Ethnocentrism:

The tendency to view the values and behavior of other peoples as invariably inferior and less "natural" or logical than those of one's own social group, and to judge the values and behaviors of other peoples by the standards of one's own social group.

Tourism and Ethnocentrism

“Our small band was intrepid, well traveled and well prepared. Members talked knowingly of the volcanic sands of Guatemala, the cashews of Mozambique, the barracudas of Belize. They carried medical kits that included sutures and hypodermic needles. They knew how to check the tires of domestic airplanes. They could find the 24-hour supermarket in Teheran to buy caviar and the synagogues in Isfahan on their own.”

“Ronald Endeman, a lawyer from San Diego, counted Iran as the 235th country he has visited so far (but then, he counted places like Sicily and Hawaii as countries, too).”

--even though there are less than 200 countries in the world!

The Composition of the Group . . .

“Except at the mosques, the women in our group took risks with their dress almost from the start. Our guide made the mistake of telling us at our first orientation that we did not have to wear the poorly sewn, ankle-length polyester coats handed out at the beginning of the tour. So some women donned their husbands' shirts over pants and exchanged their scarves for hats. It was unseasonably hot, so we even dared to go bareheaded on the bus, which elicited wide-eyed stares (but no arrests).”

Disrespect for the Laws and Customs of Iran . . .

more . . .

“The American women were incensed that Iranian women have to ride in the back of the bus. And then there was the incident of the restaurant toilets in in Shiraz. The men's was a familiar Western, chairlike model; the women's was, as in most places, a porcelain hole in the ground that required squatting. The women simply barged past the male attendant into the men's room.”

They Consciously Violated Iran’s Social Norms:

“But there were moments of discovery, many of them disheartening. Katharine Loring, an emergency room nurse and bicyclist, said that Iran would be a great place to take a bike trek, but then learned that men and women must ride bikes on segregated tracks. Mr. Endeman, the lawyer, gave a young Iranian woman friend of mine a good-bye hug in front of our hotel in Shiraz, and she recoiled in fear: Men and women who are not close relatives are not even supposed to shake hands.”

“Still, there were uncomfortable incidents when perfect strangers told us we were misbehaving. For instance, when one female tour member posed for a photograph with a group of giggling Iranian women in their chadors in Mashad, a man barked at the women not to allow their faces to be photographed.”

Even though they were publicly criticized for their behavior . . .

“The lead story on the television news that night showed footage from demonstrations in more than a dozen cities around the country. The only problem was that some of the footage obviously came from the archives. Still, members of our group were not amused. ‘I've been smiling at people up to now," said Fritz Wright, a retired engineer. "At this point I don't know whether to smile at them or not.’"

. . . Duh!

“What I see is a privileged group of Americans (one of whom apparently measures the depth of his cross-cultural experience by counting the number of countries he visited, including Sicily and Hawaii in his list of countries!) who traveled thousands of miles to Iran and then became disappointed that they did not find America when they arrived there.

The pleasure of traveling to a foreign country is to enjoy the very differences

that traveling to that country provides. When I am visiting another country, or even when I am visiting culturally different locations within the U.S., I respect the norms and customs of the region or the locality I visit.  I don't expect Iranians or anyone else to live by my rules.  Maybe, that is why all of my travel experiences have been rewarding, even the "challenging" ones.

  Perhaps Ms. Sciolino and her companions should stay at home the next time

and experience foreign lands via the Discovery Channel, or maybe they could visit the EPCOT Center at Disney World where they could simultaneously enjoy both palatable versions of "other cultures" and flush toilets for everyone.

An Anthropological Perspective . . .

Kenyan Dancers . . .

• “When the Maasai dance for themselves in real manyeatas, they huddle together. When they dance for tourists, they line up like an aerobic class.”

• “Come on you tourists, buy our beadwork and give us all of your money.”

• “There is no cultural exchange. The tourists get a parody of a culture they don’t even want to understand. The locals, if they are lucky, get a handful of loose change. And the walls between ourselves and others rise.

Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargain . . .

“Tourism . . . is the most colonial of colonial economies.”

“Industrial tourism . . . a postindustrial activity created by wealth and leisure.

In postindustrial societies, experience has emerged as the commodity to be packaged and marketed to those who have replaced the accumulation of wealth with the possession of experience.

This “conceit” is one of the more important forces driving the competitive marketing of tourist destinations.

“Tourism . . . is in reality a ‘devil’s bargain in which local communities gain economic development, but only through . . . The loss of what makes them a community.”

