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- What is colonialism?
- Power dynamics
A foreword before reading
As you may have guessed from the title, this article will be focused on the C-word: colonialism.
It’s a controversial yet important topic to discuss to spread awareness about practices that are presently impacting tourism.
My intent with this article is not to shame (as I am far from a perfect traveler myself), but to spread awareness based on research and experience, so we can all become better at doing what we love.
What is colonialism?
Colonialism is defined as taking control of another territory, resources, and/or people by a foreign group.
Historically and traditionally, it refers to a nation taking political and economic control over another nation, without the subjugated nation’s desire to be controlled.
Colonialism in the historical sense is still happening today, in addition to modern-day colonialism (neocolonialism), in areas of society such as travel.
Modern-day colonialism is when a foreign entity (the colonizer) changes a local society (the colonized) without their consent, either intentionally or unintentionally, to benefit the foreign entity in a political, economic, and/or cultural sense.
Unlike historical/traditional colonialism, neocolonialism is not the actual occupation of a nation, but rather the nonconsensual influence over a nation by a foreign nation.
How does colonialism show up in travel?
Economic leakage
“Support local businesses” is probably something you’ve heard before, but why does it matter?
Tourism is often seen as a positive factor for a destination; many nations, in fact, significantly depend on tourism for their nation’s economy.
The benefits of tourism can include job opportunities, improvements in infrastructure, and cultural exchange.
But a destination can only reap these benefits if the money generated from tourism stays within the local economy. When it doesn’t, this is called leakage: when the money spent by tourists leaves the local economy, along with any potential benefits tourism offers.
According to the UN’s Ocean Atlas, of every “$100 spent by a tourist from a developed nation, only around $5 actually stays in the local economy of a developing country destination.”
This results in fewer job opportunities for locals, less revenue for community development, and less room for pre-existing cultures to flourish.
How can we ensure that we are positively contributing to our destination’s local economy when we travel?
There is no other way around it: we must actively seek and spend at locally owned and run businesses.
Not only is this more economically beneficial to the livelihoods of local people, but it’s often more culturally enriching to support places that have roots in the community you’re visiting.
It may take extra time and a bit of research to find local businesses rather than settling for the chain corporation that’s conveniently located in the city center — but if you’re privileged enough to travel, I can assure you that you are privileged with the time and resources to dig a little deeper.
How is this related to neocolonialism?
Going back to its definition, neocolonialism is when unequal power dynamics are used to uphold or bolster the imbalance, disempowering the less-privileged community to the advantage of the more-privileged community.
Economic leakage, then, is neocolonialism because the money is flowing to more powerful foreign businesses at the expense of less influential local businesses.
All-inclusive resorts and cruises are top examples.
Not only do resorts and cruises deprive the local economy, but they are also a highly sheltered form of tourism from the local people and culture, as resorts and cruises do not encourage engagement with the actual destination.
This is particularly problematic in lower-income countries where the tourist bubble of an all-inclusive resort or cruise creates physical separation between more wealthy, privileged people from less wealthy and less privileged people… talk about power imbalances.
Gentrification
On a similar note, foreigners can also financially impact a destination’s infrastructure through gentrification.
Gentrification is when the property prices in a destination increase due to the increased demand by more affluent individuals (in this case, tourists), often resulting in the displacement of current inhabitants.
Vacation rental company Airbnb is one of the major players in recent gentrification issues within tourism.
Airbnb initially began in 2007 as a way for local people to make additional income by renting out space in their homes for tourists.
In 2009, Airbnb expanded beyond rooms to offer whole apartments, homes, and vacation rentals.
Now, Airbnb is frequently used as a platform for professional listers, who may or may not be living in the area they’re selling in, to make a personal business, enlisting rentals for tourists.
These professional listers buy properties intended for short-term rental, which in turn makes them unavailable for people living in the area long term to rent or buy.
In high-demand cities, the increase in short-term rentals is one of the factors causing severe housing crises.
Suddenly, a destination becomes catered to tourists rather than the locals who have been living there for decades.
Because the long-term rental housing market dries up, prices go up, aka gentrification.
It’s basic supply and demand: a decrease in the supply of a good/service coupled with an increase or steady amount of demand for the good/service = an increase in the price of that good/service.
People living in the area are no longer able to find, let alone afford, to live in their own community, so they are forced to live elsewhere.
This is called displacement — local people are literally being forced out of their homes to accommodate tourists, which sounds a lot like colonialism to me.
The “bucket-list mentality”
Ah, the bucket list.
A lovely catalyst to carpe diem; a way to make the most of this one wild, precious life.
I’m a fan of a good bucket list; trust me, I have multiple.
But too often, the point of a bucket list is lost when we become so fixated on the accomplishment of a goal that we forget the importance of the journey it takes to get there.
