Language and the imagined communities of tourism: A sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships

Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow

To appear (2010) in N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook

of Language and Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell.

In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid indentities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. (Hardt and Negro, 2000: xiii)

We start this chapter from the premise that sociolinguistics is on the move. This is partly in response to the reorderings of contemporary social life under global capitalism and partly in keeping with the reconceptualizing of key ideas in social theory – both of which are exemplified in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri quoted above. We are living and researching at a time when power is no longer so neatly centered or easily tracked (cf. also Deleuze and Guattari, 2000; Harvey, 2005) and when people’s lives and identities are no longer so neatly bounded or easily located (cf. also Sheller and Urry, 2006; Z. Bauman, 2000). As scholars of language-in-society, we are therefore necessarily obliged to review the bread-and-butter material of our work. Specifically, we are needing to rethink – and, in some cases, to ditch altogether – some of the central tropes of our field such as ‘community’, ‘authenticity’, ‘identity’ and, indeed, ‘language’ and ‘society’ themselves. In this regard, Jan Blommaert (2005) and Ben Rampton (2009), amongst others, have both written about the need for a sociolinguistics or discourse analysis that is better able to account for the hybrid, the translocal, the spectacular, the idiosyncratic, the creative, and the multimodal (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001, on this last point). Following the lead of Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (1990), both Blommaert and Rampton make a special point of promoting the importance nowadays of attending to processes of entextualization and recontentextualization, as well as to situated, local practices, and to the linguistic reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of language users.

Tourism, we think, offers itself as an ideal – and surprisingly overlooked – context for studying precisely the kinds of theoretical issues and social processes Blommaert, Rampton, Hardt and Negri and others address. In its pursuit and endless production of difference, tourism is a past master at recontextualization: lifting the everyday into the realm of the fantastical, transforming the banal into the exotic, and converting use-value into exchange-value. Tourism not only demands a rethink of certain sociolinguistic truisms, however; it also helps to moderate any tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not all of our old notions are defunct, just as contemporary life continues to be shaped by many of the disciplining, colonizing, determining habits of the past (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Deleuze and Guattari, 2000). We have shown this to be the case in our own work, for example, with regards the tenacious influence of nationality and national identity in tourism discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2004). In the current chapter, we want to explore this old–new tension a little further with particular reference to some of the ways we see language and other semiotic material commonly moved and exchanged in tourism. (It is by no means only the English language which is on the move under global capitalism but also a wide range of genres, discourses, styles, etc.) We start by reconsidering the general

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significance of tourism for sociolinguistics and then look at two fundamental principles shaping language in tourism: its commodification and its dislocation under global capitalism. We then turn to several examples of common language exchanges in tourism which we illustrate with data collected as part of our larger programme of work on language and tourism as a global cultural industry (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010; Jaworski, Thurlow and Ylänne, in prep). Together, we see these habituating, normative practices as instantiating an often playful performance of contact which, in turn, establishes a globalizing habitus or imagined community of practice for both tourists and their hosts. Tourism under/as global capitalism Whether it is people privileged enough to tour or people who are ‘toured’, there is noone whose life remains unaffected by tourism – the single largest international trade in the world and a hall mark of globalization (Appadurai, 1996; Bauman, 1998). Indeed, social theorists argue that tourism does not only reflect socioeconomic relations but is actually instrumental in organizing them (see Lash and Urry, 1994). Nor is tourism simply an economic activity. A large body of work in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies has produced detailed analyses of the social and cultural practices by which tourism is realized, demonstrating its role in establishing ideologies of difference and relations of inequality. This view is consistent with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) observation that in the world order organized by global capitalism, economic power and social power have come to increasingly coincide. While the modernist, Fordist phase of capitalism was linked to the rise, interests and imperialist expansion of the nation state, the postmodern, global capitalist order decentres and deterittorializes. This new capitalist order, which Hardt and Negri refer to as Empire, uses nation-states as instruments structuring and articulating new territories and populations seeking to dominate human nature and the entirety of social life subordinated to the process of monetary accumulation. Following Michel Foucault (1978, 1980), and in keeping with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2000), Hardt and Negri see this is as a shift from a society of disciplinarity (i.e. one based on the execution of obedience, the regulation of behaviour, the management of inclusion and exclusion through institutions such as the prison, asylum, the hospital and the school) to a society of control in which disciplinary power is intensified (note: not replaced) by being ‘democratized’ and legitimated through the internalization and acceptance of its mechanisms by its subjects. This is a mode of biopower (slightly reconceived from Foucault’s earlier notion) that regulates everyday social behaviour – consciousness, affect, needs and bodies – not just through the hegemony of traditional institutions but through flexible and fluctuating networks producing new subjectivities and social relations. ‘In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life’ (ibid.: 32). Central to the production of biopolitical order is language, communication and symbolic life, which articulate and organize global movements.

Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority. Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but moreover creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them. The communications industries integrate the imaginary and the symbolic within the biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service of power but actually integrating them into its very functioning. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 33)

As a once quintessentially modernist project of ‘organized’ or industrial capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1994), tourism continues unabated as a powerful agent of – and channel for – capital. In the age of ‘liquid modernity’ argues Zygmunt Bauman (in Franklin, 2003), tourism is both a vast movement of specific people (i.e. the tourists) and a metaphor for much of contemporary

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(Western) life: the ‘tourist syndrome’ which is characterized by temporariness, a looseness of attachment to places and people, and an endless ‘grazing’ (or consumption) of sensations and interactions. Although tourism is not something Hardt and Negri address, it is surely one of the ‘national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’(: xii) by which sovereignty and biopower are networked and sustained under global capitalism. In many respects it is the ideal industry for global capitalism because it is highly flexible, deeply semiotic and constantly reflexive (cf. Urry, 2002). Tourism exemplifies a semiotically embedded service because, like advertising and marketing, a key part of what is actually produced and consumed in tourism is the semiotic context of the service. Not only does tourism involve face-to-face (or more mediated) forms of visitor–host interaction, like in many other types of service encounters, but the ultimate goods purchased by tourists during their travels are images, lifestyles, memories and their narrative enactments. Material goods such as souvenirs, artefacts not unlike snippets of language formulae brought back from foreign trips are themselves packaged and promoted as useful props in the enactment of these performances, and they serve as an extension of the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002) slowly turning into a tourist haze as the narratives continue ‘back home’. It appears of paramount importance then for sociolinguistics and discourse analysts to engage with tourism, and mobility more broadly, as a key global communication/culture industry. It is here where the encounter between host and tourist (and between tourist and tourist) manifests itself as one of the sites articulating most acutely the ‘biopolitics’ of globalization with all its concomitant privileges and inequalities. If the functioning of Empire is dependent on the agentic subjectivities of its ‘citizens’, as Hardt and Negri propose, then tourists, with their desire to consume movement, places, bodies, images and information (cf. Urry, 2007) are the perfect exponents of, and agents for Empire to assert and reproduce itself. And it is in the singular interpersonal, intercultural exchanges between the touring and the toured that we find most forceful manifestations of the internalized, global order. This is where language and communication become both commodities and the vehicle for their exchange. It is also where the traditional places of language are dislocated. Language as commodity The incredible expansion of tourism as a dominant cultural industry is one of the major areas of economic activity under globalization which has highlighted the significance of language commodification in the study of shifting identities, interpersonal relations, and group structures. The political economy of language has long been recognized (Bourdieu 1991; Irvine, 1989; Friedrich, 1989; Tan and Rubdy, 2008), and so have the general processes of commodification and appropriation of language in the new economic order of flexible accumulation and of time–space compression (Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1994; Cameron, 2000). For example, in her work on bilingual areas of francophone Canada, Heller (2003, this volume; Budach, Roy and Heller 2003) demonstrates how the collapse of traditional industries (cod-fishing, mining, logging, etc.) in the second half of the twentieth century, and their substitution with new information and service-based industries (most notably, call centres and tourism) have led to the commodification of language (understood as a measurable skill) and identity (especially in relation to other forms of cultural practice such as dance and music in tourism). In these domains of economic practice based on contact between different linguistic markets through advances in communication technology (call centres) or travel (tourism), linguistic and other symbolic resources become highly marketable commodities. At the time of the decreasing role of the State in regulating local economies and welfare provision (a process arguably being halted or even reversed in the global economic ‘downturn’ begun in 2008) and the shifting space of national points of reference, ethnolinguistic minorities around the world, however disenfranchised and marginalized they

