similarities between tourism and ethnography have been
explored with irony and insight by Crick (1985, and this volume). Both
tourists and ethnographers travel to foreign areas, reside there temporarily,
observe native peoples, and return with accounts and stories of their
observations. Tourism and ethnography (and colonialism) are relatives
(Graburn 1983), as they arise from the same social formation and are
different forms of Western expansion into the Third World. KirshenblattGimblett (1987: 59) regards "tourism as a species of ethnographic
discourse." Colonialists frequently yearn for the traditional native culture
that they have destroyed, what Rosaldo (1989) calls imperialist nostalgia,
but as I have noted elsewhere (Bruner 1989) it is precisely this traditional
culture that ethnographers have usually described and that the tourists now
come to see. Colonialism, ethnography, and tourism have at different time
periods engaged the mythological "traditional" culture of primitive peoples,
based upon a gross inequity in power relations. In our contemporary era,
tourism seeks to occupy the ethnographic present, the discursive space that
colonialism mourns for and that ethnography has recently, and finally,
abandoned. As the ethnographic present never existed it has always been
reconstructed, formerly in the traditional ethnographic monograph, and
now in the standard tourist performance (Lanfant 1989). This preference
for the simulacrum is the essence of contemporary tourism in these
postmodern times, where the copy is better than the original (Baudrillard
1983, Eco 1986).
It is not, of course, that ethnographers acknowledge the similarity
with tourism. "From the perspective of ethnography, tourism is an

illegitimate child, a disgraceful simplification, and an impostor (de Certeau

1984: 143), and we strive to distinguish ethnography from tourism, for
tourism is an assault on our authority and privileged position as
ethnographers (Bruner 1989: 440)."
But Mintz, Graburn, Crick,
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and others have begun to highlight the similarities
between tourism and ethnography. In the remainder of this paper I will
reverse the focus to highlight the differences. The challenge is to avoid the
obvious - that ethnography is science, authentic, and work, whereas tourism
is commercial, inauthentic, and play - and to articulate the differences
based upon my own Indonesian field experiences.
Touristic Visualization
My most striking insight into the tourist mentality occurred when I
was a guide for the second tour group to Indonesia in 1987. In Bali, in
addition to the usual tourist itinerary of the kecak and barong dances, I had
arranged for the group to attend an odalan or Balinese temple festival, a
performance that the Balinese put on for themselves. Such rituals are not
on the tour itinerary because they occur at irregular intervals and the time
scheduling is unpredictable. A group may arrive at a temple only to find
that the festival was over yesterday or will take place next week. Our
group arrived on the day of the temple festival, which was fortunate, but we
arrived too early, at 10 am in the morning, and nothing was happening. We
took our bus to another nearby site and returned at 11 am, only to find that
not much had changed. We waited until 11:30 am but there was still not
much activity. One of the tourists complained of the heat and suggested to
the tour director that we leave. I urged that we wait, noting that the
Balinese were resting in the shade whereas the members of our group were
walking about in the sun. Just relax, for the ceremony will begin, I assured
them.
Shortly after noon, the festival started, and it was spectacular.
Elderly Balinese women began dancing in a line around the temple
courtyard. Their faces were intense, as if in trance, their finger and body
movements slow and delicate. Other women began arriving with pyramids
of flowers, fruit, and sweets balanced on their heads as offerings to the
temple gods. The pemangku or priests were sprinkling holy water on
kneeling supplicants. The barong and rangda masks, which look like
Chinese dragons, were assembled for a procession. Incense was burning,
the gamelan was playing, the odors, sounds and colors were coming from
everywhere, it was all happening at once, an ethnographer's paradise. At
that point, just as the festival was beginning, around 12:30 pm, the tour
director announced that we were leaving for lunch and that everyone
should go back to the tour bus.

