The role of narrative in tourism 1

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Criticism and Interpretive Theory

2022 Cureton Dr.

Urbana, IL 61801

phone 217-384-6383

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I begin with the role of stories told throughout the life cycle of the touristic engagement, from pre-tour to on-tour to post-tour narratives. Rather than “follow the money,” I follow the story. Although the stories are told at different times along the touristic cycle, they are interconnected, as pre-tour narratives are brought along into the journey, and indeed they are like scripts that shape the journey, while the stories generated on tour provide material for post-tour narratives, which over time may change the pre-tour tellings. Rather than examine just the journey itself, I study travelers’ narratives before the journey starts and then extend the inquiry beyond the ending. This is a very different perspective than one which views the tour as a sacred journey, or that just studies one part of the process, such as pre-tour marketing, the trip itself, or post-tour tellings.

My basic theoretical question concerns the relationship between narration and experience, a problem that has interested me for the past twenty years (Bruner 1984, Turner and Bruner 1986). How are the pre-tour narratives and expectations about the destination culture modified during the actual journey, and how are the experiences on tour selectively condensed after the voyage into post-tour narratives and eventually memory?

Ideally, the ethnographer would study the same travelers from the initial stage when they are deciding where and how to travel, would then follow them while they go on their journey listening to their stories and observing their actions along the way, and finally would continue to study them after they return home and tell travel stories to themselves and to others. An even more refined investigation would examine variations in travel experience by social class, age, gender, and national origin. This would be an ideal research program. My paper is more exploratory, more a sketch of a research project than an empirical study. It is an extension of ideas presented in Bruner (2005).

I know that tourists do more than tell stories---they touch, smell, feel, see, hear, and use all sensory modalities. These sensory modes, however, are symbolically structured; they are not unmediated nature. A 16^th century European traveler would not see or hear the same as a 21^st century person. My position is that pre-tour narratives channel how travelers use their senses, but I also believe that embodied experiences may exceed the boundaries of the text.² Clearly, however, I privilege narration and need to explain why.

By narrative I mean not only stories told by one person to another, or to those in fictional texts, but also to the larger sometimes implicit pre-tour master narratives about destinations, sites, and peoples. In hermeneutics, in Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s terms, pre-tour narratives are pre-understandings. In the Western imagination, for example, Bali is a South Sea island paradise, a land of beautiful women, of mystical dance dramas, where artistic expression is found in everyday life, where the people are at one with nature and live a charmed harmonious life. Everyone is familiar with this description of Bali as the Island of the Gods, as it is a well-known story told in tourist brochures, travel writing, guidebooks, television, film, scholarly accounts, anthropological writings, novels, journalism, and increasingly these days, on the internet, and other sources. Mike Robinson (personal communication, August 9, 2005) is doing some interesting work on how comic books and travel television influence school children’s ideas about the meaning of “holidays,” and convey messages about various destinations. The Balinese master narrative is part of Western discourse, as well as Japanese, Indonesian, and global discourse, and it is given life in a multiplicity of different genres. Diverse genres, of course, are not exact mimetic copies of one another, but my contention is that, in a structural sense, they tell essentially the “same” basic story.

Bali has become a brand as a result of effective tourism marketing but this only occurred after the island was colonized by the Dutch in 1910. The earlier 19^th century accounts of the warrior Balinese were not so flattering. The narrative construction was developed in the 1920s (Boon 1977, Vickers 1989, Picard 1996) as a result of collaboration between the Dutch colonial government, expatriate intellectuals including anthropologists, and the emerging tourism industry. Many pre-tour narratives in other areas emerged during the colonial period.

Established master narratives have tremendous consequences as they make meaning, shape action, mold tourist behavior, serve to select which aspects of Balinese culture will be displayed for visitors, direct the construction of the infrastructure for foreigners, and work in subtle ways, sometimes on the unconscious level. They are not only stories of meaning but of power. If a new attraction built for tourists doesn’t fit an established master narrative it is more likely to fail, as the tour agents may have a difficult time attracting clientele, and the tourists themselves may feel that the attraction is not authentic, not really Balinese. This is an important point because the tourist’s conception about what is “authentic” may be based more on pre-understandings than on what occurs on site, primarily because most travelers have no way of knowing what is real or true or authentic or genuine in the foreign culture. If it fits the preconception, if it is the same image seen in the pages of National Geographic or on Granada television, then it gains credibility.

