Historicising hospitality and tourism consumption: exploring Orientalist expectations of the Middle East
Derek Bryce; Andrew C. MacLaren; Kevin D. O’Gorman*
Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, 199 Cathedral Street,Glasgow, Scotland
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(Received XXMonthYear; final version received XXMonthYear)
This article explores ‘Orientalist’ accounts of hospitality to identify historical antecedents for contemporary Western demand for hospitality and tourism products in the Middle East. Scenes of hospitality in the diaries of Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell are analysed in the context of the authors’ historically locatable, subject positions. The paper finds that Orientalist expectations of hospitality form an image that is both culturally self-serving and, to an extent, impenetrable by the actual experience of the traveller. The durability of this discourse may still inform Western impressions of the contemporary Middle East. The development of the Middle East as a centre for hospitality and tourism innovation is critical to the continued global success of this industry; thus, by understanding historical antecedents, contemporary operators can begin to conceive the rich complexity of consumer attitudes towards the region. This analysis offers both an exploration of the inscription of a longstanding discourse of ‘difference’ on contemporary consumer culture andpresents a context for future research into contemporary modes of hospitality and tourism demand and commercial response in the Middle East.
Keywords: Orientalism; hospitality; expectations;consumption; historicism
Introduction
Given its rich endowment in cultural and natural attractions, the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) attracts fewer international tourists than might be expected relative to competing destination regions(Henderson 2006). Yet destinations such as Egypt, Dubai, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Oman are attractinggrowing extra-regional tourist arrivals, although the effects of recent popular anti-authoritarian political uprisings may inhibit this growth in the short term. Dubai, of course, has constructed an international profile based on the provision of high quality, often spectacular, hospitality and tourism facilities and Emirates Airlines’ establishment of a global aviation hub at Dubai International Airport (Lohmann, Albers, Koch, & Pavlovich 2009; Mansfield & Winckler 2007). In 2007 the World Tourism Organisation reported an increase in tourist arrivals in the Middle East of 16.4% from the previous year, compared to 4.8% in both Europe and North America (UNWTO, 2008). The continued significance of those Western markets as principal zones of extra-regional demand for hospitality and tourism in the Middle East and North Africa may yet be acknowledged.
In order to contextualise twenty-firstcentury Western modes of hospitality and tourism demand and consumption in the Middle East (and for reasons we will elaborate upon, Turkey), we suggest the utility of adopting a historicist approach whereby the availability of a variety and combination of textually determined ‘Easts’ becomes a resource for contemporary consumer expectation and, potentially, commercial response. Bonsu (2009) calls for attentiveness to the historical contexts within which current discourses of consumption emerge by using the example of residual colonial imagery in contemporary advertising images of Africa. Here, it is argued, the tropes of supposed African savagery coupled with untutored benevolence that ‘justified’ colonial intervention are recycled as effective stimulants for consumption. Yet, these are disavowed and thereby dehistoricised as discursive remnants of colonialism. This invites consideration of modes of contemporary consumption involving the individual experience of historically informed tropes but decouples them from any cohesive narrative that has troubling associations with past injustice. Sardar (1998, 176) looks askance at suggestions that dissociation of detail from framework indicates a concomitant decoupling of Western consumer subject from complicit location in discourses of inequality. Rather, he sees a renewed imperialism in Western culture where final victory is vested in the ability of consumers to engage in a ‘new game of old images’ by mixing and matching detail in a kaleidoscope of dehistoricised images of various ‘others’. The archive of historical tropes that we will explore in relation to Western images of the Islamic East is considerably more nuanced than a simple imperial metropole/colony dyad and the implications for consumer expectation and commercial response are correspondingly complex. Therefore, framed within Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse, we offer indicative analyses of two prominent examples of mid-nineteenthand early twentiethcentury British travel writing in the Middle East by Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell. These serve to demonstrate, in the former, an existing awareness of longstanding Orientalist lore and, in the latter, the material consolidation of that discourse during the brief inter-war period of Anglo-French colonial rule in much of the formerly Ottoman Middle East. Framed within a wider discussion of the history of Western travel writing in the Islamic Orientwe hope to outline a set of Western ‘expectations’ of the Orient that, even within a contemporary commercial context like hospitality and tourism, are remarkably durable.
Certain clarifications and caveats related to spatial nomenclature are necessary. We use the terms ‘West’; ‘Europe’; ‘East’ and ‘Orient’ in full cognisance of their empirical inadequacy as signifiers of ‘imagined geographies’ (Said 1978) proceeding from Eurocentric cultural registers. Hence, ‘Near Orient’ or ‘Middle East’ implies a certain kind of European spatial attitude that places them in relation to the ‘Far East’ of China, Japan, etc. (see, for example, Bryce 2009; Delanty 1995). For instrumental reasons, we refer often to the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed much of the territory that constitutes the Middle East, where Burton and Bell’s travels took place, as well as North Africa and south-eastern Europe. (Hathaway 2008;Özbaran 2009).