I’m not trying to be all philosophical here (well, maybe a little), I’m trying to argue that an entire destination is too complex and diverse to be crossed off a list as a “been there, done that” kind of thing.
I call this the bucket-list mentality: when we treat places like goals to check-off a list, or as things to be “conquered”.
When we reduce destinations to their names in need of accomplishing, we are essentially saying that, because we visited once, there’s no need to go again, as we already know what it’s like and can tell others that we’ve been.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful thing to have a bucket list and want to go to x country, but let’s not treat it like it’s a sport where the person who’s traveled to the most amount of countries is the winner.
Countries, cultures, and places around the world are more than just their symbolic title. They are ever-changing and multifaceted — so let’s stop asking if someone has “done” x country.
We can apply the bucket list mentality to more than just country-counting.
It also manifests when people travel to a certain site just to extract digital content from it.
In other words, doing it for the ‘gram.
How often have you visited a particular attraction just to snap a photo of it, then leave?
Probably all of us.
Not only do we limit our real-life experiences to the aesthetics of a social media post, but we perpetuate overtourism when we visit places that are already frequently visited by other tourists.
Santorini’s iconic white-washed houses overlooking the Mediterranean Sea are one of the most popular travel shots online, inspiring millions of tourists annually to visit the Greek island for their own photos.
Overtourism to the island has created a host of problems, from gentrification to cultural loss.
Though Greece has about 227 inhabitable islands, most of the tourists’ attention is on Instagram-famous Santorini.
The problems of overtourism could be significantly reduced if tourism were spread out over the many islands of Greece, but because of the attention garnered from social media, tourists continue to travel to Santorini, trying to recreate a photo that’s already been posted before.
How to not treat destinations like the colonizers of the past?
Stop objectifying them for our own self-pleasure and treat them with the dignity they deserve.
Power dynamics
Let’s talk about unequal power dynamics.
An unequal power dynamic/relationship occurs when one individual/group has greater power to influence another, whether that is socially, politically, or financially.
In terms of travel, an unequal power dynamic can look like a tourist from a Global North country visiting a Global South country.
If you are a citizen from the Global North, you inherently have greater power because of privileges such as:
- Financial abundance (Global North countries generally have higher salaries and stronger currencies, allowing greater spending power than Global South countries)
- Passport strength (Global North passports are generally stronger than Global South passports because they allow visa-free access to more countries)
- Legal protection (Global North countries generally grant more legal rights to protect their citizens when abroad than Global South citizens, which often translates into the destination country where the tourist gets better treatment by legal enforcement officers than local people)
Why is your unequal power dynamic important?
Whether you are conscious of it or not, it directly impacts your travel experience.
By becoming aware of your privileges, you will hopefully increase your sensitivity to your impact on local communities and navigate interactions respectfully.
But what happens if tourists aren’t aware of the privileges afforded to them by unequal power dynamics?
Here are some examples of how unrealized power dynamics can manifest in harmful, neocolonialist ways:
Voluntourism
“The people who are most affected by decisions should be the ones making them.” – Mitchell Baker, Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation.
Voluntourism is when volunteers, typically from more affluent Western countries, go abroad to “volunteer” in less affluent countries.
This type of traveling can be problematic in several ways:
- Volunteers are often sent without proper training, and therefore don’t actually provide value to communities.
- Many voluntourism organizations offer programs from as little as 1–2 weeks, which is hardly enough time to make a lasting impact.
- The above is especially unhelpful, and at worst, harmful, if the projects involve children. Children need stability. If every couple of weeks, there’s a new English teacher in their school, how might that impact the children’s ability to learn and build stable, healthy relationships?
- The project you’re working on may be taking away jobs from local people.
- The money that voluntourism organizations receive may not be appropriately allocated to the target community.
- The target community is often not actively involved in the process, or even asking for foreign assistance in the first place.
All these points elucidate the glaring effects of the savior complex: when an individual/group feels the need to “save” or help another, without their request.
This is one of the best examples of neocolonialism — when an individual/group feels superior over another and imposes themselves onto another nonconsensually, disempowering the “helped.”
Is there a way to volunteer abroad and not contribute to neocolonialism?
Yes, it’s possible.
And the surest way to ethically do so is by ensuring that your volunteer work is actively sought by the community and allows their direct involvement.
Some questions to ask yourself before a volunteering experience abroad:
Ultimately, voluntourism is good-intentioned, but it is necessary to thoroughly investigate volunteering projects beforehand to ensure that your desire to help isn’t doing the opposite.
Objectification/exoticism of foreign cultures
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page,” Saint Augustine of Hippo once said.
Indeed, traveling allows you to see different ways of life in environments outside of your comfort zone.
But how much learning are we doing if we’re seeing through a skewed lens?
All humans have biases, or tendencies to view life through our own perspective.