Western narratives about Balinese culture focus on only certain aspects of Balinese life worlds and exclude the rest. Those parts that do not fit the master narrative are blocked out or ignored by the producers of Balinese culture for foreigners. What is often omitted is the prosaic side of Balinese life, the world of the everyday, and the focus is on peak expressions such as the religious rituals, and those aspects of culture that interest foreigners. The master narrative is a perceptual framework that works as a filter which excludes as much as it includes, and offers the tourist an interpretive frame within which to understand the destination culture.

Balinese master narratives are about paradise, mysticism, and beauty; Egyptian master narratives are about the pharaonic period, the ancient royalty, tombs and pyramids; Jerusalem accounts are about the origins and holy sites of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions; East African stories are about wild animals, wild landscapes, and wild tribes. It is no accident that in Kenya the government bureau in charge of travel is called the Bureau of Wildlife and Tourism. Master narratives give meaning to sites and places. A mountain fortress like Masada would be just another large rock in a barren landscape without a story.

Agents in the destination societies construct their own narratives of themselves for foreign consumption which may either reinforce or work in opposition to the Western ones, serving as a corrective. The Hong Kong Tourist Board is a sophisticated marketing organization creating campaigns to sell Hong Kong as a destination for foreign travelers, and it is interesting that their creations are so powerful that they come to be embraced by Hong Kong residents. In other words, the image designed for foreign others becomes accepted by the locals as a story about themselves. I learned this when teaching a course on tourism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where my students did field studies. It is as if the tourist campaign articulates an aspect of Hong Kong self and culture that had not previously been acknowledged. On the other hand, some of the marketing by regions in India are explicitly devised to counteract negative Western stereotypes, while the advertising of Singapore Airlines that features its attractive flight attendants plays directly into Western stereotypes about Asian women. Some ethnic groups, for example, American Indian tribes in the United States have become ethnic corporations that control assets including land and gambling casinos, and they market themselves, although still, I believe, within the parameters of American imaginings.

Master narratives are neither monolithic nor uncontested. I have often wondered how master narratives may exist in a touristic discourse almost separate from the rest of the society and its history. In Africa, for example, the romantic tourism narrative focuses on animals, tribes, and nature, but there is another tragic narrative about Africa dealing with poverty, war, corruption, and disease that appears frequently in such popular media as journalism, fiction and film that seem strangely unrelated to the romantic narrative. It is as if the two are not in competition but are strictly compartmentalized, each in its own domain, although both stories are about the Other. Travelers to Africa may experience both the romantic and the tragic narratives, and an empirical question would be how they handle the discrepancy. The upscale safari tour agencies do their utmost to suppress the darker side of Africa.

Pre-tour narratives are what the tourist understands from generalized Western discourse, but the story may be reinforced by friends who may have gone on a similar trip, by tour agents, travel writers, tourist brochures, guidebooks, and the internet. There are no naive tourists who go to a place without any conception whatsoever about what will be found there, thus pre-tour narratives are already in the tourist consciousness before the journey begins.

On-tour

What happens on tour? There is a flood of new narratives from local tour guides, from descriptive handouts, markers at the sites, postcards, pamphlets and books sold in the destination culture, from the stories that tourists tell each other, and from those that emerge from the tourists’ own encounters and observations. These on-tour stories modify and enhance the pre-tour narratives, and form the basis of the stories that will be told after the end of the trip.

. The sources of information en route vary by mode of travel. For those on a group tour who travel together, the tour agents, local guides, and sometimes the performers are the primary storytellers, supplemented by the standard guidebooks. For backpackers, who may begin the journey individually or as couples but often end up as small groups traveling together, an additional primary source are other backpackers encountered in internet cafes, in hotels that cater to young tourists or at sites during the journey. The Lonely Planet and similar guides tell the travelers not only which sites to see but where to find other backpackers. Some independent travelers I have known research the destination in great depth before the trip and plot their own itineraries. In addition to the cultural brokers found in the formal tourism sector, there is an informal supplementary tourism zone where entrepreneurial individuals, beach boys, sex workers, or others volunteer their services as companion guides to interpret the destination for the traveler.

Some guides are very professional, licensed, well informed, and strive to supply accurate information, while others are less competent. Most of the ones I have listened to over the years want to be entertaining as well as educational, but most do not have an anthropological understanding of culture but rather present unrelated snippets of information, or interesting random stories about the people or locality. The performers themselves in Bali or Maasailand tend to be mute and rely upon the guides for their explanatory voice, while in heritage sites like Plimoth Plantation or New Salem the performer-interpreters in period dress explain the site directly to the visitors. In any case, guides, performers, and other travelers are major sources of onsite narratives.

