The temporal template of tourism: a comparative analysis of Epcot Center (Orlando) and Wadi Rum (Jordan)

Abstract

The article offers a comparative analysis to demonstrate how Western culture produces temporal narratives of world history in which the Arab, Muslim, and Turk are understood as ‘behind’ European and Western civilization. To illustrate this argument, the article takes the reader on a journey from Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida to Wadi Rum in Jordan to locate how a temporal script produced in the context of nineteenth-century Social Darwinism informs contemporary representations in these important tourist locations. The author is particularly interested in analyzing how these examples from the tourism industry illustrate a Eurocentric (in the case of Epcot) and a nationalist (in the case of Jordan) temporal script in which the modern self is distanced from its premodern Other, producing a temporal script which denies coeval time between the ‘modern’ West/Jordanian and its ‘traditional’ Eastern/Bedouin Other. The paper explores also how such representations are consequential because they produce political and material effects on both the global and national scale.

Keywords:

• Epcot
• Wadi Rum
• Eurocentrism
• allochronic time
• Bedouin
• Jordanian nationalism

Notes

This analysis is borrowed from Massad's (2001, pp. 77–78) adaptation in his study of Jordanian nationalism of Fabian's (2002) analysis of anthropology.