Biases, from an evolutionary standpoint, are helpful because they allow us to make quick judgments in the absence of more information or not enough time to think more critically, which could potentially save our lives in threatening situations.
However, this also means we tend to view people and places in ways that diminish their complexities to conform to the narratives or biases we have about them.
When we fail to consider the totality of a person or place, we risk participating in these neocolonialist mindsets:
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is when an item or practice of significance from a historically oppressed culture is taken and used by a dominant culture without mutual agreement.
It’s a complex issue, and can range from obvious to very difficult to identify.
A common way cultural appropriation manifests is through fashion.
One example is Gucci’s 2018 Fall/Winter fashion show, when White models went down the runway wearing traditional turbans.
Turbans are religiously significant garments that can be worn by men or women who practice Sikhism, Islam, or Hinduism.
But rather than hire models of Color who actually wear these pieces for religious purposes, or acknowledge their religious significance and origins, Gucci took sole credit for the outfits.
Even if out of ignorance, using religious items outside of their religious context is cultural appropriation.
It’s problematic because it fails to recognize a culture’s role in preserving a cultural practice and strips the item away from its cultural identity and history — this leads to cultural erasure, which means the culture has less visibility and power, maintaining unequal power imbalances between dominant cultures and historically oppressed cultures.
How can we do our best to avoid cultural appropriation?
By practicing cultural appreciation. Unlike cultural appropriation, cultural appreciation acknowledges and gives credit to something’s historical and cultural significance before using it. This ensures that the item or practice is not detached from its origins and potentially erased from its original culture.
It is also important to ensure the original community is okay with outsiders utilizing it for themselves. Sometimes, in the case of religiously significant things, you probably should avoid them if you aren’t practicing that religion yourself to avoid diminishing their spiritual purpose.
If you think you might be culturally appropriating, ask yourself:
1. Do I understand the historical and cultural implications of this item/practice?
2. Is the original community of this item/practice okay with outsiders using it?
3. How can I honor and give credit to the original community while using it?
Cultural commodification
To avoid cultural appropriation, one can practice cultural appreciation by acknowledging and giving credit to something’s historical and cultural significance before using it, as well as ensuring the original community is okay with outsiders utilizing it for themselves.
To take cultural appropriation one step further, however, is called cultural commodification.
This is when a cultural practice or item is not only removed from its historical roots, but it is turned into a commodity for those outside of the culture.
The main focus is on the economic benefits of a culture, rather than the preservation and honoring of the culture itself.
Two examples of this are slum tourism and tribal tours.
Slum tourism, or poverty tourism, is when tourists participate in tours that visit “slums” or impoverished areas of a city.
Tribal tours are experiences where tourists visit indigenous communities.
Both examples are meant to dive deeper into the “culture” of a destination, but often the reality is the objectification of local people for the benefit of outside tour companies, not local communities.
Not to mention, a culture that has been commodified for tourist consumption is usually altered in some way to make the culture more approachable or accessible for tourists, and is consequently not an accurate representation of the culture.
One example is the Balinese Kecak dance, originating in Bali, Indonesia, which is a sacred dance typically used to communicate with Sang Hyang (the term used by many Balinese for the source of all existence).
Despite its deeply spiritual origins, the dance is now a popular tourist spectacle.
Not only has the dance been commodified, but modified to fit tourists’ desires — in the “Commodification of Culture in Bali in the Frame of Cultural Tourism,” researcher Agoes Tinus cites that “tourists do not like to see long performances,” or the “savage scenes” during the dances, so they are cut from the traditional dance.
Exploiting a certain group with less power (local communities that rely on tourism financially) by a group with more power (tourists with spending money) is colonialist in nature, with the latter group imposing their influence over the former group in a way that alters their previous way of being.
Exoticism
What underlies cultural appropriation and cultural commodification?
Enter exoticism: the tendency to view others from different cultures as “exotic” or very different.
In reality, it is a form of othering that emphasizes another’s differences while ignoring attributes of similarity.
When we only view others in terms of what makes them unique, special, or different from ourselves, we fail to account for their imperfections, complexities, and nuances.
At best, it’s putting a person or culture on a pedestal; at worst, it’s dehumanizing.
Let’s talk about photography.
We used to take photos to preserve memories.
Now, in the age of social media, many of us take photos to showcase online.
When we take our private moments public, we take responsibility for how we portray them.
When we take photos, we have the ability to humanize or dehumanize our subjects, and to reinforce or challenge stereotypes of a place.
Say a tourist who goes on a slum tour in Mumbai, India (where slum tours are popular) takes photos of what they see, then posts them on social media with limited contextual information.
What does this tell others about India?
What kind of emotions are evoked?
For those who have never visited India before (most of the global population), seeing photos of people living in impoverished conditions only bolsters the incorrect assumption that all people who live in India are poor, evoking sympathy for those living in the pictured conditions.
