Venice was built to confuse. The floating Italian city has few straight lines: Each cobblestoned footpath veers and twists, the buildings lean, and small bridges vault sideways. For tourists, it’s like entering a labyrinth. Locals have tried to help, scrawling arrows on the walls. They are supposed to point to San Marco Square, the city’s most prominent attraction, but sometimes the arrows point in opposite directions.
The beauty is that it doesn’t really matter. Somehow, everybody ends up in San Marco anyway, as if by magic. Befuddled tourists emerge from narrow alleys and abruptly find themselves standing on the edge of a grand square with a towering 323-foot-tall bell tower. To get some perspective on the mystery, many visitors ride the elevator to the top of the tower. On the observation platform, they can use coin-operated telescopes to scan the vast medieval tangle of waterways, churches, and tiny, hidden piazzas.
But on an afternoon in the spring of 1991, a well-dressed Italian man was monopolizing the single west-facing telescope, preventing anyone else from getting a good look at Dorsoduro, Santa Croce, and San Polo, the wealthy neighborhoods on the far side of the Grand Canal. Vincenzo Pipino was attractive in a classic Italian way, which is to say he wasn’t good looking at all. He had prominent moles, a high forehead, and slicked back hair, but he radiated a sense of confidence, as if he owned the entire city. In a way, he did. He had robbed many of the buildings he was looking at, and had cased most of the others.
To the southwest, there was the Palazzo Barozzi, a charming, five-story Baroque building at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Count Barozzi had hired Pipino to steal art from his fellow aristocrats and, as a result, had an attractive collection of masterworks. Further up the canal stood the Ca’ Dario, a fifteenth-century marble-fronted palazzo leaning slightly to one side. Periodically, a new owner bought the place and filled it with fine art, apparently unaware that the building was cursed. Many of its owners over the centuries have been murdered, driven insane, or gone bankrupt after buying the place.
Finally, Pipino’s view through the telescope came to rest on a centuries-old palazzo on the far side of the Grand Canal. It had an enclosed garden, a sign of extraordinary wealth in a city where every inch of dry land is worth a fortune. He scrutinized a skylight. It looked to be about forty feet above a secluded alley. The brick façade was crumbling, and the roof tiles would be brittle. A dangerous climb, but worth it: The building was owned by Raul Gardini, one of the richest men in Italy.
A few days later, Pipino wended his way through an increasingly narrow series of alleys. He had a bold sense of style, often pairing a red velvet suit with white shoes or a white-checkered jacket with a thin black tie. He aimed to look like an eccentric gentleman, not a thief.
He turned down an alley that was barely wider than his shoulders, passing tall lacquered doors. Minutely detailed bronze figurines of African women served as door handles. The lane dead-ended in a black door: the back entrance to the Gardini Palazzo. He rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He rang again — still nothing.
Pipino glanced over his shoulder. Claudio*, a longtime friend, trailed behind him and now stood guard at the alley entrance. Claudio was sharp-eyed and reliable, but, as a lookout, he had a shortcoming: He was hard of hearing. At times (like now), it seemed silly to rely on a nearly deaf watchman, but it was hard to find trustworthy accomplices. Pipino waved a few times before catching Claudio’s attention. Claudio gave the thumbs up.
Pipino started climbing. Over the years, salt-water from the Adriatic had corroded the surface of Venice’s ancient buildings, leaving the bricks pockmarked and brittle. It was easy to avoid the most damaged masonry, but sometimes even solid-looking stonework was unreliable. As he neared the roofline forty feet up, the pressure from his foot disintegrated a brick almost instantly. He fumbled for a moment — a fall at this height would be deadly. Brick shards plummeted to the cobblestones below and echoed in the alley.
But Pipino had been scaling the sides of Venice’s palazzos for more than three decades. He’d hung from rusted rainspouts and rotted wooden shutters. By now, he was accustomed to the risk. He took a breath, regained his balance, looked up, and started climbing again.
Cashmere was his weakness. It was a common sight on other burglaries to see Pipino climb into the getaway boat with an armful of clothing. Upstairs, he conscientiously worked his way through drawers and closets. He found naked pictures of Gardini’s wife and respectfully tucked them back in the drawer. Over the years, Pipino had developed a code of conduct for himself and the few people he was willing to work with. No violence. No blackmail, either. He wasn’t interested in embarrassing anyone. And the work had to be neat. He detested a mess. He carefully perused a wardrobe and was pleased to find a beautiful blue cashmere sweater. He tried it on. It fit well.
