Tourism, Hybridity, and Ambiguity: The Relevance of Bhabha's ‘third Space’ Cultures

This paper critiques the contribution which Dr.Homi Bhabha has recently made to cultural theoretical thought on historical and temporal forms of ethnicity under the post-colonial moment. Since tourism is frequently dubbed the business of ‘difference’ and ‘the other’, par excellence, it synthesizes not only what tourism researchers can learn from Bhabha’s powerful contemporary analyses of identity and alterity, but also how Bhabha could fruitfully explore tourism as an important ‘location’ for cultural production and emergent belonging. In interpreting Bhabha’s highly problematic notions (such as ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’, and ‘interstitial culture’), the paper challenges the field of tourism studies to develop more vigorous interrogations of the everday performative activities which tend, ethnocentrically, to essentialise people, places, and pasts through tourism.

Much had indeed changed in the way that social scientists have viewed ‘culture’ in the past three decades, and Bhabha’s thinking is clearly a product of such revised understanding. During this time, previously dominant views of culture as an all-powerful 1 supra-individual ‘system’ have tended to be rejected as an illusory conceptual abstraction, and instead of viewing culture as a collective prime mover acting on individuals contained within a given society, attention has been switched “towards investigation of the real phenomena of individuals interacting with one another and with their natural environments” Thus, increasing numbers of social scientists have come to reject the idea of culture as something concrete, in and of itself, over the last three decades, and nowadays have come to understand culture as a looser realm of communal thought which people of a given society participate in. Today, to symbolic anthropologists like Geertz, what counts is not so much culture as ‘system’, but culture as ‘context’, where all acts and events are potentially meaningful but also always inherently ambiguous. Culture is not a cause to which happenings or actions may be attributed, but it is a realm of contextual or situational meaning in or through which these events or behaviors may be made intelligible at a given point in time, and for a given setting.

Bhabha’s research agenda — or, rather, his critical program — on the sense of disorientation and the disturbed discriminations of post-colonial life is a huge contribution to the emergent trans-cultural inquiry within postmodern scholarship: tourism studies theorists of culture production simply cannot afford to overlook Bhabha’s fresh insights into hybridity—for, to repeat, tourism is very much the, or a, imaginary business of ‘difference’-making.

The real worth in Bhabha’s ongoing work, thereby, is that it emancipates awareness about vital matters of difference and critical issues of macro-social affiliation, enriching our outlooks on the cultural orientations and the geopolitical bearings of the cluttered, the subject, and the mixed populations of the world. In revealing something of complex ways in which communities artfully “become”, it questions not only the fixity of the boundaries of places and nations, but it assails those who seek singular and within-discipline explanations of or for such macro-social bonds.

It is time for Bhabha’s ideas to be connected to the world of tourism and be influentially located within the realm of tourism and leisure research.