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What I did on my Summer Vacation
or - the Politics of Postmodern Tourism
by Daveena Tauber
      

       This past summer in a café in Guatemala, I heard a woman at the table behind me complain, “I like the goods here, but they look like they’re straight out of Cost Plus, and I know I can just buy them at home.” Her lament echoes precisely the predicament of the tourist in the postmodern era. The custom of bringing home exotic objects of curiosity, is after all, one of the long-standing customs of travel, handed down from colonist to tourist. As essayist and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu once wrote, “First came the conquering armies, then the little people with the sketchbooks and the cameras.” But in a globalized market, new obstacles face the tourist in the accomplishment of this task.
       In a globalized market, it is hard to find something that is “out of context,” because everything is everywhere. Goods that were one prized by tourists because they were objects of use in a foreign culture are now manufactured specifically for export. Philosopher Walter Benjamin identified his as the “age of mechanical reproduction” wherein artwork lost what he referred to as its “aura” -- its relationship with its original context. Ceremonial objects become art objects, Benjamin suggests, when they are removed from their original context and re-contextualized in museums. Accordingly, these objects have come to be made in order to fill their new function -- their to-be-looked-at-ness. Tourist goods have experienced a similar loss of aura. They can never be removed from their original contexts, since they were never intended for anything but export in the first place. . .

. . .

 . . . In an age when taking goods home is no longer a sure way to prove that one has, in the lingo of tourist brochures, “discovered,” “explored” or “uncovered the secrets of” a place, photos take on a renewed importance
. . . I find that the act of photographing can take me out of the present tense, into the future and past simultaneously. The taking of a photo anticipates a future when the present moment will be a memory. Looking through the lens of my camera, I sometimes have the uncanny sensation of looking back on a given moment, of seeing it as a picture already developed and encased in plastic. Watching other tourists climb off buses, boats, and jeeps to take their photos, it occurs to me that the act of photographing has come to replace the desire to learn about or engage with a place. . .


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