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might have been in the homogenizing process of ‘nation building’, are free to engender a new sense of authenticity and community, to invoke new place-identities predicated on the (re)invention of tradition, heritage, and heavy policing of language boundaries (Pujolar and Heller, in press). However, due to the new conditions for its commodification, language, together with other forms of cultural practice, can now be more easily detached from ‘identity’ and used as a strategic styling resource (Bell 1999; Cameron 2000; N. Coupland 2007; Thurlow & Jaworski, 2006) and marketed and traded as metonymic of places to be consumed by tourists (Urry, 2007).

Of course, in terms of Bourdieu (1991), all linguistic exchanges are also economic exchanges; however, under the new economic conditions of globalization, existing language forms and configurations (e.g. bilingualism) are put to new uses, gain new value, and become objects of intense scrutiny, as well as vehicles and sites of ideological struggle, contestation, legitimation and authentication of ethnic, national and other subject positions. In the context of tourism, this is especially clear in the proliferation of theme parks, open-air museums, festivals and spectacles laying out displays of ethnicity, nationality, culture, urban or industrial heritage through the (re-)invented narratives of group origins, history, and present-day lives (e.g. Kirshenbatt-Gimblett, 1998; Bruner, 2005; Heller 2009). These are also the most obvious areas of tourism-driven activity, where language (and other semiotic codes) become vehicles of explicit staging (Edensor, 2001) or ‘high performance’ (N. Coupland, 2007) in which gathered (rather than simply co-present) participants overtly orient to the formal properties of code through metapragmatic commentary and the evaluation, translation and labelling of linguistic items. Such performances are heavily marked by claims to ownership, belonging and authenticity, or, conversely, by pragmatic instrumentalism, playfulness and appropriation, and not infrequently, by a mixture of all these positions dynamically and dialectically negotiated in the process of staged, ritualized enactments and interactions. As observed by David Block (2008: 201) in the context of the discourses surrounding language shift, ‘what ultimately galvanizes people around a language is probably not a question of either/or: either the more emotive cultural/national identification with the language or the more practical instrumental uses of language’. And, in the context of tourism, we see language frequently shifting between use-value and exchange-value. The places of language Building on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1983, 2000, 2001) on World System Analysis Jan Blommaert (2003, 2005, 2009) has proposed a sociolinguistic theory of globalization based on the idea of language flows across three broad areas identified in Wallernstein’s system as ‘core’, ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’. This division is based on the nations’/regions’ political and economic organization, their relative position in the economic hierarchy of the world, and the asymmetrical relations of the division of labour across the spectrum. Due to the exploitative relation between the core and peripheral regions, with the former maximizing their profits at the expense of the latter, the system is founded on neocolonial forms of discrimination and control. As Blommaert argues, the differential wealth and status between these strata is responsible for the fact that ‘[i]nequality, not uniformity, organizes the flows and the particular nature of such flows across the “globe”. Consequently, whenever sociolinguistic items travel across the globe, they travel across structurally different spaces, and will consequently be picked up differently in different places’ (Blommaert, 2003: 612; original emphasis). One of the consequences of the movement of discourses through the geographical ‘spaces of unequal development’ (Harvey, 2006) is that while their form is preserved, their value, meaning or function are significantly altered: ‘Value, meaning, and function are a matter of uptake, they have to be granted by others on the basis of the

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prevailing orders of indexicality, and increasingly also on the basis of their real or potential “market value” as a cultural commodity’ (Blommaert 2005: 72).

