Tourism and cultural differences

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice holiday weekend these past few days.

There was a light-hearted article in the Sunday NY Times about travel, tourism and cultural differences, which is worth a read.

Every summer, people all over the world become acquainted again with a deep truth spoken by the philosopher-tourist Steve Martin. He was speaking for tourists everywhere, not just to France, when he said: “Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!”

That people from different countries observe different customs -  not only of speaking, but of eating, sleeping, gesturing, counting change, observing boundaries of personal space, tipping cab drivers, standing in lines, avoiding certain topics of conversation at dinnertime as unbearably disgusting -  is a truism one probably can never be reminded of too often.

…it is bad news only in those isolated cases (which you hear about if you talk to cabbies, tour guides and certain sarcastic individuals in sales) where the awe of Mr. Martin’s revelation is supplanted by the ugly reality of a culture clash – a tip denied, a personal boundary violated, or a long line at a drug store counter jumped by a family of Italian-speaking people, who forever thereafter shall be remembered by the offended party present (an acquaintance of mine) as those “ugly Europeans.”

Let it be said that no group holds a monopoly on the title of “ugly.” Tip-stiffing, line-jumping, excessive price-haggling, sidewalk-blocking-when-stopping-suddenly-to-take-pictures-of-a-person-playing-the-steel-drums – none of these are unique to any national group…

“Ugly” behavior in tourists is almost always in the eye of the people being toured; and Americans are no longer the only, or even the dominant group of tourists out in the world. We are now as often toured as tour-ing.

And New Yorkers, it turns out, are just as likely to be exasperated being toured by tourists unfamiliar with their local mores about tipping or standing in check-out lines, say, as the Achuar tribesmen of Ecuador are to be offended by tourists who sit on certain sacred rocks.

The moral of the story, of course, is that cultural differences matter, even for tourists.

To be an ugly tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martin’s statement. “It is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as cultural difference,” wrote Prof. Inga Treitler, the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.

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