Introduction: Eastbound
Tom Selwyn
University of London, ts14@soas.ac.uk
Irena Weber
University of Primorska & University of Ljubljana, irena.weber@guest.arnes.si
As Chiara Cipollari, the author of one of the papers in this journal, observes, there has been markedly less social scientific study of the history and present state of tourism in central and eastern European countries than there has been of those regions in western Europe and the Mediterranean that have traditionally been the focal geographical points of reference for studies of historical and contemporary post-war tourism. Given that some of the papers in this volume originated from the 2008 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held in the University of Ljubljana, the convenors of the panel 'Eastbound' (i.e. the editors of this edition of Anthropological Notebooks) felt it appropriate to retain the panel's title whilst being aware that the 'East' which it denotes is not, of course, a geographical term. Had the conference been held in Beirut, for example, the panel might have been entitled 'Westbound' - which does raise several interesting questions! Nevertheless, whilst signalling that the issue of what is 'East' and what is 'West' is a discussion to be had, or joined, at another time, we have chosen to continue to use what are more or less conventional terms for the parts of the world covered by the papers. Thus the volume's centre of gravity is still taken to be Central and Eastern Europe (specifically the Dalmatian coast of Slovenia and Croatia, together with Romania, and Czechoslovakia) although the compass has been extended to the two additional 'Eastern' sites of Palestine in the eastern Mediterranean and Odessa in the Baltic.
The two aims of this brief Introduction are to introduce the papers (in the alphabetical order of their authors) and to indicate how they may be related to each other.
Bojan Baskar describes the enormous influence that the Austrian Hapsburg aristocracy, along with aristocratic visitors from elsewhere, exercised in the nineteenth century on the emergence of Dalmatia and the Adriatic as a tourist region. Following the opening of the railway from Vienna to Trieste in the 1840s and the enlarging scope at that time of operations of the (Austrian) Lloyd shipping company, it became much easier to move around the region and its coastlines. But it was such archdukes and duchesses as Ferdinand Max (the future Emperor Maximilian of Mexico), Maria Josefa, Maria Theresa, Ludwig Salvator (best known for his popularization of Mallorca), and Franz Ferdinand himself, who played a key role in bringing the region to the attention of the world. Baskar shows how these were accompanied by, and associated with, artists, poets, natural scientists, historians, and
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others, all of whom wrote about, painted, and studied the area. By so doing they raised the standing of the Dalmatian littoral and the Adriatic Sea in the eyes of 'Western' travellers to almost the same level as the French Riviera - which itself, Baskar observes, owed much to the attentions and enthusiasms of other aristocratic visitors from the north.
One of Baskar's principal aims is to counter the generally held assumption that the origins of tourism owe most to the middle-classes. His emphasis on the almost magical effects that aristocratic legitimation brings to places aspiring to attract visitors reminds us of the kinship between travel, tourism, and enchantment.
The theme of enchantment is taken up by Cipollari who argues that both locals and tourists in Botiza, Romania, play what she terms a 'self referential game' in which a mythical past is imagined that gives rise to a view of a particular type of 'authentic present' which is legitimated by the products of a cottage arts and crafts industry making 'traditional' clothes and other historical objects in the image of that past. Such 'games' are encouraged by the regional authorities who have adopted the line that Miramures (in which Botiza is to be found) is 'iconic of rural Europe: a ''living museum in (and of) Central Europe'' '. Such processes and practices are not unfamiliar in the tourist literature but they continue to raise real existential if not philosophical issues, not least the question of why travellers from directions west of Romania should find that country's 'myths of rurality' so compelling. The issue is even more complex given that the myth of the 'rural farm world' and its association with the 'soul' of Romania was promoted during the socialist period - even though the same rurality was simultaneously seen to be one of the main causes of Romania's economic backwardness. It is as if tourists in Botiza have been engaged in a long discussion with authorities, locals, and themselves (as they squeeze into cotton shirts, woollen waistcoats, or pleated skirts in changing rooms that are 'generally small and often hot') about the nature of socialism, capitalism, the relation between economy and society, and the symbolic worlds (including the smell of hay) that make these issues feel so poignantly relevant.
