Tourism and Conflict

I was recently made aware of this initiative (thanks Nick!) in California by the Physicians for Social Responsibility. Their "Military Tour of Southern California" looks at the military industrial complex in the region in order to discuss its impacts on the wider world as well the very near health of locals and workers.
While this tour fits into the critical tourism that the Travel Office is interested in, linking environmental justice and global militarization concerns, this got me thinking more about how such histories lend themselves to touristic imaginings.
I'm not interested here in what is referred to as "war tourism," where tourists are looking for danger and adventure in conflict zones... that will have to be a separate post.
A friend of the Travel Office, Trevor Paglen, has been exploring the largely unknown (to most of us anyway) landscapes of secret military programs, sometimes taking people out into the deserts of the US Southwest where most of them are located. This first hand experience of the sublime landscape combined with knowledge about the equally sublime amount of money being spent on them in search of ever more sublime methods of control and destruction is key to his work. Film maker Bill Brown's "Buffalo Commons" that takes a poetic look at decommissioned missile silos in the Dakotas and their intersection with depopulation also comes to mind.
The Cold War has its off-the-beaten-track sites, as well as the more accessible museums, monuments and guided tours around the world for military buffs, historians, political partisans and cultural analysts.
What will the second major ideological war of modernity (or post-modernity, if you like) - the "War on Terror" - produce in the way of touristic experiences?
Sure, some in the US might already see the memorial to the the destroyed World Trade Center as the first official version. Like the Cold War, where monuments to capitalism as the "winning" ideology dominate, there can be little doubt that sites of memory in the "War on Terror" will be simplistic in their depiction of conflict - a "with us or against us" representation of events.
Some critical tourists/artists/geographers/etc have begun exploring the spaces of the "War on Terror", at least trying to give us a more complex view of what is going on:
As already mentioned Trevor Paglen has been looking into the geography of the US military.
Tony Chakar's "Catastrophic Spaces" - an audio tour through East Beirut
You Are Not Here - a psychogeographic tour of NYC and Baghdad and Gaza/Tel Aviv
An Architektur has looked at the Juridical-Political Spaces in the "War on Terrorism"
The Institute for Applied Autonomy's (with Trevor Paglen) "Terminal Air" - the airspace of extraordinary rendition
Angie Waller's "Ebay Longing" looked at the trade in goods from Afghanistan and Iraq on Ebay.

Tourism and Imagineering

Someone recently sent us a link to an article on the ACM Siggraph site titled "From Myth to Mountain: Insights into Virtual Placemaking" by a senior vice president and creative executive of Walt Disney Imagineering. In it, the author discusses Disney's Animal Kingdom and Expedition Everest and the manner with which Disney has created places using story-telling methods. In introducing what he means by story telling, the author states:

Narrative space is theatrical space. What matters are not the functional realities of the buildings and landscape, but their use as language to communicate ideas. Theatrical space exists only in the viewer's imagination and is shaped only by story.

The experience of the space is described in terms of the conceptual narrative as experience, where "in the public environment of narrative space, the guests' real physical bodies are all moving inside the imaginary narrative space."
Of course, the narrative space being created is a very familiar one for Disney, and one that they've mined for countless stories - colonialism. The Animal Kingdom puts viewers in the role of a safari participant, now interested in preserving wilderness in the form of parks rather than trophy heads on a wall. It is less civilized people - poachers - against whom the Animal Kingdom must be protected.

Likewise, Expedition Everest is a "a high-speed adventure ride into the Himalayas to confront the yeti, the legendary abominable snowman." Yes, an abominable snowman. And yet again, visitors are put in the role of adventure seekers, this time, mountain climbers of course.
While criticisms of these narratives are perhaps too easy, after all, these are the narratives upon which Disney has built its empire, there is another kind of colonization at work - the very non-virtual colonization of space within which their narratives play out. As the author notes, the visitors (or as Disney calls them "guests") do not leave their physical bodies behind when they enter Disney's stories. Their bodies are moving, not just "through the imaginary narrative space," but also through the Disney-constructed environment. The food people buy at Disney is not imaginary, the people serving Disney's "guests" are not imaginary, the money being exchanged is not imaginary. And neither are the very real political and social impacts of Disney's narratives.

What are we touring when we tour a Disney version of the Himalayan Mountains, or a Swahili village constructed in a Florida resort for our amusement? How does this educate us (U.S) to think of the rest of the world in a way other than as a theme park?
pictures from happysteve.

Tourism in the Era of Emerging Diseases

The US Department of Health and Human Services recently announced the US will begin compliance with a revised version of the International Health Regulations "designed to prevent and protect against the international spread of diseases while minimizing interference with world travel and trade." The original version, adopted in 1969 was design to combat the spread of cholera, yellow fever, smallpox and plague.
The new version is designed to tackle "new" health concerns, like smallpox, polio, SARS and human cases of new strains of human influenza, as well as potential biological, nuclear and chemical terrorist attacks. The DHHS press release goes on to say:

The regulations provide an algorithm to determine whether other incidents, including those of unknown causes or sources, may constitute public-health events of international concern, and as such must be reported to the WHO.