I protested, and explained that what ethnographers do in these

circumstances is to "hang around," to flow with the events, and to observe.
This was a rare opportunity, I said, because such Hindu rituals were only
performed in Bali, and an odalan is performed at each temple only once a
year. Stay, I said, to see this dazzling ceremony. "But we have seen it,"
replied one tourist as the group followed the tour leader back to the air
conditioned bus.
"But we have seen it." These words still haunt me. The touristic
mode of experiencing is primarily visual, and to have been there, to have
"seen" it, only requires presence. The tourist "sees" enough of the Balinese
ritual to confirm his prior images derived from the media, from brochures,
and from National Geographic. To "see" a ritual is comparable to
collecting a souvenir to be placed in the centerpiece of a buffet table, a
twentieth century wonder cabinet. The tourist has "seen" a strange thing, a
token of the exotic, and there is no necessity to go further, to penetrate to
any deeper level. To have captured the ceremony in photographs is to have
domesticated the exotic, so that it can be brought back home, and the aura
of pleasurable mystification remains.
As Clifford (1988) and Geertz (1988) have informed us, if
ethnography is anything it is writing, for the final ethnographic product is
an account, in words, spoken or written, a lecture, article, or monograph.
An ethnographer could spend years studying an odalan, and many have, as
we analyze the time sequence, the placement in space, the ritual symbols,
the identity of the social groups involved, and the meaning of it all for the
Balinese. For us, being there is just the start of a long process of taking
field notes, analyzing, writing, revising, and presenting. The touristic and
ethnographic modes of understanding are totally different.
I had a similar experience with another tour group in Sulawesi.
When we arrived at the hotel I learned that there was to be a large Toradja
funeral the next day and suggested at supper that we forget the printed
itinerary and go directly to the ritual. One tourist objected that he didn't
want to miss anything that was written on the printed schedule, and the
group, supported by the local Indonesian guide, decided to follow the set
itinerary but to go to the ritual before lunchtime. After a morning of going
to dead Toradja "traditional" villages, where no one lived but where the
tourists could buy souvenirs and cloth (and the Indonesian guide could
receive his customary commission), we finally arrived at the ceremony in
time to see the slaughter of ten buffalo. At 1 pm, the group sent a delegate
to inform me that they felt it was time to leave, but I had managed to keep
them there for one and a half hours, better than in Bali. At lunch, we did
have a good discussion of animal sacrifice, kinship groupings, and
Indonesian beliefs about the supernatural, but I would have rather remained
at the ceremony.

That tourism is based on visual perception was reinforced by the

contrast between the role of photography in ethnography and in tourism. In
my earlier work in Sumatra, I found that I could not do ethnography and
photography at the same time. Maybe Karl Heider or Richard Chalfen
could do it, but I couldn't. As ethnographer, I was sensitive to my primary
sources of information, my conversations with people and my observations
of their behavior. I had to go along with the flow of the dialogue. As
photographer, I went off in a different direction, as I was sensitive to the
correct camera angle, to the play of light and shade, to the moment when
the elements in the photograph were in the most appropriate arrangement.
My objective was a photograph that was aesthetically pleasing as well as
ethnographically informative. At a given event or ceremony, I might do
both ethnography and photography, but serially, never simultaneously.
Each required a different style of concentration and a different play of
sensory modes.
On the other hand, tourists observe people and events through the
camera lens. Many times I have observed that when tourists come to a new
site, their first reaction is to move the camera to the eye, so that they see
others through the viewfinder. This is very selective perception, as it places
a frame around the object, and it decontextualizes the Other (Sontag 1973,
Mulvey 1975, Barthes 1981). It removes the surrounding context from
view and selects out for emphasis what is contained within the frame,
almost as a close-up of life, a well composed image, to the neglect of the
larger environment around the frame. This way of experiencing transforms
the native object into images, into frames. The world is seen as a series of
framed photographs. It is the ultimate triumph of Polaroid photography,
because even without the requisite technology, peoples and sites are turned
into instant images.
Is this emphasis on tourist visualization an overstatement? Not
every tourist, of course, carries a camera. If a couple is traveling together,
frequently only one person takes the pictures and assumes the
photographer's role, although sometimes both may take photographs. Sites
require varying degrees of verbal explanation, and indeed there are some
verbalizations about every site, in the form of tour guide talk, signs,
markers, guidebooks, tourist brochures, or even the remarks of other
tourists. No site in the Third World is approached naively, because there is
always some interpretation provided or available before the tourists come
the site. In a sense, every site is pre-interpreted. The tourists "know" about
the site before they arrive, if only because they have selected the site in
advance when they purchased the tour, and they do have a prior conception
of what they are buying.
Nevertheless, photographic visualization is the dominant mode of
touristic perception.