Theoretical and contextual frames: Orientalist reception, expectation and Ottoman historical space
Jameson’s (1992) ‘totalisation’ approach seeks to identify the relationships between cultural products and the historical conditions in which they are embedded. Moreover, the notion that popular consumption is a vehicle for wider cultural expression is longstanding (e.g. Adorno 1991;Arnould & Thompson 2005; Featherstone 1987 Lash and Lury 2007). In the sphere of tourist motivation, for example, Shepherd (2003) notes that it is less productive to seek insights from consumers’ quest for authenticity versus commodified experience, as it is to attend to the historico-cultural contexts from which such a binary itself emerges.
Orientalismis “a fairly constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners dealing with the East’ (Said 1978, 201). The focus of Said’s (1978, 41) attention in Orientalism is the Islamic Middle East, with the authorstating that, for Westerners, ‘it was in the Near Orient, the lands of the Arab Near East, where Islam was supposed to define cultural and racial characteristics, that [the Orient was encountered] with the greatest intensity, familiarity and complexity’.Unlikethe deployment of more generallyapplicable postcolonial theory(e.g. Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994; Said 1993) emphasising the counter-discursive agency of the Orient in consumer culture (Cayla and Eckhardt 2008; Kuehn 2009; Jafari and Goulding 2008; Brace-Govan and de Burgh-Woodman 2008), we insist upon the specific utility of Said’sOrientalism for this study given its particular geographical, cultural and historical context.
Expectations solidified during the colonial period emerge from far older sets of images and discourses accumulated before ‘Eurocentric diffusionist geography polarised the world into an all-competent inside (Greater Europe) and empty outside (Others)’ (Majid 2000, 134; Chakrabarty 2000). The classical antecedents of Orientalism are perhaps less certain than Said suggests (Llewellyn-Jones andRobson 2009),yet aretraceable to the acute judgment of difference between the spheres of Medieval Latin Christendom and Islam, subsequent systematic academic approaches in the eighteenthcentury followed by the actual military-political encroachment from the early nineteenth(Said 1978, 73-76).It is useful to briefly survey that ‘pre-Orientalist’ archive since it provides the very basis upon which the diarists discussed below conceived of the region itself and the modalities of their access to it in both material and discursive terms.
During the Renaissance,“in a climate of commercial and political competitiveness, Europeans looked outwards for aesthetic confirmation of who they were – what defined them as ‘civilised’ – and met the steady returning gaze of the non-European”. (Jardine and Brotton 2000, 11). Western accounts acknowledged travel from a cultural and economic periphery into Mamluk and Ottoman polities in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean more advanced in these respects than their own, with excoriation of the East proceeding principally from awareness of religious difference (Wheatcroft 2004; Çirakman 2005).
Accounts in the 17th and 18th centuries were shaped by an Enlightenment discourse that valued empiricism and the rendering of complex phenomena into abstract typologiessuch as ‘Oriental despotism’ (Çirakman 2005; Grosrichard 1998). Maclean (2004, 134), for example, writes of the seventeenthcentury Englishman, Sir Henry Blount’s account, the ‘Voyage to the Levant’, as further “shifting understanding of the Ottoman Empire from a religious to an empirical frame of reference”. Western travellers in the Ottoman lands could not proceed with the armature of subjective and discursive assurance that Said identifies in later, 19th and twentiethcentury, visitors (Mather 2009). Yet, their persistence was driven by desire and their observations contributed to the set of images and expectations carried with such confidence by later travellers.
Not until Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and subsequent French, British and Italian occupation after World War I was the Ottoman-Islamic Orient to become a zone of focused European presence and political power, supplementing existing aesthetic desire(Jeffreys 2003; Lockman 2004). Drawing on Foucault (1981, 2002a) Said (1978, 14) observes that Orientalist discourse should be seen as a productive and not “unilaterally inhibiting force”. Western art, scholarship and imperial practiseconstituted a consolidated vision of how colonial subjectivities should be engaged with (Said 1993). This was the context within which the Orient became, “a favourite place for Europeans to travel in and write about” but which “always involves being a consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings.” (Said 1978, 157).
