What western tourism concepts obscure: intersections of migration and tourism in Indonesia

Abstract

Classic Anglo-European definitions of tourism as recreational travel have hindered more nuanced locally-grounded understandings of travel phenomena elsewhere in the world. Moreover, contemporary global labor and educational mobility have produced novel travel forms and behaviors that straddle the Western categories of “tourist” and “migrant.” The purpose of this analysis is to examine Toraja (Indonesia) perspectives on travel which can be instructive for correcting the binary divides between tourism and migration that have long plagued dominant Western models of travel. Drawing from data culled from long-term qualitative fieldwork and online research, I convey three ethnographically-grounded stories of Toraja migrants on return visits to their homeland in order to destabilize Western-centrism in tourism studies. Research findings underscore contemporary travel understandings and practices that do not fit neatly with Western mutually exclusive categories of “tourism” and “migration.” These Toraja practices encompass local historical patterns of travel for experiential/financial enrichment (merantau), migration and tourism. This study also advances tourism scholarship by highlighting the importance of local knowledge and demonstrating the value of ethnographic storytelling as a scholarly strategy for destabilizing orthodox Western-centric theoretical understands of tourism. The global significance of this place-based research is that tourism studies can be enriched by widening our lenses to also consider emigrants on return visits to their homelands.

摘要

欧美地区旅游的经典定义为休闲旅行, 这阻碍了人们对世界其他地区的旅行现象更细微的、在地性的理解。此外, 当前全球劳动力和教育流动产生了跨越西方”游客”和”移民”范畴的新型旅游形式和行为。本研究的目的是检验印度尼西亚托拉雅族人对旅游的看法, 这有助于纠正长期困扰西方主流旅行模式中的旅游和迁移之间的二分法。从长期的定性田野调查和在线研究中收集的数据中, 我传达了三个以民族志为基础的故事, 是关于托拉雅移民为了颠覆旅游研究中的西方中心主义而回访故乡的故事。研究结果强调了当前有关旅行的理解和实践并不完全符合西方相互排斥的”旅游”和”迁移”类别。这些托拉雅族人的实践包括出于充实旅游体验和财务自由、迁移和旅游的当地悠久的旅行模式。本研究还通过强调地方知识的重要性和展示民族志叙事作为打破正统的西方中心的旅游理论理解的学术策略的价值, 推进了旅游学术的发展。这种以地方为基础的研究的全球意义在于, 旅游研究可以通过拓宽我们的视角来丰富, 从而也可以考虑侨民回访他们的祖国。

Keywords:

• Heritage tourism
• local knowledge
• migration
• story-telling
• critical tourism studies
• Indonesia
• Toraja

关键词:

• 遗产旅游
• 当地知识
• 迁移,讲故事
• 批判性旅游研究
• 印尼
• 托拉雅

Acknowledgments

I thank the organizers of the first Critical Tourism Studies Asia-Pacific conference for inviting me to deliver a keynote lecture that ultimately became the basis for this article. I am especially grateful to the Toraja migrants and residents who generously shared their stories with me. My appreciation also goes to Dirk Sandarupa for providing the map, and for help with gathering additional data on the Sandarupa family’s restaurant. Peter Sanchez, Andrew Causey, Jill Forshee, Harng Luh Sin, Alan Lew and the journal’s anonymous reviewers offered helpful advice and suggestions, for which I am appreciative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My selection of this Hollywood film captures some of the ironies and challenges inherent in efforts to “Asianize the field.” I initially contemplated using an Asian film as an article “frame”: the 2009 Indonesian film, Merantau (trans.: migration/quest). But Merantau is largely unknown outside Indonesia and would have necessitated a lengthy plot recitation, whereas the Wizard of Ox’s familiarity to international audiences rendered it more serviceable for this journal’s readership. Ironically, this calculus reflects how Anglo-Western publication contexts can vex desires to Asianize the field.

2 See https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/

3 https://www.indonesia.travel/gb/en/event-festivals/lovely-december-festival-2017-in-the-scenic-highlands-of-toraja

4 http://makassar.tribunnews.com/2016/01/31/toraya-mamali-atau-lovely-toraja-tokoh-toraja-ingin-kembali-mamali

5 An earlier article (Adams & Sandarupa, 2018) concerning tourism entrepreneurship and local wisdom includes some of this data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen M. Adams

Kathleen M. Adams is professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her books include the award-winning Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia and Indonesia (2006), Indonesia: History, Culture, Heritage (2019) and The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (2019, with Leite and Casteñeda). She has also written numerous articles on tourism politics, public interest anthropology in heritage sites, and tourism’s cultural ramifications for hinterland groups in Indonesia.