ABSTRACT
Tourist encounters are considered to be ‘closely entwined with the imperial project and colonialism’ (Pritchard and Morgan, 2007: 21), in that they ‘define and fix both the tourist and the toured “other” in a relationship with each other which stems from colonialism and is always inherently colonial in nature’ (Tucker and Akama, 2009: 510). In Empty Meeting Grounds, for example, MacCannell (1992: 27) laments that ‘The tourist who calls an Indian ‘Injun’ means to insult, but the well-intended tourist on the same bus is no less insulting’. Even the apparent good intentions of the ‘new moral tourisms’ (Butcher, 2003), or ‘ethical tourism’ practices, are critiqued as being yet another branding exercise to attempt to cover over the same relations of domination as the other, more usual ‘mass’ tourisms. Rather than dismissing that good intention out of hand, however, it would seem worthwhile opening it up a little, in order to look at the possibilities it might hold and the meaning it may have for, what are clearly, the very complex moral encounters of tourism. The possibilities that good intention might hold would arise out of an understanding of tourism encounters as altogether more complex and fractal than a portrayal of them as straightforwardly colonial, and insulting, could allow. There is a need, then, for more in-depth location and interrogation, not only of ‘precisely the agents, moments and techniques of the exercise of power in tourism encounters’ (Gibson, 2012: 59), but also of the interruptions and destabilizations of that power.