While on the journey tourists not only speak, they write, in personal diaries, in postcards and letters sent home, and on the internet. They may travel with their own laptop computer or use those in internet cafes or hotels. Not only do they send to and receive email from friends and family, but they may use the computer to look up travel web sites to acquire up-to-date information about the destination, to read the entries of other travelers, or to add their own written contributions. New technologies enable fast access to current information and provide an opportunity for virtual conversation and the sharing of stories with anonymous fellow travelers, but this process does not necessarily require the internet. Chaim Noy ( ms) describes how Israeli backpackers compose “trail stories” written on paper, which are detailed descriptions telling future backpackers where to go and what to see. These written documents are left at selected hotels for future backpackers to consult, or add to. Tourist narratives en route are not only told and heard, they are written and read.

Experience turns into narrative as soon as tourists say to themselves what is happening to them on tour, as soon as they transform a sensory occurrence into a plot structure expressed in words. This is the first on-line telling. Even if they do not tell themselves a fully formed narrative, but just evaluate their feelings, that in itself becomes the basis of a first telling. From the point of view of the experiencing self, the journey consists of a series of sensations, but from the point of view of the remembering self, it becomes a narrative, and a severe selection from reality (Kahneman 2005). The second telling is when the story is articulated for others.

I need to point out some distinctions here. The original experience is much richer and more complex than any narrative, and what tourists tell themselves, the first telling, is always different from what they tell others, the second telling. As everyone experiences the world differently, what arises to consciousness is different for each individual tourist, as it is filtered through past understandings, personality, knowledge base, and other factors. All tellings may be seen as interpretations based on but not exact duplicates of an objective reality. In fact, most experiences are not remembered, and indeed the problem may be to give an explanation of why a particular encounter is indeed remembered, which could be because of its intensity, or affect, or importance, or because of prior associations, or because it was unexpected, or replicates the pre-understandings, or whatever. There is then an on-going tension between experience and narration.

We have to empathize with the predicament of the Western tourist going to exotic Third World destinations. There is such a deluge of unfamiliar sensations that arise to consciousness, such varied sights and sounds and smells, that their experience may only be dimly understood. The pre-tour narratives have limitations because they offer such a schematic outline that it can never become an actual blueprint that explains everything happening on tour.

The discrepancy between a schema and a blueprint opens a space for the tourists to improvise, to construct their own interpretations that takes the pre-tour narrative and expands it to cover their own personal encounters in the destination culture (Chronis 2005). The pre-tour narratives do shape the tour but the tourists do not merely repeat what is in the guidebooks or brochures. Rather, they have agency and personalize the master narratives and make them their own. This is an arena for creativity and construction, for placing the strange within a familiar framework. Photographs are taken of travelers in front of important landmarks, not just to show that they were there, but to create the basis of a future personal story of their experience of being there. The stories told about the souvenirs brought home focus as much on how the object was acquired as on indigenous meaning. The selection and purchase of the object, the hard bargaining, the acumen of the tourist, the setting of the acquisition, the appearance of the seller—all may become the basis for future stories. The problem, of course, is that the souvenirs and photographs themselves may be very inadequate and incomplete reflections of the richness of the original experience, and tourists may recognize this.

There is a wide range of how tourists and performers individualize narratives about the site, depending on their motivations, perspectives, and understandings. To be a tourist is a social role, and like all roles, is not merely occupied but is constructed as it is enacted. The telling of travel stories serves to construct the teller as tourist, and also functions to construct a community of fellow travelers. It is the same with other roles in tourism, including those of the performers, guides, agents, and the locals---all are constructed roles best studied as a system in interaction, as a co-production. The metaphor is theater.

I want to reflect for a moment on what is meant by improvisation or creativity in storytelling while on tour. We know that tourists personalize master narratives, but possibly what is called improvisation in telling may simply be the substitution of one master narrative for another. A grand narrative about Bali is replaced by one about the tourist as hero. The focus shifts from the destination culture to the exploits of the courageous traveler. Possibly there are only a limited number of basic travel stories, and when it appears that storytellers are improvising or creating something entirely new, or filling the gaps between pre-tour narratives and experience on-tour, they may merely have exchanged one narrative template for another. What is called improvisation may be that the storyteller is just following a different script.

