Humanitarian travels: Ethical communication in Lonely Planet guidebooks

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2008, Pages 155-172

  Lisle, Debbie ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43149096497     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508007845     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Tad Friend, 'The Parachute Artist: Have Tony Wheeler's Guidebooks Travelled Too Far?' The New Yorker, 18 April 2005, p. 82.
2. Ibid., p. 87.
3. Richard Plunkett and Brigitte Ellemor, 'Foreword: About Lonely Planet Guidebooks', Lonely Planet Sri Lanka, 9th edn. (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2003), p. 8.
4. For a good analysis of the development of independent travel, see K. F. Hyde and R. Lawson, 'The Nature of Independent Travel', Journal of Travel Research, 42 (2003), pp. 13-23.
5. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990);
6. see especially 'On the Beach: Sexism and Tourism', pp. 19-41.
7. Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8. I use the term Burma rather than Myanmar in part to highlight the history of colonialism in Southeast Asia, but also to follow the lead of Burma Campaign UK. Although the use of either name indicates a political position, there is no consensus over whether Burma or Myanmar is the preferred term. Indeed, LP uses Myanmar (Burma) on its guidebooks.
9. Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', p. 82;
10. see also Tony Wheeler, 'Tourists Should Not be Ashamed to Go Back Soon', The Independent, 31 December, 2004, p. 33;
11. and "Tony Wheeler's Guide to the Risks of Travel', The Independent, 22 September 2001, 'Features', pp. 2-3.
12. David Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
13. Questions of diversity and multiculturalism emerge in much of Mattelart's work, but Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) was an important contribution to this debate in the early 1990s. These issues were rearticulated in Networking the World, 1794-2000 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and continue in his more recent untranslated work.
14. Slavoj Žižek, 'Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', New Left Review, 225 (September-October 1997), p. 44.
15. The literature on this debate is vast, but a good starting place is Cynthia Willett (ed.), Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (London: Blackwell, 1998).
16. For good introductions to this literature, see Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
17. Uma Kothari and Martin Minogue (eds.), Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001);
18. Uma Kothari (ed.), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies (London: Zed Books, 2005);
19. and Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power (London: Zed Books, 1992).
20. Marianne Gronemeyer, 'Helping', in Sachs, The Development Dictionary, p. 55.
21. Ibid., p. 66.
22. Ibid., p. 53.
23. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001).
24. Peter Hallward, 'Translator's Introduction', in Badiou, Ethics, p. xxx.
25. Badiou, Ethics, p. 13.
26. Ibid., pp. 9, 12-13. For more on how our humanitarian responses are triggered by a fascination with, and desire to consume, scenes of catastrophe, violence and victimisation,
27. see Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
28. Badiou, Ethics, p. 16.
29. Ibid., p. 26.
30. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in an Age of Dissolution (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 39.
31. Robert Foulke, 'The Guidebook Industry' in Michael Kowalewski (ed.), Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 95.
32. Deborah Battacharyya, 'Mediating India: An Analysis of a Guidebook', Annals of Tourism Research, 24:2 (1997), pp. 373-4;
33. Battacharyya draws on Eric Cohen's seminal essay "The Tourist Guide: The Origins, Structure and Dynamics of a Role", Annals of Tourism Research, 12 (1985), pp.5-29.
34. Edward Mendelsohn, 'Baedeker's Universe', Yale Review of Books, 74 (1985), p. 389.
35. Battacharyya, 'Mediating India', p. 374.
36. Foulke, 'The Guidebook Industry', p. 97.
37. Mendleson, 'Baedeker's Universe', p. 390;
38. Friend, "The Parachute Artist', p. 80.
39. Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', p. 88. The pretence of neutrality is certainly the driving strategy of the competing Dorling Kindersley 'Eyewitness' guidebooks;
40. Personal interview with DK 'Eyewitness' editor Douglas Amrine, 8 November 2001, Dorling Kindersley Offices, London.
41. Wheeler's advocacy of judgemental authors was reproduced faithfully in my interview with the LP public relations officer in London: 'LP is very keen that our authors should have opinions about things, that they should speak their mind. We are sending them out there to put across their opinion, to tell it as they see it, and not to gloss over things';
42. Personal interview with Tom Hall, 7 November 2001, Lonely Planet Offices, London. Hall was also clear that LP writers would not advocate sex tourism which is 'very removed from LP. It's a totally different thing. It's just not independent travel, which is what we are all about.' Personal Interview, Tom Hall.