Just then, Claudio barreled into the bedroom ready to grab anything that shined. He reached for an ornate, golden Mont Blanc pen.
“No, no,” Pipino said, stopping him.
“What?”
“It’s ugly.”
“But it’s gold.”
“The pen is hideous,” Pipino said flatly. He had standards.
“Before your student begins classes at the school, please make sure they are capable of the following. Also, as parents and family members, please follow the same conduct yourself.”The 18 points are divided into two categories, starting with “Basic Conduct and Attitude,” which lists:
ABSTRACT
In this article, I discuss how mediatised tourism constructs various discourses of othering through representations of the ‘tourist self’ vis-à-vis the ‘local other’. In order to do so, I analyze a six-hour travelogue Himalaya with Michael Palin broadcast by the BBC in 2004. The analysis shows that despite the forces of globalisation that have made national and cultural boundaries more porous than ever before, common stereotypes about otherness continue to shape the experience of travel narratives at present. While the liberal discourses used in the travelogue appear to celebrate the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world, they simultaneously reproduce the moral superiority of the West when the traveller is presented as an authority to give the judgmental accounts of otherness under the guise of equality and tolerance. Himalaya with Michael Palin as a form of mediatised tourism does in fact invoke cultural stereotypes to commodify local authenticities, languages, and identities in order to make the travelogue a ‘good’ TV programme.
Coupland (2010) discusses five discursive strategies that are deployed to represent the other: homogenisation, pejoration, suppression and silencing, displaying liberalism, and subverting tolerance. Homogenisation is a form of social stereotyping that entails a selective focus on salient cultural traits, giving them an iconic status – colour, gender, socio-economic background, religion or speech style. The representation of Black people, Asians or Muslims as ‘being and doing alike’ is an example of homogenisation. Pejoration takes a more serious and negative consequence of othering in which case others are discursively represented as incompetent, deviant or instable. Suppression and silencing is a discursive tool where social exclusion or minoritization is achieved with limited representation or no representation at all. Similarly, a display of liberalism is a way of monitoring and mitigating representations that speakers consider non-liberal (racist, sexist, ageist). Finally, subverting tolerance is a way of simultaneously undermining and legitimising othering discourses. For example, the use of humour often allows people to claim, if challenged, that they are ‘only kidding’.
One noticeable characteristic in the Himalaya with Palin Palin is its discursive production of difference between the self and the other. The discourses of difference portray Palin as a contemporary traveller with the characteristics of a liberal subject who celebrates diversity and humanity. Hidden in those liberal discourses are new tropes of colonialism that create the stereotypical essentialization of difference against the other. The travelogue both constructs and reproduces inequalities in power between the tourist and host identities, as presented in Excerpt 1.There are several examples of othering presented.
In Excerpt 1, Palin, the tourist-presenter, constructs identities of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, highlighting the already privileged status of the six production crew members who are there to travel and consume the ‘wonderful country’ (line 06). ‘People’ and ‘horses’ are lumped together into the category of ‘helpers’, and they are there to serve the crew (line 05). Coupland (2010) argues that this is an indirect way of othering people through discursive suppression where others have a very limited voice in representation. Whenever they are shown, representations may erase the diversity that a group has. Palin acknowledges his privileged status mentioning he does not even have to fill his water bottle. The Bhutanese porters do for him; all he has to do is to drink it (lines 06, 07). Palin here is preserving and reproducing the dominant social order while appearing to celebrate diversity and difference. While Palin is not building a colonialist empire by creating the Victorian type of binary text, his discourses nevertheless are a marker of what Gilroy (2004) recognises as ‘post-imperial melancholia’ (p. 98) that is reminiscent of the imperial tropes.
The interaction in Excerpt 13, which takes places in northern Tibet, shows a more covert way of constructing and representing multilingualism in the travelogue. Palin’s narrative constructs English as a common language between him and his audience, but functions as a tool to exclude the Tibetan family (Migma, his wife and two children who do not speak English) from conversation.
