By:
• Cambodianess

• November 3, 2024 , 10:00 AM

What have in common the ascent of Mount Everest with a Sherpa guide, an express tour of the temples at Angkor, a stay in a seaside luxury hotel with housekeeping staff from the Philippines, or a safari in an African reserve from which farmers who previously lived there were evicted?  

All these tourism activities would be based on the domination of indigenous people and exotic environments for the benefit of a small European elite. This is, essentially, the theory put forward in the book “Dévorer le monde” (devouring the world) by Aude Vidal—an independent anthropologist, traveler and feminist—and echoed at her ecologist French-language website reporterre.com.     

According to this author as mentioned at the website, tourism would be a matter of “domination,” as the essay states in its subtitle, of a privileged Western class over all the others. Due to its elitist nature, it would accentuate socio-economic inequalities provoked by capitalism of which it is one of the most flourishing sectors. Moreover, one could say about tourism, writes the author, that it is one of the means of cohesion of this social group. Holiday photos taken at unusual places, off the beaten path, now so present on social media such as Instagram, she writes, show that the success of a destination is as much because people wish to stand out from the crowd as because they want to do the same thing as others. People want to show themselves everywhere on the planet to their friends. A person being able to show him/herself at such and such a location is more important than the riches of the place where he/she is.    

In reverse of the concept that “travel broadens the mind,” the essay writer, drawing on her own globetrotter experience, considers that travelling alone only provides superficial encounters and does in no way develop a critical or open mind as Western backpackers come one after another, more or less alike. As evidence, she speaks of her own visit to the temples of Angkor, which lasted just a few hours, ruins from which she only remembered a few clichés   

At the end of the day, why would tourism mean so much for the privileged classes? Because this would be a “compensation industry” for the middle classes consumed by work. Aude Vidal includes a series of profiles of women and men exhausted by their daily routine and who can only find release for their unhappiness in a series of vacations around the globe.

For those dominants dominated by the ruling class, tourism of any kind would be offering an enchanted digression from the harsh individual competition, and therefore a way to prevent their frustrations.

In this country of the temples of Angkor, in which tourism is a driving force for growth, this theory in favor of the “abolition of tourism” can make teeth grind.