Other forms of global linguistic flows follow different fortunes and trajectories. Global media, for example, have been enormously successful in homogenizing formats, templates and genres (cf. Cosmopolitan, Big Brother, video games, etc.) while allowing their content to be diverse and localized. One particular linguistic and cultural practice that has caught the imagination of many a sociolinguist writing about globalization is rap/hip-hop (e.g. Pennycook 2003, 2007; Cutler 1999; Alim 2006). The significance of this work, not unlike that cited above in relation to Heller’s and Blommaert’s research, is that it demonstrates how rap/hip-hop has become a global identity resource particularly in the context of youth cultures. However, as Pennycook (2003, 2007) demonstrates, the content, code choice and style of hip-hop lyrics in its many ‘regionalised’ varieties may be inflected in any number of local ways. This complex linguistic playing with codes allows performers to locate themselves in different spaces of local and translocal identities, which, according to Pennycook, is not in fact located in the code itself, but in the act of performance (in the sense of Judith Butler’s 1990, 1993 performativity) of the semiotically reconstructed and reconstituted English forms (Kandiah 1998). Thus, we can see the appropriation of a new music genre as a celebratory, yet wholly creative and original process straddling dialectically local and global, national and transnational spaces, but never falling short of invoking new, refashioned subject positions.

All of these linguistic processes have a profound effect on the reordering of space, creating new sense of place-ness while new linguistic styles and genres come to be enacted and consumed in private, public, commercial and media contexts. Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck (2005) develop the idea of space as organized along different hierarchically ordered scales of social structures (e.g. local, national, transnational, global, ethnic, political, and so on). These spaces are filled with various sorts of material and symbolic attributes and constitute an active, contextualizing (Gumperz, 1982; Goodwin and Duranti, 1992) semiotic source of indexical meaning; while people move between differently ordered spaces, they effect different indexical values providing meaning to individual, situated acts of linguistic behaviour. Movement through space of linguistic and communicative resources and skills affects the value of the linguistic skills and repertoires of speakers such that, for example, a bilingual migrant from Eastern to Western Europe (i.e. from the periphery to one of the centres of the continent) who cannot communicate in one of the ‘host’ languages may be described as having ‘no language’. In consequence, Blommaert et al. (2005: 203) argue that:

[e]ntering such spaces involves the imposition of the sets of norms and rules as well as the invoking of potentially meaningful relations between one scale and another (e.g., the local versus the national or the global). This has effect on (a) what people can or cannot do (it legitimizes some forms of behavior while

disqualifying or constraining other forms); (b) the value and function of their sociolinguistic repertoires; (c) their identities, both self-constructed (inhabited) and ascribed by others.

Certainly, space is also modified by people’s semiotic behaviour (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2009) and linguistic signs will also bear indexical values involving scalar relations (Blommaert et al. link these ideas with Goffman’s frame analysis). For example, shifts in accent, topic, or communicative event may invoke (index) different scales: local, national, private, public, and so on. In sum,

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people have varying language abilities – repertoires and skills with languages – but […] the function and value of those repertoires and skills can change as the space of language contact changes. (Blommaert et al., 2005: 211, original emphasis)

It is with these general remarks in mind that we turn to present some of our data from the domain of tourism, in which borrowing, appropriation, and re-valuing of language are part and parcel of face-to-face interactions. In doing so, we want to tease out some of the key sociolinguistic processes typical of the fleeting relationships that characterize the language exchanges of those people privileged enough to crisscross the planet by choice – those who ordinarily get to come home at the end of their travels. Language on the move One of the inevitable consequences of tourism is that language in the shape of codes, discourses, styles, genres, voices, or repertoires participates in the global flows of tourists and their hosts (the flowees), those people who are the recipients and/or targets of the stream of tourists. The language that accompanies, facilitates, or results in these flows is also ‘on the move’ as people bring into new spaces their codes, styles, genres, and so on, which are unavoidably recontextualized and often resemioticized in the process (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010). However, rather than thinking of globalization generally and tourism in particular as introducing markedly or necessarily new ways of speaking and writing into peoples’ repertoires, it makes more sense to focus our attention on how the ‘meaning’ or symbolic and economic value of what is said or written changes (or not) when migrants, business people or tourists move around the globe (cf. Blommaert, cited above), or when space is re-scaled and re-imagined, say, from ‘national’ to ‘local’/‘regional’ (as has been the case in parts of francophone Ontario; cf. Heller, cited above).