43. Mendleson, 'Baedeker's Universe', pp. 387-8.
44. Rudy Kosher, German Travel Cultures (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), p. 16.
45. This description of the typical LP traveller is displayed on their specialist webpages directed at other businesses - it is primarily used to demonstrate the kind of market other companies can access by building partnerships with LP; available at: 〈www.lonelyplanet.biz/about102. htm〉, accessed 9 November 2006.
46. Brian King, 'Us or Them? Lonely Planet Travel Summit', Tourism Management, 16:3 (1995), pp. 245-6;
47. for further elaboration on how the tourist/traveller distinction was enshrined in the early LP guidebooks, see Gillian Kenny, ' "Our Travellers" out there on the Road: Lonely Planet and its Readers, 1973-1981', Journal of Australian Studies, January 2002, pp. 111-19.
48. Battacharyya, 'Mediating India', pp. 375-8.
49. Although Edward Said did not examine guidebooks specifically in Orientalism (although he did examine travel writing, ethnography, science writing, and so on) these texts certainly belong to Europe's wider project of producing and managing the Orient in the post-Enlightenment period; Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 3.
50. Mendleson, 'Baedeker's Universe', p. 399.
51. Roland Barthes, 'The Blue Guide', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 75.
52. This refiguration of the space of encounter is derived from Mary Louise Pratt's account of the 'contact zone' in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Pratt's own formulation derives, in part, from Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and third space,
53. see The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
54. and 'Cultures in Between' in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996).
55. Behdad, Belated 'Travellers, p. 52.
56. This discussion of 'responsible independent travel' can be found on LP's website; available at: (www.lonelyplanet.com/responsibletravel/overview.cfm), accessed 9 October 2006, as well as further statements about travel bringing the world together (for example, 'Lonely Planet is passionate about bringing people together, about understanding our world, and about people sharing experiences that enrich everyone's life' (www.lonelyplanet.eom/about/#LonelyPlanetToday), accessed 13 November, 2006.
57. Karl Frederich Baedeker, 'On the Task and Form of the Travel Guide', unpublished manuscript, no place of origin, February 1937,
58. quoted extensively in Alex W. Henrichson, Baedeker-Katalog, Part I: History of the Firm, trans. Michael Wild (Holzminden: Ursula Hinrichson Verlag, 1989), p. 34.
59. LP tips on Responsible Travel. Available at: 〈www.lonelyplanet.com/ responsibletravel/travel_tips.cfm#culture〉, accessed 10 November 2006.
60. R. Caruna, A. Crane and J.A. Flitchett, 'Paradoxes of Consumer Independence: a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Independent Traveller', Paper presented at the 4th DeHaan Tourism Management Conference, 13 December, 2005, Nottingham Business School, p. 5.
61. Wheeler made this claim in his 1979 Southeast Asia Guide, quoted in Kenney, 'Our Travellers', pp. 115-16. I disagree with Kenney's argument that early LP readers were somehow doing something 'independent' and 'authentic' that was different from tourism. More persuasive in this respect are Cohen's claims about the institutionalised structure of 'alternative travel' and the way guidebooks like LP actually evacuate spontaneity rather than facilitate it:
62. see E. Cohen, 'Nomads from Affluence: Notes on the Phenomenon of Drifter Tourism', International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 14:1-2 (1973), pp. 89-103;
63. see also Friend, "The Parachute Artist', p. 82.
64. Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', p. 90. One of the consequences of LP's commodification of such out-of-the-way places is its transformation of local economies, especially along the backpacking trail of India and Southeast Asia. For example, 'LP is the bible in places like India. If they recommend the Resthouse Bangalore, then half the guesthouses there rename themselves Resthouse Bangalore', Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides, quoted in Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', p. 79.
