Why Tourism Can Be Problematic for Cross-Cultural Understanding (My Love/Hate Relationship with İstanbul)

So now we can start seeing the terrorists… I mean, the tourists.

-Our cab driver, upon arriving at a tourist attraction in Istanbul

For those of you who have no interest in hearing me prattle about "culture," "understanding," and other nonsense, here is a picture of İstanbul being beautiful

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting Istanbul for the better part of a week when my parents came to visit me in Turkey for Kurban Bayramı, the Muslim holiday that celebrates the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. During this week, we did most of the common things to do in Istanbul: we saw the Aya Sofya and the other great mosques in the city, such as the Blue Mosque and Suleymaniye Mosque, we took a cruise up the Bosphorus, and we toured Istiklal Street and its many bars, shops, and restaurants.

And it was an absolutely wonderful week. I’m glad I got to see many of the sights in Istanbul for a second time, as many of them, especially the view from the Bosphorus, the Aya Sofya, and the Suleymaniye Mosque, are absolutely amazing. In addition, it’s certainly true that, no matter how many times you’ve been to Istanbul, you’ll always keep finding amazing cafes, restaurants, and sights you never know existed before. İstanbul truly is one of the most amazing, vibrant, and historical cities in the world.

The caveat to that, of course, is that İstanbul is one of the most amazing, vibrant, and historical cities in the world. And with that comes baggage. More specifically, it brings baggage stored in large, bright, gaudy suitcases – perhaps with a cruise line or travel agency logo on it – carried by many, many tourists. We unwittingly visited Istanbul during the heart of cruise season, so every day, as we went out, we were surrounded by the countless droves of tourists who flock to the city this time of year.

As I write this, I recognize that I am myself a visitor to this country, and I also spend my weekends visiting other parts of the country and seeing their important cultural and/or geographic landmarks. So, you may think that my problem is simply one of hypocrisy, that I am just one tourist complaining about how everyone else is making the local attractions so crowded, without understanding the negative externality I exert on others.

It’s not that, however. I promise my issue represents something more than one donkey’s complaint that he is surrounded by a bunch of asses. It is instead something deeper, because when I talk about a “tourist,” I define the term incredibly narrowly. A tourist is not merely any person who travels for pleasure, but is specifically the type of person who seeks to maintain his or her way of life to the fullest extent possible while visiting another culture. In this way, I distinguish the tourist from what I call “the traveler” who strives to understand and take part in the local culture to the fullest extent possible while visiting another country.

These distinctions had been in circulating in my mind for quite some time, ever since my fellow English teaching colleague, Ebrahim, introduced them to me two years ago, during my first stay in Turkey. It was not until this past trip to Istanbul, however, that I finally understood, or was able to put into words, why I have a problem with tourists.

My problem is that, I believe that tourism—which I define as the economic systems and interactions that are created by the actions of tourists, again not travelers—is bad for cross-cultural understanding.

I understand that this is quite the contentious claim, especially since most scholars would argue that, overall, intercultural contact leads to increased inter-group understanding. However, if you travel to a different country but want to keep things around you as familiar and comfortable as possible, there are a number of companies that offer these services. You can choose a hotel or cruise ship where you’re afforded all the conveniences you’re used to, with people who are hired to wait on you and speak in your own language, or you can go on a guided tour where your guide will take care of almost everything for you, from food to transportation to deciding what is worth seeing in the first place. A tourist could spend an entire vacation relying on these types of services, thereby saving themselves the trouble of having to navigate these issues themselves. And many people do just that.

And none of this is wrong per se. I mean, if you have the means to afford these services, why not by yourself a little piece of mind while you’re traveling, right? So you can actually enjoy your vacation, right? My problem with these programs however, is that when you’re on these tours, or a cruise ship, the entire goal is to keep you from interacting with a local resident of the place you’re visiting. The ones you do interact with are paid employees at the hotel or with the tour company; they are given money to treat you subserviently, in a way. So, to put this in a different way, to engage in this kind of tourism usually means that you are unintentionally ignoring or delegitimizing the local culture or population. At its worst, tourism is about seeing “the sights,” usually historical buildings, and focusing solely on these sorts of attractions. If this is the aim of tourism, then it defines a country such as Turkey by what happened there hundreds or thousands of years ago, while ignoring, either willfully or unwittingly, the millions of people that call this country home and their culture.

This is a beautiful, awe-inspiring house of worship

To see an example of this, let’s visit the Blue Mosque, which was packed with visitors during my trip to Istanbul. Of course, my problem with it being crowded was partially hypocritical whining, the “why is it so crowded?” complaint. However, I think more of it came from the comportment of the visitors while they were in the mosque. Outside the structure, there were numerous signs asking guests to remain respectfully quiet. Once inside the mosque, I could see that these signs were to no avail. A noticeable din developed in the visitor’s side of the mosque as tour guides rattled off factoids to their followers, fathers pointed out parts of the mosque to their sons and daughters, and everybody snapped pictures.

And all the while I bit my tongue.

Because, while all of this was going on, people were praying at the front of the mosque. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to visit a mosque when it’s almost empty, then you’ll know that –like entering a church – one of the greatest aspects of the visit is the sense of reverence you feel as the walk in and the size, beauty, and silence of the space hit you at once. Upon walking in, you can understand its function and beauty as a house of worship and you can instantly appreciate that, allowing you to connect with the culture that built it, even if you don’t subscribe to the same faith. Needless to say, this atmosphere is largely undone when there is the constant buzz of a crowd milling through the back of the structure. While I was there, it no longer felt like a house of worship, but instead like a museum or any other tourist attraction.

And this is a tourist trap

I can’t imagine how I would have felt if I had gone there wanting to pray.