Renda (2005) notes that stabilised relations with the Ottomans required travel to collect useful information on the imperial court, administration and daily commercial life. Written and illustrated accounts of Western European diplomatic visits to the Ottoman Empire (e.g. de Busbeq 2001; Fischer 2009; Montagu 1994), as well as of ‘insiders’ at the court writing for a Western audience (Popescu-Judetz2007) from the 16th to 18th centuries stimulated not only production of histories of the Ottoman Empire (Parry 2003) but emerged in spheres of popular consumption ranging from ceramic production,movements in fashion and interior design and in the settings and staging of Baroque and Romantic opera (McKendrick 1960; Faroqhi and Neumann 2004; Wheatcroft 2004; Quataert 2005; Cardini 1999). This indicates an emerging sense that the Ottoman lands, and the Orient generally, were no longer threatening, but available as a source of images of fabulous wealth, luxury and sexual license (Kontje 2004, 61; Quataert 2005, 8-9).
By the nineteenth century, access to the Ottoman lands and the production of writing about it had moved into the discourse of Orientalism ‘proper’ identified by Said (1978) wherein access, both covert and ‘touristic’, by Western Europeans was motivated increasingly by the perception of the region’s status as Oriental and intellectually and aesthetically ‘other’ (Thompson: xi in Lane 2003; Pardoe 2010). By the 1870s, this expectation of the Ottoman-Islamic Orient was embedded to such an extent that its disruption by prosaic reality could elicit expressions of profound disappointment, such as that of the Italian writer, Edmomdode Amicis (2005). Where the aesthetic specifics of one Oriental location did not correspond with reality, artists and writers might on occasion fill in the gaps with imagined or transposed detail (Fahim 2001). These, in turn, were ameliorated by counter-discursive moves to apprehend the Orient in terms of sympathetic identification (Anderson 2004; Sharafudin 1994; Nash 2005; Jasanoff 2006).
Expanding sea and rail transport stimulated travel by painters anxious to capture original, authentic and sympathetic detail in their depictions in possible reaction to the more lurid fantasies of the East produced by their contemporaries (Thornton 1994; Peltre 2004). These paintings, at the height of their popularity, were exhibited publicly and distributed widely in albums and catalogues, constituting ‘heady discoveries of exoticism by Westerners (Thornton 1994, 5). Here, then, was a discursive context in which a seductive blend of empirical veracity and heightened exotic escapism emerged when the industrialisation of hospitality made access to the Orient increasingly viable.
A consequence of this normalisation of consumption was what Behdad (1994, 54), calls a sense of melancholic ‘belatedness’ in which the “search for a ‘counter-experience’ in the Other turns out to be a discovery of its loss”, foreshadowing the ‘loss of discovery’ Eldem(2007) identifies amongst current consumers of tourism in the region. Therefore, if longstanding images and tropes of the Orient are recycled and redeployed in new touristic contexts of promotion and consumption then perhaps the same can be said of the circuit of Western desire for, domestication and mastery of, regret at the loss of original discovery in and, finally, search for new forms of authentic escape to and in the perennially ‘re-imaginable’ Orient.
Costa (1998, 306) notes that in ‘paradisal-based tourism [escape to a tropical idyll] … a particular local identity is created and/or reinforced by tourist perceptions and expectations and by marketing practices’. Yet,whereas Costa’s work is situated within a tradition of taking up Said’s ideas as a general theoretical method for the analysis of the representational politics of ‘othering’ in a metropole/periphery dyad,we focus on the quite specific historico-geographical binary explored in Orientalism and its potential legacy in contemporary modes of hospitality and tourism consumption.
Hospitality and tourism consumption in the Islamic Orient – historical and theoretical contexts
Focusing on Egypt, Gregory (1999, 2001) invokes Said’s notion of the Orient as an imaginative geography; a theatrical space appended to Europe, to identify scripted performances of contemporary tourism within spaces of constructed visibility. He notes nostalgia for colonial modes of transport, such as the Nile cruise, which is catered for by tour operators offering products explicitly evoking that period for ‘Western’ visitors. Antecedents for contemporary tourism images are identified by Burns’ (2004) analysis of how idéesreçues from formal academic Orientalism emerged in the discourse of popular consumption in staged ethnographic images of Oriental types, including veiled women, in early twentieth century postcards. In a subsequent study, Al Mahadin and Burns (2007) highlight the durability, and we must presume utility, of Orientalism in the continued presence of veiled women in Western generated tourism imagery as signifiers of the East’s supposed perennial dialectic between exotic, mysterious allure and pre-modern backwardness. Echtner and Prasad (2003) argue that Western tour operators are commercially driven to proffer fantasies of the mystical and unchanging East, while Bryce (2007) explores the invocation of Orientalist tropes by the travel industry, placing tourists in the subject positions of eighteenthand nineteenthcentury Europeans in relation to Turkey and Egypt.
