While the concept of the 'tourist gaze' has been influential in tourism research, the 'counter-gaze' of the host communities and their imagination of the tourists' places of origin have not been adequately addressed. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Langtang National Park of Nepal, and drawing on Simmel's theory of sociation, this paper attempts a simultaneous analysis of the shifting images the visitors and hosts have of each other and how these images shape their experiences of tourism, and argues that a constant shifting of subjectivity between 'reverie' and 'emplacement' characterises the structure of tourism encounters.K EYWORDS : Nepal Himalaya, tourism, Simmel, place, developmentThe spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. (Debord 1994) Spirituality and corruptionOne rainy afternoon in July 2002, while I was having my usual lunch of Tibetan bread and omelette in the kitchen of my landlord in Langtang village, Lantang National Park, in came a trekker who had just returned from a place called Kyangjin, which is the final destination for most trekkers to the Langtang valley, one of the most popular trekking destinations in Nepal. At that time, Kyangjin was still under the 'rotation' system, under which, throughout a particular week, groups of hotels took turns to open for business. The system was devised so that hotels would not engage in cutthroat competition and to ensure that all the hotels in Kyangjin had a chance to earn some tourist money. Now, this Italian trekker, fresh from being 'fleeced' by the Kyangjin hotels, and in an indignant and pained tone, began an apparently heartfelt litany on the degeneration of Langtang Tibetans. In between sips of hot lemon tea, he accused the Kyangjin hotel owners of being 'money-minded' for charging high prices for food and accommodation, including charging Rs. 20 for a mug of hot water. Due to the rotation system, on each day there was almost a monopoly in the supply of accommodation in Kyangjin, with hotel owners agreeing to cooperate and to fix their rates. Since Kyangjin was the highlight of the trek and the last permanent settlement in the Langtang valley offering food and accommodation to trekkers, most trekkers had little choice but to stay at Kyangjin for at least one night if they wanted to explore the surrounding areas and to enjoy the stunning scenery, the finale of the trek. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Italian called the hotel owners a 'Mafia'.Because of the rotation system, this particular trekker found that he could not bargain down the prices of food and accommodation in Kyangjin, something that he could do in Langtang village, where the rotation system had previously broken down. In the presence of my landlord and two other villagers, the tourist, without any sense of impropriety, lamented Downloaded by [Washington University in St Louis] at 06:27 22 December 2014376 Francis Khek Gee Lim that the Langtang Tibetans were 'corrupted and finished', for they had lost their Buddhist faith and pie...
This article is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio‐semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would in turn generate their very contestations. By treating the materiality of the hotel as an anthropological tool, we are thus able more fully to understand how a community's pursuit of development and intensive engagement with tourism have resulted in the creation of new forms of subjectivity as well as social and political relationships. Résumé Le présent article est consacréà la signification sociale et culturelle des hôtels dans l'Himalaya népalais. Grâce à une approche socio‐sémiotique, l'auteur analyse la manière dont l'hôtel fonctionne, dans le tourisme himalayen, comme une forme architecturale médiatrice de différents domaines sociaux. Il intègre ainsi l'idéologie du « développement » dans la vie de tous les jours, et crée des relations de pouvoir qui génèrent à leur tour leurs propres contestations. En traitant la matérialité de l'hôtel comme un outil anthropologique, on peut mieux comprendre comment la quête du développement et l'engagement intensif d'une communauté dans le tourisme ont abouti à la création de nouvelles formes de subjectivité et de relations sociales et politiques.
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