As tourists approach the Other with camera in hand, they "see" the
Balinese or the Toradja through their viewfinder. The camera held in front
of the face of the tourist serves as a mask, a way of enhancing the distance
between subject and object, of hiding oneself from the Other. The tourist
can move in for a closeup but this is accomplished without direct eye-toeye contact. It is as if what confronts the Other is the camera-mask (to coin
a phrase) of the tourist, which hides his or her real self. Photography is a
way of examining the native, a voyeurism, without being personal or
committed to the relationship, without seeming to look. Photography
provides a role for the tourist in what otherwise might be an awkward
encounter. The tourist eye "sees" though photographic frames.
As a compliment to this touristic mode of experiencing, much of
the Third World, at least along the main tourist routes, is being transformed
as image for the tourist gaze.
Native craft demonstrations and
performances are being arranged at times of the day when the conditions
and the light are best for photography. I have observed this phenomena in
Bali, in Java, and in East Africa, but I first noticed it as a graduate student
during a tour of Monument Valley in the Southwest, where Navaho in
bright blue and turquoise clothing, riding horses, would herd sheep in the
late afternoon, when the sun cast long shadows along the ridges of a sand
dune. It made a magnificent photograph, one reproduced many times, and
had become a standard part of the tour. The tour leader, in advance, told us
exactly where to stand to get the best photographs. Marked photo vantage
points along tourist routes are commonplace, but that native life is being
rearranged to fit touristic photographic requirements is something else
again (Chalfen 1987:118). In one of my Indonesian tours, I asked an
elderly tourist if he had a good day, and he replied that it was better than
yesterday, as there were more good photographic opportunities. He
evaluated the success of his tour by the number of his photographs. Tour
agents and entrepreneurs have responded to this need, as native peoples are
being given visual but not verbal space in touristic discourse.
Touristic Surrender
An executive of a large technology firm on the east coast explained
to me that once he boarded the plane for Indonesia he became completely
relaxed, because he knew that everything would be done for him by the
tour agency, and that everything would be first class. He traveled with this
agency, he said, because they really took care of you - there would be no
hassles, no concerns, and no necessity to make decisions. I came to
understand what he meant. When the group was moving from one island
area to another, the instructions were to place your bags outside your hotel
room on the day of departure. A bus was waiting to take you to the airport,

where you were given your boarding pass. There was no waiting in line, no
worry about customs or immigration, passports or tickets. When the plane
arrived at its destination, another bus was waiting to take you to the hotel,
you were given a key to your new room, and shortly thereafter your bags
were delivered. At every step along the way you were told what to do.
While on tour you were told when to stay with the group or when there was
a period of free time, and in the latter case, you were instructed precisely
when to meet back at the bus. The time spent at each site was
predetermined by the agency. The main requirement was that you follow
instructions, and it was considered bad form to be late or to hold up the
group. Almost all of the tourists did as they were told.
This set of practices and the attitudes that accompany it I call
"tourist surrender." Other writers have described this phenomena in other
terms, suggesting for example, that tourists become like children (Dann
1989). What I wish to emphasize here is that the tourists voluntarily
surrender control, they let go, and turn over the management of the tour to
the agency. They become passive and dependent, and this is what gives
them the feeling of relaxation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines
surrender as "to give oneself up into the power of another," as a prisoner,
and this expresses my meaning in that tourists relinquish power over their
actions for the duration of the tour.
I do not, however, accept the model of going on tour as a liminal
"time out" from home, based on the van Gennep, Victor Turner notion of
rites of passage, as used by Jafari, as a three part home-journey-home
paradigm. Such paradigms fail to problematize "home" (Morris 1988) and
from the perspective of my own home university community, with all its
turmoil about multiculturalism, racial, and gender issues, it is difficult
anymore to regard "home" as a stable beginning or ending. Then too, the
journey on the group tour involves an oscillation, from hotel to the bus to
the sites, and as I have already mentioned in an earlier section, what the
tourists talk about is other tours and tourism more than Indonesia, so that
in their conversations on the journey, which are about status and
consumerism, they never really leave home. What the tourists surrender is
not their structural position in a home society but rather control over their
journey.
Touristic surrender involves acceptance of the common practices of
the group tour, such as the social requirements of group travel and the loss
of the ability to set one's own agenda. Surrender makes the details of travel
so much easier, but in the bargain, the tourists also surrenders control of
their relationship with the Indonesian peoples. Touristic surrender then is
just the opposite of the ethnographic stance. Ethnography is a struggle and
one never surrenders. An ethnographer is or could be working every
waking moment, taking notes, conducting interviews, and continually