And that’s my point about tourism, summed up in this example. In my eyes, the crowd of tourists defines the Blue Mosque only as a beautiful structure, or a historic building. In doing so, it ignores the significance the building has for the residents of Istanbul. In fact, the actions of the tourists can actually undermine its value as a house of worship for the locals, in the way I just described. If I were a devout Muslim in Istanbul, I’d almost certainly find myself choosing to avoid the noisy crowd of non-believers at the Blue Mosque, despite its historical significance, and opt for a quieter place to pray instead.

In this way, from the side of the locals, tourism might be viewed as the newest wave of colonialism: with their money, they can change respected and revered cultural symbols into tourist traps surrounded by hotels and gift shops. Within the most touristy areas of the world’s most famous cities, I wouldn’t be surprised if the locals feel marginalized within their own milieu. To make matters worse, since tourists bring money, the businessmen/women in touristy areas will of course jack up their prices, further driving away the everyday inhabitants of these amazing areas. This process leads to the development of touristic ghettos, filled with pricey hotels and restaurants and located far from poorer neighborhoods in these cities. In some beach towns, the problem is even worse, as actual walls and fences are built keep unwanted intruders off the premises of pricey hotels. Beach resorts in Mexico represent an extreme example of this, as cartel violence in some areas leads to the complete walling-off and isolation of these resorts. These conditions lead to a stark separation between foreigners and locals. All too often, this line can fall squarely along economic divides.

So yes, if I was a local living in a popular tourist destination, I would probably feel resentful.

Of course, the problem isn’t all with the tourists. As I referenced before, due to the wealth disparity I just mentioned and perhaps a touch of resentment, some “entrepreneurs” see tourists as their golden ticket to a better life. With gouged prices or flat out scams, some business owners in these areas might try to siphon off as much tourist money as they can in a given season. It goes without saying that there are a significant number of friendly, good-hearted, respectable people in the tourism industry. However, the problem remains that economic pressures lead many local businessmen/women to become much more pushy, aggressive, or unscrupulous when it comes to making a sale, or the price at which the sale is made.

And unfortunately, these pushy, aggressive, or unscrupulous shop owners or tour guides are a noticeable proportion of the locals that tourists will actually meet, because most tourists don’t really interact with true locals all that often. Moreover, the everyday, decent people that live in these cities often have no reason to break through this aforementioned invisible divide and meet tourists. I would absolutely agree with the statement that intercultural contact, in general, breeds intercultural understanding, but I fear that tourism, as I define it, does not cause intercultural contact. Instead, it fosters contact only between the tourists and the people that seek to make money from them. Meanwhile, the true locals of a city never meet the tourists. They may only see them walking around, sporting clothes or comportment they see as “different,” without ever gaining the opportunity to understand it. Worse yet, they may only come into contact with the effects of tourism, the creation of the touristic ghettos I described above.

As such, this sort of interplay does not lead to understanding, I think. Instead, it merely leads to a simplification and stereotyping of different cultures. The locals come to see foreigners as camera-toting, helpless individuals who have little respect for the local culture, yet can get whatever they want thanks to the money they have. When it comes to the tourists, they may come to see the locals in two separate ways: either as the helpful, polite, and respectful people that work in the hotels and restaurants (these perceptions may unfortunately be clouded by the air of servitude, however) or the shifty, untrustworthy con artists looking to nickel and dime them out of every last dollar/pound/euro.

I worry that these perceptions tend to stick because the nature of tourism keeps the true members of the local society away from true members of the local society. Indeed, some tourists chasing “authentic culture” may instead find belly dancers in Turkey, or snake charmers in Morocco (neither of these things are originally from the country they were mentioned with). Tourists, I fear, are not given authenticity. Instead, they are offered a hyper-romanticized version of what the country used to be (or in some cases, what another country used to be. See: snake charmers in Morocco) and so they go back home detailing how amazing Turkey or whatever-country-they-visited was, when in fact they never actually experienced the true nature of the country, or its people, or its culture. Their visit lead to no understanding (well, maybe they had some good chats with tourists from other wealthy nations), instead it simply reinforced harmful stereotypes, both in their minds and in the minds of others.

This post is a plea to all my friends and family and others: everyone I know, as well as those I do not. When you visit another country next, please aim to make yourself a traveler, and not a tourist. Please step outside of your comfort zone and try to interact with the people and cultural symbols that are real and authentic. Try to leave the beaten path and connect with someone completely different from yourself. This post is not intended to be a damnation of certain people for the way they travel. There is no hard-and-fast line between the tourist and the traveler. Rather, it is a spectrum onto which we fall, based on the choices we make: pricey hotel or bed-and-breakfast, McDonald’s or authentic cuisine, hiring a tour guide or asking a random shop keeper for recommendations. I have done many touristy things in the past, and indeed, nobody has a perfect track record in terms of being the perfect cultural ambassador. Too often, our fear or discomfort holds us back from engaging in a truly new and different experience. But I beg you to make a conscious effort to make choices – small choices even – that affirm and support the lives and culture of the local people in the place you’re visiting, in lieu of spending your time in ritzy hotels, restaurants, and resorts that are clearly catering to your ilk.

As I said, I have gone the touristy route a number of time, more often than I’d like to admit, and sometimes the experiences have turned out fantastically. However, more often than not, I end up feeling cheated, like I paid too much for something that wasn’t as great as advertised and like I missed out on a real experience. The next time you travel, I encourage you to be wary of the prepackaged touristy experiences that attempt to tell you how to experience another country and what that country is. Instead, make your own itinerary and discover what life is like there for yourself. I assure you, you’ll end up enjoying it more if you take the time to truly discover and connect with this other culture and, more importantly, the world will be a better place because of it.