Community-based cultural tourism: issues, threats and opportunities

Abstract

Using examples from long-term anthropological fieldwork in Tanzania, this paper critically analyzes how well generally accepted community-based tourism discourses resonate with the reality on the ground. It focuses on how local guides handle their role as ambassadors of communal cultural heritage and how community members react to their narratives and practices. It pays special attention to the time-limited, project-based development method, the need for an effective exit strategy, for quality control, tour guide training and long-term tour guide retention. The study is based on a program funded by the Netherlands-based development agency, Stichting Nederlandse Vrijwilligers (SNV), from 1995 to 2001, and on post-program experiences. Findings reveal multiple complex issues of power and resistance that illustrate many community-based tourism conflicts. The encounter with the “Other” is shown to be central and that the role of professional intermediaries in facilitating this experience of cultural contact is crucial. Tour guides are often the only “locals” with whom tourists spend considerable time: they have considerable agency in the image-building process of the peoples and places visited, (re)shaping tourist destination images and indirectly influencing the self-image of those visited too. The paper provides ideas for overcoming the issues and problems described.

以社区为基准的文化旅游：问题，威胁和机遇

该文章使用在坦桑尼亚长期人类学工作中的例子批判性地分析被人们普遍接受的以社区为基准的旅游内容是怎样反映在事实上的。文章着重在当地导游如何发挥他们作为本土文化遗产的大使这样的作用，并且社区居民对导游的讲稿词和实践活动有何反应。作者特别研究的是那些以有限时间里的项目为基准的发展方法，创造有效后备战略需求，质量控制，导游训练和长期导游的保留。该研究是建立在一个从1995到2001年被荷兰发展机构（SNV）所赞助的项目，并讨论了项目发展后的经历。结论显示了许多以社区旅游为基准的旅游冲突中的权利和对峙里的多重复杂问题。人与人之间的交流是关键，并且研究发现专业媒介在协调文化交流经历上是非常重要的。经常，导游是旅游者花最多时间在一起的唯一的当地人：他们对参观过的人与物的形象建立过程有显著的作用，同时在形成和重新形成旅游目的地形象，和间接影响旅游者的自我形象。文章为以上描述的问题解决提供想法和建议。

Keywords:

• cultural tourism
• community
• tour guiding
• representation
• anthropology
• Tanzania

关键词:

• 文化旅游
• 社区
• 导游旅游
• 代表性
• 人类学
• 坦桑尼亚

Acknowledgements

Permission to conduct the research in Tanzania was granted by the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (research permit no. 2007-16-NA-2006-171) and kindly sponsored by the University of Dar es Salaam. The fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant no. BCS-0514129) and a grant from the European Commission Directorate General Research (grant no. PIRG03-GA-2008-230892) made it possible to write up the results. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Tourism in Developing Countries (ICST-DC) in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), 10–11 August 2010, where it received the Best Overall Paper Award. I truly thank my Tanzanian research assistant, Joseph Ole Sanguyan, for all his help. All omissions and errors are mine alone.

Notes

1. The continuous process of “othering” peoples in cultural tourism has been extensively discussed in the scholarly literature (e.g. Aitchison, 2001; Bruner, 2005; Dann, 2004; Salazar, 2004, 2010; Van den Berghe, 1994).

2. Broadly defined, “alternative” forms of tourism refer to “those forms of tourism that are consistent with natural, social and community values and which allow both hosts and guests to enjoy positive and worthwhile interaction and shared experiences” (Smith & Eadington, 1992, p. 3; emphasis added).

3. Manyara and Jones (2007) even argue that, through foreign resource control and heavy reliance on donor funding, CBT in developing countries promotes neo-colonialism and reinforces dependency.

4. The Maasai, speakers of the Eastern Nilotic Maa tonal language, are a widely dispersed group of seminomadic pastoralists and small-scale subsistence agriculturists who occupy semiarid/arid rangelands in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania – collectively known as Maasailand. In Tanzania, they are said to have lived in the Serengeti plains and Ngorongoro highlands for some two centuries. Alongside the wildlife, the Maasai are the flag bearers of Tanzanian tourism (Salazar, 2009a; Snyder & Sulle, 2011).

5. As the ethnographic examples of this paper illustrate, the qualifier “local” does not necessarily imply that guides are natives of the place where they operate (although they are habitually perceived as such by foreign tourists).

6. The notion of culture broker implies a model of discrete cultures, an assumption contemporary anthropology questions (e.g. Gupta & Ferguson, 1992). Despite criticism (Aramberri, 2001; Sherlock, 2001), the concept is still widely used within tourism studies, where tour guides and other tourism service providers are conceived as intermediaries – be it cultural (Scherle & Nonnenmann, 2008) or social (Jensen, 2010) – between dichotomized host and guest cultures.

7. The Meru people, who have traditionally been farmers, are settled around the base of Mt. Meru.

8. The Arusha people are originally from the foothills of Mt. Meru. Influenced by Maasai ancestry, they still use the Maasai age system and other elements of Maasai social organization. However, they have different clans and abandoned livestock herding in favour of settled cultivation.