Emilio Cocco considers the historical formation of the senses of cosmopolitanism that suffuse contemporary travellers' imaginations as they consider the nature of the two cities of Trieste and Odessa. He describes how both cities were regarded by both their resident merchant traders and the authorities of the Austrian and Russian empires in the nineteenth century as being in the front line, so to speak, of the then emerging maritime and oceanic world system. Not only did the sea open routes to business but both cities were also linked to global diasporas, which were (rightly) regarded as potentially fruitful points of investment. He then places this discussion in a contemporary political context looking, inter alia, at the significance of contemporary tourism within and around the two cities. Just as the authorities of Miramures 'stage' Romanian rurality for tourists, so the tourism boards of Trieste and Odessa 'stage' the sea and the way in which it implies and connotes Adriatic and Baltic 'maritime cultures' and identities. Such ideas are food and drink to Western 'explorer/tourists' who are clearly increasingly attached to notions of extra- and inter- national identities and the routes and pathways through the seascapes beyond the two
cities that help form and structure them. But at this point Cocco interposes a fundamental and (to some) painful contradiction. The historical facts have been that from the end of the nineteenth century the 'watery connections that linked the port cities of the Mediterranean were progressively eroded' partly because the advance of land based transport systems and partly because of the rise of 'new classifications of people based on race, ethnicity, and nation' that began to compete with 'the old maritime affiliations'. Here Cocco makes a fascinating link between the cosmopolitan dispositions of the explorer/tourists and suggestions by some regional scholars that the sense of maritime and cosmopolitan connectedness in the Mediterranean and Baltic might be kept alive and indeed promoted by civil society institutions in the nation states along their borders. But he is less that sanguine about such a desirable outcome. Tourism is increasingly in private hands and integrated within national structures which are themselves supported by conventional nationalist and ethnicised political rhetoric. For Cocco, the chances of any 'public good' coming from a genuine engagement with questions about what a cosmopolitan heritage might mean for a cosmopolitan present seem minimal.
Hana Horakova picks up two discursive threads already touched upon: the relation between tourism and class and the fact that the geographical area discussed by the panel and this volume was (with the exception of Trieste and Palestine) not only in the 'East' but the socialist 'East'. What happens when socialist Central and Eastern Europe becomes part of the capitalist economies of a wider, including Western, Europe? For the two villages in what was formerly communist Czechoslovakia that Horakova describes, Lipno nad Vltavou and Starkov, what has happened is that they have become Dutch! Showing how the geographical location of the two villages effectively 'doomed' them as sites for agricultural or other industrial development, she explains that 'the only branch of industry that was taken into consideration was tourism'. In the case of the two villages the form of tourism that emerged was second home ownership. The owners of these are Dutch and, broadly speaking, they have made more or less gated communities in which Dutch language and social conventions operate to the more or less total exclusion of anything remotely local. The authorities of the two villages encourage this pattern. The mayor of Starkov, for example, said to Horakova 'I want the Dutch to be on the area of 13 hectares so that they do not bother the locals'. Occasionally, in the off- season, the locals of Starkov go up to the Dutch enclave for a beer but that seems the limit of association. In the case of Lipno the Dutch enclave has a 'buffer zone' called 'New Lipno' which is for Czech nouveau riche.
These tourist developments contrast radically with the tourism of the socialist period. Back then, Horakova tells us, tourism was anchored within ideas and policies designed to reward the working class. She concludes by observing that for the moment, at least, the social and economic consequences of second home ownership and the associated rise in the attractiveness of the villages as sites for the new Czech bourgeois are fine. But as these processes progress into the next generation of a local population witnessing simultaneous de-population (of local families priced out of the housing market) and re-population by second home owners she wonders whether the existing 'stony silence' of locals towards
the incomers might have 'nightmarish consequences'. Once again it is a picture that is not unfamiliar in the literature on tourism in other parts of the world including the geographical and economic peripheries Western Europe itself.
The four chapters considered so far are all, in one way or another, concerned with civil society (the Czech mayors, the scholars of the maritime heritage of the Adriatic, the small and medium sized private and public associations of Botiza, for example) and what is imagined and known about as 'cultural heritage'. Tom Selwyn's paper describes how both of these terms, civil society and cultural heritage, have been adopted by the European Commission's TEMPUS Programme in order (or so the story goes) to be put to use for the post-conflict economic and social development of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Palestine. Following a consideration of where these terms come from and how they may be used and/or misused, Selwyn describes the work of university students in the two countries who, in the course of two TEMPUS projects, produced dissertations which now stand as exemplars of how an enlightened tourism policy could make a contribution to (precisely) the kind of local and regional development envisioned by the arguably enlightened and scholarly initiators of the TEMPUS Programme. Selwyn concludes, however, by arguing that the processes of more or less unregulated capitalism in the Bosnian case and a mixture of unregulated capitalism and political occupation in the Palestinian case make it unlikely that any such beneficial outcome is to be expected in the near term.
We have identified a variety of themes to be heard and read in our collection of essays. One of the more insistent and overarching themes starts from a concern with the relation between tourism and identity (which can of course encompass cultural, economic, and political elements). Our papers demonstrate how different actors - tourists, local residents of tourist sites, marketing specialists and operators, government and civil society institutions - engage in their own and different ways with the issues raised by this relationship. Perhaps one of the more intriguing and contradictory images that our papers leave us with is that of the Western explorer/pilgrim (unquestionably a leading player in the post-mass tourism of the areas considered) treading his or her way into an 'East' of imagined utopian, maritime based, cosmopolitanism only to find that the service received is based upon structural and procedural models firmly rooted in Western capitalist and nationalist traditions.