“Living is replaced by lifestyle.”

By catering to tourists, local communities become caricatures of themselves. They sell “bottled” authenticity.

Aspen: from mining town to faux Swiss mountain ski resort.

Santa Fe: from poor territorial capital to quaint and colorful multi-ethnic festival.

Consequences of Tourism . . .

Tourism-induced changes are not just aesthetic; they are social, economic and political . . .

The community must be what the market demands.

Control of the community is, thus, lost to outsiders and to outside social, political and economic forces.

Few if any businesses survive that serve the local community.

Aspen and Vail have become “up-scale tourist-oriented shopping centers with faux Victorian architecture.”

Santa Fe has become an “up-scale tourist-oriented shopping centers with faux Pueblo architecture.”

Rising costs and low wages force locals out of the community.

This is true within the U.S. and in international tourism.

Tourism can result in a variety of conflicts . . .

The conflict of expectations in Iran.

The resentment of tourists in Kenya.

The conflict over earning a living vs. maintaining values in Zanzibar.

The anti-tourist backlash in Santa Fe.

The kidnapping and killing of tourists in the Middle East, Africa and Indonesia.

Ecotourism Represents Another Example of Tourism as Neo-Colonialism . . .

A major multinational corporation has allocated one quarter of a billion dollars for the purchase of land in developing countries. The money will be funneled through a Western-dominated international organization whose voting members are disproportionately represented by individuals and corporations from the U.S. and Europe. The land purchase is designed to remove prime land from indigenous ownership in order to have it be at the disposal of the mostly white employees and customers served by the international organization in question.

* * * * * Intel Corporation has announced that it is donating $250 million to

Conservation International for the purchase of land in developing countries. Conservation International is a major international organization that undertakes biodiversity research, conducts its own ecotours and supports the ecotourism industry. The principal beneficiaries of both the biodiversity research and ecotourism industries are disproportionately white middle and upper-middle income citizens from the economically advantaged countries in Europe and North America.

“North Waging Cultural War against South”

Frank Furedi,

“In this new climate of Northern moral intrusion, all forms of Southern  cultural practices become subject to scrutiny.  Western aid agencies, including the World Bank, have emerged as champions of Third World children and women.  Campaigns, such as those against female genital mutilation in Sudan and child labour in India, have been harnessed to the perennial crusade against Third World fertility.”

“Since in many of the campaigns around the issues of fertility, women and children are presented in the vocabulary of rights, they often enjoy the endorsement of Western liberal, left-wing and feminist circles. And yet it can be argued that such campaigns of moral intrusion represent a form of cultural warfare against societies of the South.”

“For family planners the cultural norms and values of target societies are obstacles that need to be overcome through a variety of techniques. 

“A central emphasis is placed on encouraging women to adopt aspirations, lifestyles and identities which are at variance with the prevailing norm. 

"To reduce unwanted sexual contact and pregnancy, we must assist girls to envision future identities apart from sexual, marital and mothering roles," argue Bongaarts and Bruce.

“The far-reaching implications of this perspective . . . (is) . . . to foster new aspirations and identities . . . (that) . . . would systematically undermine the moral foundation of the target society.”

Furedi (cont.) . . .

“Population control literature contains an implicit - sometimes explicit- moral condemnation of the culture of fertility that prevails in target societies. It contains a clear assumption of moral superiority, which is expressed routinely in the moral condemnation of practices deemed to be unacceptable. “

“UNFPA's The State of World Population contains a variable catalogue of practices and beliefs which are confidently dismissed as unacceptable. The report sometimes assumes the tone of a sermon, which runs through a list of practices that should be abolished and which ought to be adopted.  Female circumcision is represented as a ‘major public health issue’. The need for later marriages is stressed because of its beneficial effect on the rate of population growth.”

Furedi (cont.) . . .

October 12, 1999

Y6B*Day

                         

Thomas Malthus

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

--The Population Bomb (1968)

“By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.“

--“Eco-Catastrophe” (1969)

Statements made by Paul Ehrlich . . .

Humanity was predicted to exhaust critical resources in the following order . . .

gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1981

mercury . . . . . . . . . . 1985

tine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1987

zinc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1990

petroleum . . . . . . . . . 1992

copper . . . . . . . . . . . 1993

lead . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1993

natural gas . . . . . . . 1993

--Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (1972)

The following claims of species loss have already been made . . .

40,000 species per year --Norman Myers, The Sinking Ark (1979)

250,000 species per year, with half the earth’s species gone by the year --Paul Ehrlich (1981) 2000, and all species gone by 2025.