But this is not a fair representation, as India is far more than its most impoverished communities, just like any other country, including the United States.
Furthermore, is it correct to assume that the people living in economic disadvantage are unhappy (which is what these photos without context suggest)? And thus, sympathy is warranted?
Just because we perceive something a certain way based on our experiences, does not mean it is the accurate reality of those with different experiences.
It is a privilege to tell other people’s stories, as we have the power to shape their narratives — yet we fail to recognize this when we post a photo simply to get “likes.”
To avoid reducing people or places to mere posts on our feed that maintain them as “other” by accentuating how “different” they are in reference to what we’re familiar with, we should always take photos consensually.
How to take ethical photos when traveling:
- Before snapping a photo of a local person, ask them if that’s okay with them.
- Before mindlessly taking shots of a scene, consider your intent and if it’s appropriate to do so.
- And before you post about your travels, ask yourself if you are doing justice to the destination by portraying it as fully, respectfully, and honestly as you can.
One way to do this is by adding context to every photo in a caption, in which you can choose to write about:
- The story behind the photo (what was happening before, during, and/or after this moment?)
- The setting’s significance (why here? What’s around the area? Is there anything important to know about this destination?)
- How does this photo reflect or challenge parts of the culture of a destination?
- What can you share about the history of this culture that people should be aware of?
- Who is benefiting from this post? (If it’s you, that’s okay as long as you ensure it’s not at the expense of the place or its people.)
- What is your intention in posting this?
Now it’s time to bring in the question of authenticity.
Authenticity:
Every traveler wants to know: Is what I’m seeing and experiencing “authentic”?
This word, too often thrown around in tourism, is multi-layered and unhelpfully vague in its lack of an agreed-upon definition.
Everyone has a different perception of what is authentic, and that is the problem.
Who exactly has the authority to decide whether something is “authentic” or not?
Let’s go back to the Balinese Kecak dance that tourists pay to watch.
Tourists’ interest in seeing a performance stems from a desire to see an “authentic” part of traditional Balinese culture.
But as mentioned, this dance is often edited for tourist convenience, and is therefore not how the dance has been performed historically.
Yet if the tourist dance performance is held in the site of its creation and performed by the descendants of the people who created it, is it authentic?
Everyone may have a different answer: a traveler from the United States who knows little about Balinese culture may think it’s the most “authentic” cultural experience ever, while someone in the Balinese community may strongly disagree.
Now imagine if the American traveler writes an article all about her “authentic” cultural trip to Indonesia for her hundreds of readers.
The point is, we can’t trust the “authentic” label, as too often, “authenticity” judges have no real insight or experience of the culture they are evaluating.
But because these critics often come from a group of greater influence and power, their opinion (based on assumption) is valued more than that of a person from that culture.
If you feel tempted to use the word “authentic” in your description, consider what you mean by the word.
Do you mean non-touristy? Original? Organic? Like what you experienced in x country?
Try harder to be more specific — just don’t pretend to be an expert on a culture you’re not a part of, because that is thinking like a colonist, my friend.
Entitlement
Last but not least: the world is not your oyster.
Just because you have the legal and economic means to travel somewhere and do whatever you want, doesn’t mean you should.
We should all remember that traveling is a privilege that not everyone has for economic (monetary means) or political reasons (in terms of nationality/passport).
Let’s be as humble and grateful for this privilege as possible, and keep in mind that some destinations simply do not want you to be exercising your privilege at all (aka places with anti-tourist sentiments).
Just because you have greater power as a tourist than the local people, in some destinations (economically or politically), doesn’t excuse you from being respectful to the people and places you interact with.
Do’s and don’ts of being a responsible tourist:
DON’T:
- Act entitled just because you’re on vacation
- Ignore local customs or laws/rules
- Assume the locals know English
- Bargain to get the cheapest price possible, especially if there’s not a significant difference in your home currency
- Get upset if things aren’t how they are at home… you’re traveling abroad after all
DO:
- Educate yourself as much as you can on the place you’re visiting (local customs, traditions, history)
- Learn basic words in the local language and put effort into using them
- Dress appropriately in more conservative places, like sacred or religious sites
- Remain open-minded about the things you see or experience
- Act like you’re a guest in someone’s home… because you are
We can’t completely rid power imbalances present when we travel, but we can be more mindful of them so we can try to minimize the harmful impacts they can cause in the destinations we are so fortunate to visit.
Recommended resources for further reading:
- https://gotravelandtalk.com/blog/travel-through-neo-colonialism-lens
- https://www.easternstandardtimes.com/episode/when-you-travel-dont-be-a-colonizer
- https://linktr.ee/baniamor
- https://rootedstorytelling.com/rethinking-tourism/decolonizing-tourism-community-diversity-nature-culture/
I’d love to continue this discussion with you, drop your thoughts down below!
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