There are limitations to the stories tourists are willing to tell, or to acknowledge to themselves. Tourists may experience embarrassment, fear, shame, anger, or desires that they are barely able to recognize and are hesitant to talk about. There are well known genres—lust for the savage beauty, guilt because of superiority over underprivileged others, shame at one’s own wealth, hidden desires and fantasies, disgust at the dirt and poverty, terror over the possibility of savage aggression turned against the self, embarrassment at being duped or overcharged, and simple fear at being in such strange surroundings. Such emotions may not be recognized, may not even be storyable, or if brought to consciousness, may be considered as beyond the boundaries of appropriate travel narration. Much of the tourist experience may be left out of what is told.

Touristic understanding differs from ethnographic ones in many ways, but a critical difference is in how discrepancies are handled. The anthropologist, too, has pre-understandings before fieldwork that are based primarily upon the existing scholarly literature and disciplinary constraints (Bruner 1986). These anthropological narratives are taken into the field, but when indigenous practice does not fit, or seems out-of-place, or unanticipated, then to the vigilant ethnographer this sends a four alarm alert to investigate further. The situation presents a research opportunity. The discrepancies between pre-understandings and observation in the field are precisely how the ethnographer learns something new, makes a contribution, and revises the literature. You are all familiar with the first sentence of the typical journal article---“although the existing scholarship says the following, my empirical findings were different, and so we have to revise the theory.” In all science, experimental observations that differ from existing theory form the basis of new knowledge, and are how science and anthropology advance. Tourists, however, may not have the time, inclination, or knowledge for the extended investigation called for by a divergence between pre-understandings or theory on the one hand, and incongruous observations on the other, although they may well be aware of such incongruities. They might dismiss an observed incongruity as a cultural oddity, or a misunderstanding, or by feeling that their knowledge was incomplete, or that the pre-tour briefings were lacking, or that they were misinformed, but they do not initiate research projects.

Tourists vary in how much understanding they strive for. Some travelers simply surrender themselves to what is presented to them, or as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has put it, the experience becomes more important than the hermeneutics. The existential moment subjugates the meaning. Such travelers do not quest for coherent narratives, and they are more accepting of whatever is given. Others are more demanding, and approach alien cultures with the sensibility of a museum curator or an art collector, in that they want to understand everything, in depth, often in a few weeks. I’ve known tourists that read the scholarly literature before every journey so as to be well prepared in advance to better understand other cultures. Tourists do vary in their acceptance or rejection of pre-tour understandings, but I hesitate to apply such label as “collaboration” or “resistance,” as I find these terms too binary and simplistic as analytic concepts for understanding the range of tourist responses.

Some tourists construct a metanarrative around their travel such that the details and content of the culture become inconsequential. I am fond of the example of the woman who said to me before a performance in Bali, “Here comes the tourist dance.” Her remark offered a metanarrative about the performance so that she in effect had abandoned any attempt to understand the Balinese content and placed the dance in a larger frame within tourist discourse. She was on a tour to an exotic locale and in her other tours there had always been a performance of native dancing. In this specific instance, the dance was no longer Balinese, it was simply touristic, and she accepted it as such. In her touristic frame, the indigenous significance became irrelevant, and this may have been a way for her to cope with difference. A performative event was removed from its culturally specific setting and placed within a more universal touristic context.

Many tourists have what I have called elsewhere (Bruner 2005: 95) a “questioning gaze,” which is an undefined puzzlement about the authenticity and credibility of what they are seeing. The questioning gaze is an existential ambiguity about the sights they see and the constructed tourist performances they witness, as they have doubts about their accuracy and question if they are indeed true representations of the culture. They ask, “Is this real?” It is like a diffuse background noise that accompanies them throughout the tour, which sometimes rises to prominence, and other times recedes into the surroundings. For Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 72) this is the “irreducibility of strangeness;” for MacCannell (2001: 34) it is “an ineluctable absence of meaning to an incomplete subject.” Tourists have a questioning gaze and recognize that there is a limit to their understanding and their ability to construct stories about what they see. They may accept a degree of unintelligibility and during a performance may suspend disbelief.