Palin is interacting in multiple footings here. Seemingly, he is interacting with Migma (see the use of ‘you’ and gazes to Migma). However, the interactional goal seems to create exoticness of Tibet to Western audience by presenting a ‘typical’ Tibetan family life (lines 01– 08). Here, it is important to highlight how the tourist-presenter is represented as a cosmopolitan self who appears to celebrate and respect diversity and cultural differences. By narrating his experience of yak milking on the way (line 01) and by showing his embodied taste of drinking butter tea (10), Palin highlights his openness to cross-cultural encounters. Palin’s effort to appear liberal and cosmopolitan for his English-speaking audience is quite successfully achieved here.
However, the shared identity of Palin and his audience as English speakers renders Migma and his family as linguistic and cultural other. Migma not only possesses less power in this media frame of interaction, he is also linguistically powerless as far as his proficiency in English is concerned. Migma has an innocent look toward Palin and the camera; he is the focus of the camera most of the time. Migma is presented as incompetent in English since he does not and cannot use English. However, Palin keeps talking to him in English. Following Coupland (2010) this is an example of othering through silencing.
Migma is there, happily smiling and nodding for the travelogue audience. The Tibetan language does not have space in tourist presentation; it only functions part of an authentic background noise for the audience. The other whose language is incomprehensible to the tourist-presenter and his audience is excluded from the interaction. Note that the stereotypical construction of differences between the cosmopolitan self and exotic other is strategically mitigated in lines 17, 18 and 20. The tourist-presenter presents similarities between the host country Tibet and his home country Britain highlighting very obvious practices such as people both in England and Tibet eat and share food and there are children both in Britain and Tibet. This accommodation of otherness in relation to fundamental commonality, as Gilroy suggests, can be seen as characteristic feature of postcolonial melancholia (2004). By constructing such commonality, Palin is trying to subvert his stereotypical portrayal of the other in the language that the other does not understand.
Concluding remarks
The article has discussed if and to what extent broadcast travelogues invoke cultural essentialism in their various forms of representations in the context of contemporary global mobility and cross-cultural encounters. The contemporary traveller, as Lisle (2006) also points out in case of travel writing, becomes a site of struggle between an imperial subjectivity (that continues to reproduce colonial tropes) and a liberal, cosmopolitan subjectivity (that celebrates diversity in cultural and linguistic encounters). Under the guise of a liberal subject position, Himalaya with Michael Palin does in fact invoke cultural stereotypes to commodify local authenticities, ideologies and identities, keeping in mind of the interest and expectations of the media audience who are interested in viewing a different other, not a similar self. While the liberal discourses used in the travelogue appear to celebrate the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world, they simultaneously reproduce the moral superiority of the West when the traveller is presented as an authority to give the judgmental accounts of otherness under the guise of equality and tolerance. The humorous tone adopted in this travelogue plays a key role in presenting the traveller as a liberal subject, helping him to subvert the ideological intent of some covertly pejorative discourses. Although such humour superficially seems to be a non-serious act of performance specifically designed to address the interest of the target audience, it reproduces and constructs a larger social order. Those who make humour build an ingroup identity with audience by sharing a ‘secret code’ (Lisle, 2006, p. 79), and those who are laughed at become the butt of the joke. The discursive representation of tourists and hosts perpetuates power differences between the supposedly cosmopolitan traveller and the relatively static local.
The analysis has also shown that representation is not a unidirectional act whereby only tourists and media other locals; there are opportunities of identity negotiations. In a few occasions, identities of the local projected by the tourist-presenter were resisted and reinterpreted by those who were being represented. By enacting their agency, the local may repackage their identities as a similar (Excerpt 5) or a different but more ‘advanced’ other (Excerpt 4). Throughout the travelogue, English is represented as the powerful language that mediates destinations with media audience. Other languages as objects of tourist’s performance or part of a touristic scene add authenticity to the representations.
The seemingly liberal forms of discourse in the travelogue continues to carry the characteristics of the colonial tropes and reinforces the unequal power relationship between the traveller (as representatives of the dominant group) and the host (represented as local others). Tourist and host identities are largely performed and the performance of these identities is influenced by tourist-host subject positions. Media producers accomplish various ‘ideologies of tourism’ (Galasiński & Jaworski, 2003), which are socially and politically congruent with the interest of their employers, sponsors and the Western audience. This resonates with Fairclough’s(1989) argument: the ‘power in the discourse’ does not explain the ‘power behind the discourse’. Thus, any analytical explanation of discourses in mass mediated tourism contexts requires connecting the analysis of the micro-politics of tourist-host interaction with the macro-politics of the relationship between media producers and audience, and the objects of media gaze.Full study here.