struggling to understand and to make sense of a different culture. In the

field, the constant struggle is against the taken-for-granted, of giving in to
native routine, for the greatest danger is in accepting, or surrendering, to
native ways to such an extent that one begins to live the native life rather
than describing it for a home audience. The enterprise is never completed
because even after you leave the field site the hard problems emerge of
creating order out of a melange of discontinuous notes and memories.
Tourism is primarily visual, ethnography verbal: tourists surrender,
ethnographers struggle.
Possibly even more important are two points about which I am still
gathering data and am not prepared to discuss at this time, but I will
mention them. The first is that tourists, at least those on upscale cultural
tourism of the kind I have described, accept no moral or political
responsibility for the people they visit or for the accounts of native peoples
that they produce, whereas ethnographers these days have to accept full
political responsibility for their work. As a tour guide working for a tour
agency I found myself fighting the system, and even trying to change it, in
ways that I will describe elsewhere (Bruner nd).
The second point is that in places like Bali, which have had at least
70 years of continuous tourism, from the late 1920s (Picard 1990, Boon
1977, 1990), it is no longer possible to differentiate in Balinese culture
between what is touristic and what is ethnographic.
There are
performances which arise in Balinese life, the province of the ethnographer,
but drift into tourism, such as the barong drama, and there are dramas such
as the frog dance which was created in Batuan in the 1970s explicitly for
tourists but which has now been performed in Balinese social life, and
hence is now ethnographic. Michel Picard, Hildred Geertz, and James
Boon are among those exploring these issues. It is not just that Crick and
others highlight the similarities between tourism and ethnography, as two
entirely separate discourses, and I focus on some differences, and that this
is a purely scholarly issue, but rather that tourism has influenced the selves
and the lives of native peoples to such an extent that they cannot be entirely
sure what is touristic and what ethnographic, between what is performed
for outsiders and what for themselves, between what is sacred and what
secular (Picard 1990). If a culture is shaped for 70 years, over multiple
generations, to perform for foreigners, as in Bali, and if the evaluations of
foreign scholars legitimate some Balinese performances more than others,
so that they are emphasized more in Balinese culture, it blurs the
boundaries. If a Balinese troupe performs a dance drama in a temple, we
call it religion; if in a concert hall in London, we call it art; if in a beach
hotel, e call it tourism. But the distinctions between religion, art, and
tourism are Western categories, not Balinese realities.

Earlier in the paper, in an ironic tone, I described how I was

lecturing to the tourists about Indonesia, thus influencing them, and then
studying their reactions to Indonesia, so that in effect I was studying
myself. This same process has been operating in Bali and possibly in
Toradja (Volkman 1990), on a more profound cultural level, as Indonesians
shape their performances for a foreign audience. Balinese culture, the stuff
of ethnography is itself becoming contaminated with the touristic. The
point goes beyond my personal role problem in separating my touristic self
from my ethnographic self. The point is that the Balinese and other
Indonesian peoples have the same problem, which is indeed a predicament.

Footnotes: Please consult published version, as footnotes do not

transmit in DOS text file posted here, with author's permission.
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