While on tour, the travelers are not always living in the moment, not just going with the flow and surrendering to events around them, but they may be directing their actions toward accumulating material for future stories that will be told later. Tourists collect objects such as postcards, restaurant menus, handouts from the travel agents, airline tickets, photographs, and other mementos that will form the basis of yet to be constructed albums of their trip. The travel album is one of the best devices for storytelling, as are souvenirs, for every object becomes the basis of a story. But more than this, travelers seek compelling or unexpected happenings on tour precisely because they will form a rich basis of future stories, in which the tourist becomes the heroic adventurer. Those on a group tour have a set itinerary, although they value the unanticipated, but backpackers have more choice in destination, and many select sites precisely because of their storytelling potential (Vail 2004). They go where the good stories are to be found, like Rosaldo’s (1986) Illongot tribesman who hunts not only for meat but for stories to be told back in camp.

One of the best possible contexts for telling travel stories is while traveling, in part because an audience of fellow vacationers is built in, readily available, and are interested in travel, as all of their time and attention on the tour is devoted to it. There are few distractions. After the tour, back in familiar surroundings, there are many fewer occasions for talking about their trip, and indeed, after returning home many travelers find that they lack an audience with whom they can share their tales of adventure.

The stories that travelers share with others on or after the tour serve to bind the members of the group, and their storytelling is indeed their own performance. Individual stories may assert the knowledge, authority, or status of the storyteller; travel narratives have individual as well as group functions. I would love to know how the style of story telling varies by gender, age, or nationality, but I don’t have the data. My feeling is that age of travel is a critical variable---just think for example of the differences between young people taking a year off between school and work, as opposed to newly retired persons who finally have the opportunity and wealth to explore the world. Both are rites of passage, marking a change between life stages, but the question is, what are the similarities and dissimilarities in the mode and experience of travel between the young and the old.

My studies do indicate that while on tour what tourists talk about most is tourism, about the mechanics of travel, and about other trips they have taken. Rather than discuss the trip they are on, their destination culture, they frequently talk about different tours or about tourism generally. While in Kenya they might relate what happened on a tour to Thailand. The dilemma is that they really don’t know much about the culture in which they find themselves, but they do know about travel and tourism. My observations suggest this is as true of backpackers as it is of mass tourists. Vail (2004) reports that even though backpacker ideology is about separating themselves from the despised tourists and interacting directly with indigenous peoples, backpackers in Bolivia spent about 85% of their time with other backpackers. A graduate student who had been a frequent backpacker told me of the time her touring companion wanted to spend the day at their hotel rather than to go out sightseeing in order to keep listening to more backpacker stories. In this case the expression was more compelling than the primary experience; it was better to hear a story about a place then to visit it oneself. The simulation was preferred over the original, an essential feature of postmodernism.

There are other variables. Some destinations have such firmly established and encompassing pre-tour narratives that they are difficult to escape, as they seem to envelop the entire society, while in other locations the narratives are more diffuse and are open to on-tour changes. I call these hard as opposed to soft pre-tour narratives. Bali is a place with a powerful pre-tour master narrative while Ghana’s is more diffuse and pliant, hence more open to tourist input and interpretation. In this sense, travel to Ghana requires more agency, more interpretive effort from the tourists. And some master stories may have a complexity that does not readily lend itself to enactment and performance.

Narratives are crafted differently if one is journeying with friends, family, a large tour group, or fellow backpackers. Woe to the backpacker who says something favorable about mass tourists. In addition to the performances and attractions in the destination culture, the unit of travel is also a site of cultural production. There is also a diurnal cycle. During the day, while touring, narratives about the local culture predominate while in the evenings when tourists congregate in their hotels and bars, and at mealtimes, stories about tourism and tourists take over, although there is overlap. Tourists also talk about themselves and their families.

Not only do government tourist bureaus and tourists have agency but so do the local people, tour guides, and performers who come to understand the master narratives told about them. They may react to tourist interest in their culture with pride, they may try to correct misunderstandings, or they may simply accept how they are characterized in tourist discourse. Tourist behavior may be taken as strange or disrespectful, and locals may joke about the tourists. In Bali jokes have been incorporated in an art form, in Balinese paintings that depict tourists, which are then sold to the tourists. I have bought four such paintings myself. This is an arena for play, but also serious business for the locals who take the master narratives into account in their performances, behavior, and in the souvenirs made for sale. While locals do tell each other stories about tourists, often humorous or disparaging ones, locals generally avoid direct open challenges to tourists or to the narratives the tourists bring with them. After all, tourism is a business, and the locals are in it for the money and do not want to alienate their clientele. Although there may be disparaging talk about tourists, it is frequently kept hidden, or disguised in art.