65. Sam Wollaston, 'Free Wheelers', The Guardian, 7 July 1998, 'Features', p. 16.
66. Wollaston, 'Free Wheelers', p. 16.
67. Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', p. 79; see also 〈www.lonelyplanet. biz〉.
68. Ibid., p. 79.
69. Mark Carnegie, an investment banker who sits on the board of LP, quoted in Friend, 'The Parachute Artist', pp. 86-7.
70. Linda Anderson, 'Travelling Man Reflects on his Time at LBS', Financial Times, 8 September 2003, "Business Education', p. 7.
71. See "The Tourism Boycott' on BCUK; available at: 〈http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/tourism.php〉, accessed 4 October 2006.
72. Aung San Suu Kyi quoted in BCUK press release, 26 May 2000; available at: 〈http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/more.php?id=79_0_1_0_M〉, accessed 4 October 2006.
73. Aung San Suu Kyi quoted in BCUK press release, 1 March, 1999; available at 〈http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/more.php?id=90_0_1_0_M〉, accessed 4 October, 2006.
74. Tony Wheeler, Joe Cummings, Michael Clark, Myanmar (Burma), Lonely Planet Publications, November 1999;
75. and Tina Gauduin, "Blood Ties', The Times Magazine, 10 January 2004, p. 34.
76. Permission to reprint the postcard image, "The cost of a holiday in Burma could be someone's life', granted by Burma Campaign UK, 19 July 2007.
77. Desmond Balmer, 'Burma guidebook publisher stands firm against boycott', The Observer, 28 May 2000, 'Escape', p. 4.
78. Letter to LP from Burma Relief Centre in BCUK press release, 13 June 2000, 'Lonely Planet's attempt to offset criticism of its Burma guide backfires'; available at: 〈http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/more.php?id= 80_0_1_0_M), accessed 5 October, 2006.
79. Terry Maccalister, 'Rights Activists Put 70 Firms on Burma "Dirty List'", The Guardian, 18 December 2002, 'City Pages', p. 23.
80. Anderson, "Travelling Man', p. 7.
81. BCUK press release, 1 February 2005, 'Tony Blair and 70 Celebrities Boycott Burma', available at: 〈http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/more.php? id = 150_0_1_0_M), accessed 4 October 2006.
82. Dea Birkett, 'Trouble in the Paradise Industry', The Observer, 1 June 2000;
83. a very public response to Birkett emerged in a joint letter by Sean Wein (PM, Burmese government in exile), journalist John Pilger and MEP Glenys Kinnock, 'Not to Travel is Better', The Guardian, 3 June 2000, p. 25.
84. But the most impressive response came from journalist Nick Cohen who suggested that Birkett positions travellers as both benefactors who make the world a better place, and victims of the nasty campaign waged by BCUK and Tourism Concern. For Birkett, and for Wheeler, the real perpetrators are BCUK and Tourism Concern because they are imposing 'totalitarian' restrictions on the freedom of movement, and making rich Western tourists (who stay in Burmese hotels built by forced labour) 'feel bad about being good to ourselves.' Indeed, Wheeler made similar claims in a reply to British MPs supporting the tourism boycott: 'I was deeply shocked to receive your letter aligning yourself with people who believe in censorship and suppression of information' (meaning the BCUK, Tourism Concern and other tourism boycott campaigners), Mark Thomas, 'Room Service? Forced Labour Please': 〈http://burmacampaign.org.uk/ mtarticle.html〉, accessed 5 October 2006. As Cohen rightly argues, such spurious claims of victimisation simply expose the privilege of the entire LP project: 'Discerning liberal consumers are now so self-confident and self-pitying that they pose, without irony, as the victims of Stalin and Hitler when anyone suggests they make the tiniest moral choice.
85. It says so much about them,' Nick Cohen, 'Without Prejudice: Burma's Shame', The Observer, 4 June 2000, p. 35.