40,000 species per year --Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992)

27,000 - 100,000 species per year --E.O. Wilson, Diversity of Life (1992)

Does Overpopulation exist?

Average global caloric

consumption has steadily increased

over the past 40 years . . .

* * *

. . . during the same period that world population more

than doubled.

SOURCE: FAO 2001 presented in Lomborg 2002:109)

Population Density by Country

U.S. Population Growth

Year U.S. Population Increase

1800 5,000,000 - -

1900 75,000,000 1,400 %

2000 280,000,000 273 %

Population Growth in Japan

In Japan, it is as if half the population of the U.S. lived in southern California.

Country

______

Total Population(in thousands,

1999)

_____________

Population Density

(per square km., 1997)

______________

GDP Per Capita

(US$, 1997)

__________

Energy Consumption Per

Capita(kilograms oil equiv.,

1990-99)

_____________

France 58,886 106 23,843 3,918

Germany 82,177 230 25,468 4,086

Italy 57,343 191 19,962 2,817

Japan 126,505 333 33,265 3,658

Netherlands 15,735 376 23,270 5,622

U.K. 58,744 240 21,921 3,938

U.S. 276,219 29 28,789 8,040

Developed Countries

______________________________________________________SOURCE: United Nations

Country

_________  

Total Population

(in thousands,

1999)_____________

Population Density

(per square km., 1997)____________

GDP Per Capita(US$, 1997)

____________

Energy Consumption Per

Capita(kilograms oil equiv.,

1990-99)__________________

Ethiopia 61,095 54 104 287

Kenya 29,549 57 356 494

Nigeria 108,945 128 1,376 753

Sierra Leone 4,717 62 260 --

Sudan 28,882 11 59 --

Uganda 21,143 85 313 --

Congo 50,336 20 52 311

Underdeveloped Countries

______________________________________________________SOURCE: United Nations

Who poses more of a threat to the

environment?

* * *

Africans & Asians

or

Europeans & Americans

Who places a greater stress on the environment within the U.S.?

The people who live in a row house in downtown Allentown, buy used cars and appliances, and attend a local college?

or . . .

. . . the people who live in suburbia, shop at the malls, buy new cars and appliances, travel to Europe, and attend private residential colleges?

 ”The Malthusian motive: the will to control the population of the poor rather than the consumption of the rich; the desire to eliminate poverty by reducing the numbers of the poor rather than the inequalities of society. . . . . . . If we claim that there are too many people on the earth, then why are we so sure that we are not the excess ones --we westerners who individually consume and pollute as much as 50 or more African or Indian peasants? In all my years in the field of population, I have never one single time heard a member of the population establishment say that there were too many upper-middle class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the world. . . .”

  --Pierre Pradervand, Africa Report (1974)

Whose Interest Does the PopulationControl Movement Serve?

SAGE sponsored the Vagina Monologues at

Muhlenberg in order to raise money, in part, to help stop “Female Genital

Mutilation” in Africa and the Middle East.

Contrary to feminist claims, female circumcision is supported by both men and women in the countries where it is practiced. It is not imposed on women by male-dominated societies.

Contrary to feminist claims, female circumcision is not practiced to please the husband or to control a woman’s sexuality. It is primarily practiced for the same reason that Jews practice male circumcision: tradition and social identity.

Contrary to the claims made by those who want to eradicate female circumcision in Africa, broken bottles are rarely used in female circumcision. As would be expected, the same tools are used in female circumcision as are used in male circumcision.

Again, contrary to Western opponents of female circumcision, most women who undergo female circumcision in Africa experience normal consequences of surgery.

. . . no attempts have been made to end male circumcision in Africa or the Middle East.

Despite the intense opposition to female circumcision in Western countries . . .

. . . or in the U.S.

While the majority of men in the U.S. are circumcised, few men in Europe are circumcised, leading many Europeans to see America as rather barbaric.

Christians have long celebrated the circumcision of Jesus.

Some 14 churches throughout Europe, including Chartre Cathedral, claimed to have had Jesus’ foreskin at one time or another. The “Holy Prepuce”, was revered as a relic and was believed to have been responsible for many miracles.

According to one Christian tradition, St. Catherine of Sienna wore Jesus’ foreskin as a wedding ring, signifying her mystical marriage to Jesus.

Do-Gooderism

Who does it benefit?

Population Control

Female Circumcision

The Yir Yuront of Australia

Amina Lawal in Nigeria

Native Americans, “Friends of the Indians” and the Dawes Act