The pre-tour narratives and the interest of tourists in selected aspects of local culture can have profound consequences for the indigenous culture itself, even more so than in the example about Hong Kong. Western expatriate intellectuals in Bali, including Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Miguel Covarrubias, and Walter Spies became so fascinated with the Balinese barong performance involving trance, which so well exemplified the master narrative themes of artistry and mysticism that they wrote extensively about the barong and filmed these dance dramas in the 1930s. Their interest so enhanced the importance of the barong to the Balinese themselves that today the barong has become the icon of Bali in Western discourse and iconography (Bruner 2005: 200-2001).

After travelers return home the lived experience of the trip diminishes in intensity over time to be replaced by memory. The remembering self supplants the experiencing self. The mnemonic devices of photograph, souvenir, and album become more significant. While on tour, attention was concentrated nearly full time on traveling, whereas at home, talk and thinking about the trip become episodic. For long periods of time one’s attention is on subjects other than travel. The audience for travel stories decreases.

After the trip narratives of travel are put in order, consolidated, condensed, and made more coherent. Master narratives become even more personal ones. The stories become more focused on the tourist as the subject of dramatic action. Drama is added to supplant stories that were merely descriptive. Aspects of on-tour stories are enhanced and exaggerated while others fade away. Memory is an active process so retelling is not mere repetition but is itself a construction, and it is not a one time occurrence but is a process that continues throughout the life course. Further, incidents that had not been included in the on-tour narrative may be recalled and then incorporated into subsequent tellings. Suppressed or neglected events previously excluded from travel narratives may be remembered later, even years later, as the person, the context, or the conventions of telling change. Thus, on-tour stories do not necessarily have a fixed content but may be added to and expanded by including occurrences previously omitted, as they are recalled by association. Retellings are constructive and reinforcing.

When I first wrote about narrative in the mid-1980s (Bruner 1984, 1986), I believed that stories had a beginning, middle, and an ending, in other words, a narrative structure, a plot. Since then, I no longer believe that narratives are necessarily linear and coherent. Maybe I have been reading too many postmodern novels, or I’m just getting older and the world is less clear, or maybe the world, or our theories about it, has actually changed. I note, however, that there is a linear structure to this paper, as pre-, on- and post-tellings.

There are strong forces favoring post-tour coherence. To assemble travel albums, or slide shows, or give a formal talk about a trip involves a linear sequencing, an imposition of a beginning, middle, and an ending. You start a story at a certain time and then end it. You begin a slide show with the first slide and end with the last. This post-tour sequencing may of course involve a severe reordering of the original. If one is asked at a casual event such as a dinner party to make off-the-cuff remarks about a recent trip, even if one strings together previously told stores, one is forming a sequence that may not have been part of any original. Events from the trip may be juxtaposed in time so as to make for a better telling for that particular occasion. Telling about a trip reinterprets the original experience and the on-tour narratives told about it. Every retelling imposes its own constraints. On-tour narratives are told onsite to fellow travelers whereas post-tour narratives are told to an audience that probably has no first hand knowledge of the original.

That pre-tour, on-tour and post-tour travel stories may well be about different trips taken at different times by different people highlights a significant feature of all travel narratives, that they are dialogic, in Bakhtin’s sense. I have elsewhere called this “dialogic narration” (Bruner 2005: 169-188). Some may use the term intertextuality, but that wording directs attention to a property of the text itself, that it contains references other stories. I prefer dialogic narration because it examines a process occurring outside of the text, that one story is told in reference to another, or possibly in opposition to another, but in any case the story being told at any given time takes account not just of previous stories about a particular trip, but of previous narratives about all trips. The pre-tour narratives about less developed areas such as Bali, or Kenya, or Tahiti, are dialogic and have common themes. They all say that here is an exotic out-of-time destination that you had better hurry and go to before it all disappears, and, paradoxically, that you will witness other cultures and peoples as they were a thousand years ago. The trope of the vanishing primitive has been an inherent part of the Balinese narrative for at least eighty years. The stories also say that the privileged Western tourist on a group tour has the right to view other cultures, to become a voyeur of the primitive, a situation in which older, wealthier, lighter skinned people observe younger, poorer, and darker skinned ones. It is story of inequality and power told by Westerners about many Third World destinations. Such stories are more properly termed metanarratives that encompass different peoples and areas, and are stories about stories of travel. They also provide templates for tourist behavior and set the limits for tourist improvisation.

My paper today at Berkeley is yet another post-tour telling, because tourism scholars also tell travel stories and are not ”outside” tourist discourse, but are enmeshed within it. The question remains, however, what are the continuities and discontinuities between pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour narratives of travel?
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