There's an algorithm for that?
On a related note... ever heard of Aircraft Disinsection? My spell checker hasn't.

Voluntourism

The Brave New Traveler blog has a post about volunteer tourism, providing a kind of how-to resource for those looking to do some philanthropic adventure traveling. Of course, this seems to focus on tourism in the more conventional sense, i.e. travel to more remote or distant locations (relative to where one is coming from), but it's also becoming a practice closer to home. Many people in the US traveled to New Orleans to spend some time rebuilding homes and businesses, for example, taking what the Washington Post called "working vacations."
While this is definitely an interesting way of repositioning the positive potential of travel and tourism, the new voluntourism is essentially a descendant of missionary work. Not to say that all missionary work is negative and necessarily proselytizing, but it certainly comes with historical baggage.
PBS recently featured a piece on voluntourism in Tanzania, and has a short list of related resources.

Medical Tourism

[image from the CBC]
I recently came across a blog devoted to medical tourism, the practice of traveling to other location for medical care. There has been some media coverage of the recent trend of people in the US traveling to India and Thailand, for example, for special treatments and lower surgical costs.
A friend of the Travel Office (Ricardo Miranda-Zuniga) did an excellent project about US residents visiting dentists on the Mexican side of the border.
As the Wikipedia entry notes, however, medical tourism is not quite a new idea (they mention spa towns, and even an ancient Greek example). The ongoing history of women having to travel across state lines in order to receive an abortion could be a fairly recent example that also reveals that travel for medical purposes is not "simply" a tourist affair - especially since recent legislation makes this travel even more complicated and dangerous for many in the US. The Dutch-based Women on Waves provides a more international response to such juridical regulation of women's bodies.
With the US medical-insurance-nutrition industry being what it is, it's not surprising that lots of its citizens are touring to neighboring countries, both physically and virtually, for lower cost meds.
On another blog, and quite some time ago now, I posted before about the global trade in genetic material and what I called "fertility tourism," which would also include the geographic transfer of genetic material (human and non-human) from legally under-represented populations into the intellectual property banks of US and European biotech firms - what has been aptly called "biopiracy".
So where do all these different instances of mobility and health intersect? Access is probably a good place to start... but that's for another day.

Driving East

Much like my previous post about race, place and tourism, the institutionalization of the image of North American First Nations in leisure activities is laden with aestheticized and displaced narratives. Some friends of the Travel Office have been working on an extended project titled Driving East that looks at this confluence of mobility, leisure, history and stereotypes through practicing their own form of leisurely, yet critical, mobility. Below is from their recent announcement for an exhibition opening July 17th in Milwaukee (The image is from their Flickr set for the project):

The year 2007 marks the 175th anniversary of the Black Hawk "War", a 4-month military campaign by the US Army and Illinois Militia to prevent a band of Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) Indians from returning to their village near the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. While details of the conflict — including the slaughter of hundreds of starving Indians after they had attempted to surrender - may be little remembered, the mythology of Black Hawk permeates the upper Midwest and, indeed American culture at large. In Wisconsin and Illinois there are hundreds of Black Hawk place names, including state parks, churches, schools, roads, hotels, and dental offices, and several heroic sculptures. Meanwhile, Americans across the country — including the four million people who identify as Native American — may follow the fortunes of Chicago's NHL Hockey team, thrill to the action‒packed war film or Playstation game Black Hawk Down, or find themselves piloting an armored helicopter through war-torn airspace.

Seemingly about the 19th century Sauk leader Black Hawk, this project is, in fact, mostly not about Black Hawk. Rather, we are interested in the disconnect between Black Hawk as a symbol and Black Hawk as a historical person, and, more importantly, the disconnect between the Black Hawk War as a historical narrative inscribed in the landscape and the present day struggles of American Indian peoples and Nations in the midwestern United States. As white people, we believe commemorative processes and historical narratives continue to shape the physical, social, and political spaces we inhabit today with real and substantial consequences for how we view ourselves and others as fellow inhabitants of and travelers within the contemporary United States.

Driving East Through Indian Country
Driving East is a multi-year project exploring how myths of American mobility developed during Manifest Destiny continue to operate today. We use the familiar and lighthearted form of the road trip to rethink how the present-day landscape was forged by the very serious, linked processes of white westward migration on the one hand and Indian removal and resistance on the other. By engaging with the material culture of westward expansion and its commemoration, we uncover, recover, expose, and re-present traces of these histories still resonant in the landscapes and and present-day politics of a place.
Driving East Through Indian Country: Black Hawk Chapter is a project‒ based exhibition by Sarah Kanouse and Nicholas Brown of photos, videos, and texts gathered during the Cultural Crisis Residency Program in Milwaukee

CLEAR in Indianpolis Airport

I picked up this CLEAR brochure in the Indianapolis Airport... so for $100 per year, Indy fliers can join the corporate control society, if you're not on a no-fly list anyway.