The phenomenon in modern tourism of ‘Western’ or ‘Orientalist’ forms of representation and consumption in Turkey and the Middle East are now of sufficient duration to allow thematic shifts to be identified historically. Nance (2007, 1072) notes that tourism services for Western visitors in the Ottoman Empire prior to the 1870s was largely provided by imperial subjects themselves who ‘develop[ed] sights and practices specific to their [tourists’] interests’. Western based tour operators such as Thomas Cook,therefore,entered an existing ‘industry’ but the recognisable brand name and European staff Cook provided made the company’s services preferable to many Western tourists.
Eldem (2007, 263) argues that, prior to the 1960s and 1970s, promotional materials ‘paid due respect for the expectations of oriental(ist) tropes (emphasis added)’ where natural signifiers such as desert and palm trees were usually associated with cultural markers such as ‘typical’ modes of architecture and dress. Eldem (ibid) goes on to suggest that ‘the arrival of mass tourism seems to have reduced the cultural content of this package, to the advantage of the basic ingredients of leisure and holiday: sun, sea and sand’. This has, in some destinations where ‘modernity’ and ‘westernisation’ (or at least, standardisation) is perhaps most apparent, such as Dubai and beach-resort areas of Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey,resulted in a sense amongst consumers that the ‘discovery’ of the ‘genuine’ Orient had been lost (ibid). Tourism providers, to compensate for this perceived ‘loss’, have recreated elements of Oriental exoticism in, for example, newly built ‘souks’ in cities such as Amman and Dubai to evoke the historic bazaars of Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus (Bryce, 2010).
Oman explicitly recognises its advantages in possessing abundant and original built heritage sites in comparison with neighbours such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai and has aligned this with its endowment of natural attractions to build an upscale tourism industry emphasising ‘authentic’ eco and cultural tourism experiences alongside a discreetly luxurious Arabian themed hospitality sector (Winckler 2007). Eldem (2007, 263), meanwhile, notes a further development in Turkish tourism promotionwhere a return to the dyad of Oriental nature-culture where ‘typically’ dressed exotic but distant inhabitants are replaced with smiling hosts, communing directly with potential consumers ‘in what seems to be a new form of exoticism, that of the traditional values of yore, lost to the modern world’. This, then, is not simply the representation of commodified culture but the physical recreation of it to facilitate expected modes of ‘orientalist’ consumption.Wherever one places real or potential tourists in terms of their desire to experience and consume ‘culture’ on what McKercher and du Cros (2002, 32) propose is a continuum from purposeful to incidental, deep to shallow, their expectations surely come from some accretionof images of and subjective responses to the destination. In the case of Western based promotion of the Middle East and Turkey, Bryce (2007) suggests, a familiar archive of Orientalist images are used by the commercial sector and readily received by consumers.
The influence of this discursive archive is increasingly recognised in recent developments both in Western markets for hospitality and tourism and ‘Oriental’ zones of supply. Orientalist genre painting of the nineteenth century, for example, has emerged from its unfashionable twentieth century position to act as a lens into historic and contemporary cultures of travel. While Germaner and İnankur (2002, 40) argue that, with the advent of photography and mass tourism, such art lost its significance for Western consumers.Eldem (2007) demonstrates how such images provided the inspiration for tourist brochures, comic art and advertisements for products ranging from soap to coffee to tobacco where a visual link with the Orient was intended to stimulate consumption. Recently, individuals and institutions in Turkey and the Middle East have become serious collectors of nineteenth century Orientalist painting with exhibitions exploring the cultures of travel depicted therein mounted in London, Istanbul, Lisbon and Doha. These explored links between historical and contemporary Western engagement with, and consumption of, the Islamic East. In the cases of Turkish and Qatari institutional collections, Orientalist art is valued as an important lens into the history and possible present inflection of Western attitudes towards the Islamic Near East (see, for example, YapıKredi 2007;FundaçãoCalousteGulbenkian 2007; Tate Britain 2008; Pera Museum 2008; Museum of Islamic Art Doha 2010). This awareness of the power of Orientalist imagery, and those of Ottoman luxury in particular, now find lavish commercial expression in hotel developments such as Dubai’s newJumeirahZabeelSaray, which, according to its owners, ‘will deliver unrivalled luxury with an imperial touch … to conjure up the magnificence of the Ottoman Empire’ (Jumeirah Group 2010). It is clear, therefore, that embedding modes of Western demand and consumption for hospitality and tourism in the Middle East in a wider historical frame is of contemporary significance and value and is perceived as such within the so-called Orient itself.