Abstract: Prior to the pandemic of 2020, global tourism accounted for over ten percent of global GDP, for a total of $9.6 trillion USD; one in every four jobs created that year, across the globe, was in the travel and tourism sector.2 And yet the figure of the international tourist is often regarded with an attitude ranging from bemusement to outright contempt so much so that a series of books exists to guide tourists on how to avoid looking or acting like tourists.3 Why, though, is the figure of the tourist -especially the international tourist- so disreputable? Given the sheer number of such tourists (over 1.4 billion, in 2018 alone) it seems odd to think that there is something shameful or problematic about tourism as a practice. What accounts for our seeming disdain for the tourist, even as so many of us engage in tourism ourselves? There are, of course, many obvious answers to this question. The tourist -especially the international tourist- is often a figure of some wealth and privilege; that tourist is likely to be clumsy, at best, in his or her navigating of a foreign society; and he or she is often likely to be less careful in her caretaking of the physical and social spaces into which she travels, given the fact that she is as it were on vacation.4 These facts may be enough to engender some antipathy towards the tourist especially one who, as Jarvis Cocker noted thirty years ago, regards the local inhabitants as somehow amusing.5 Tourists are likely to be -as the British aphorism had it about American GIs- oversexed, overpaid, and over here. In this paper, though, I want to suggest a slightly different story for our ethical disquiet with the figure of the tourist. I will argue that the practice of international tourism raises two distinct sorts of ethical worries -both of which reflect the fact that international tourism requires a local industry in which cultural difference is curated and made consumable by the foreign tourist-. This fact may lead to ethical disquiet, I argue, because it can represent a site at which there is a maldistribution of the benefits and burdens of intercultural conversation; the local who works in the tourism industry must become adept at performing his or her culture for the outsider, while that outsider gains the benefits of intercultural conversation without bearing a similar burden of epistemic labor.6 A second reason for concern, however, stems from the ways in which this demand for epistemic labor can end up deforming and destabilizing local forms of citizenship and political agency. Those who spend their days performing a debased and simplified version of their cultural identity for outsiders may be, I believe, marked by that effort and their own ability to engage in political conversations with fellow local members may be made more difficult as a result. International tourism, in short, may be a site from which both distributive and political injustices might emerge. These concerns, I should note, may exacerbate already objectionable relationships reflecting colonial legacies of oppression; but they may exist even in the absence of any history of colonialism. The mere fact of a market in the curated experience of cultural difference may be enough to raise these worries; and international tourism, I believe, often involves exactly this form of market.
Resumen: Antes de la pandemia de 2020 el turismo mundial representaba más del 10% del PIB mundial, por un total de 9.6 billones de dólares estadounidenses; uno de cada cuatro puestos de trabajo creados ese año, en todo el mundo, pertenecía al sector de los viajes y el turismo. Y sin embargo, la figura del turista internacional se contempla a menudo con una actitud que oscila entre la perplejidad y el desprecio absoluto, hasta el punto de que existe una serie de libros para orientar a los turistas sobre cómo evitar parecer o actuar como turistas. ¿Por qué, pues, la figura del turista -especialmente la del turista internacional- está tan desprestigiada? Dado el ingente número de estos turistas (más de 1,400 millones, sólo en 2018), parece extraño pensar que hay algo vergonzoso o problemático en el turismo como práctica. ¿A qué se debe nuestro aparente desdén por el turista, incluso cuando muchos de nosotros hacemos turismo? Más allá de las respuestas obvias a esta pregunta, en este artículo quiero sugerir una historia ligeramente diferente sobre nuestra inquietud ética por la figura del turista. Así, sostendré que la práctica del turismo internacional suscita dos tipos distintos de preocupaciones éticas -ambas reflejan el hecho de que el turismo internacional requiere una industria local en la que la diferencia cultural se preserve y se haga consumible por el turista extranjero-. Un hecho que puede generar preocupaciones éticas. En síntesis, el turismo internacional puede ser un lugar del que pueden surgir injusticias tanto distributivas como políticas. Estas preocupaciones pueden exacerbar relaciones ya objetables que reflejan legados coloniales de opresión, aunque pueden existir incluso en ausencia de cualquier historia de colonialismo. El mero hecho de que exista un mercado en la experiencia de las diferencias culturales puede ser suficiente para suscitar estas preocupaciones, y el turismo internacional, creo, a menudo implica, exactamente, esta forma de mercado