As we suggested above, tourist–host interactions and identities embody the very essence of core globalizing processes. It is in communication with each other, in every instant of contact that hosts and tourists negotiate the nature of their experience, the meanings of culture and place, as well as their own relationships and identities. It is here also that many of the meanings of globalization are realized. Shaped by a mythology of contact (the encounter with exotic Other) and an ideology of leisure, pleasure and entertainment, the kind of linguistic exchanges that take between tourists and hosts are also often very playful. And, to be sure, the fun usually starts at home as tourists are first schooled (or disciplined) into an imagined community of practice, learning the dispositions and ways of touring (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010). In the extracts which follow, however, we focus on the actual moment of contact and on some of the exchanges of linguistic material which performatively establish the host–tourist encounter and, in large part, the very raison d’être of tourism. Language as linguascape Like any other landscape, the tourist landscape is a way of seeing (Cosgrove, 1984; Favero, 2007). Expressed through the powerful metaphor of the tourist gaze, tourist consumption is organized around the recognition and interpretation of various signs – symbols, icons and metonyms of place – emplaced and displayed for tourists, noticed, objectified, appropriated and discarded by them (cf. Culler, 1981; Urry 2002). These signs are frequently linguistic. In search of picture postcard views, breathtaking landscapes and cityscapes, exotic peoples and artefacts, the tourist also consumes histories, mythologies, facts and information. Embedded in tour guides’ narratives of place, for example, are jokes, personal anecdotes, and trivia of all sorts. While wandering round foreign cities, tourists gaze with more or less understanding at linguistic inscriptions. At times, the linguistic inscription itself becomes the object of tourist gaze and consumption.

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In our first example from a guided tour in the Maori village of Whakarewarewa, Rotorua, New Zealand, the guide stops with a group of tourists in front of a sign explaining the name of the village. This is one of many such stops which include accounts of local customs, traditions, way of life, and nature. The guide stands next to the sign facing a small group of tourists (Figure 1), occasionally orienting to the sign and pointing to various parts of the name of the village as he speaks (Figure 2). Extract 1: Whakarewarewa G = Guide A = Audience, a small group of tourists 1 G: but firstly folk can you all say Whaka? 2 A: (different voices) Whaka 3 G: Whaka yeah that is the name of this valley (.) and the 4 village (.) and that’s been the name for a long long 5 time the common name [drop out] true name folks (.) 6 is a lot longer (1.5) (guide points to name on the sign 7 with tip of his umbrella) Te Whakarewarewa-tanga-o- 8 te-ope-taua-a-Wahiao 9 A: (laughter) 10 G: very very long name, isn’t it folks? (.) Whaka W-H-A-11 K-A (.) (uses hands to frame the first five letters) is the 12 shortened version (.) but folks the long version (.) Te 13 Whakarewarewa-tanga-o-te-ope-taua-a-Wahiao (.) 14 Wahiao the great chief (.) Ope-taua war party (.) 15 Te Whakarewarewa-tanga the uprising of the war 16 party of Wahiao (.) and uh folks (.) how you get that 17 name actually comes about by the actions of a haka and 18 the surrounding activities so you saw the haka on 19 stage? 20 A: yes= 21 G: =three or four men on there just imagine three or 22 four hundred? doing a haka folks (.) when kicking their 23 feet up and making all the dust rise around the place (.) 24 an:d the dust rising was likened to the steam all over the 25 valley (.) now out of the dust rising the men would leap 26 as high as they could (.) and the men leaping all over 27 the place folks was likened (.) to the steam (.) oh sorry 28 to the geysers shooting out of the ground (.) up to 29 two hundred years ago thirty-six geysers in this valley 30 so that would’ve been [drop out] so folks by the 31 action of that haka (.) the rising dust (.) jumping men 32 (.) likened to the rising steam (.) geysers shooting out 33 (.) and all the action over the valley that is how you get 34 the name the uprising war party of Wahiao (.) 35 shortened to Te Whakarewarewa (.) shortened even 36 more folks to W-H-A-K-A (.) when we shorten it to this 37 version we try not to pronounce the W-H as F (2.0) 38 (smiles and looks across the crowd) for obvious reasons

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[ 39 A: (laughter) 40 G: we don’t want anyone getting the wrong ideas (.) 41 especially (unclear) so um that’s why we just say 42 (unclear) anyway let’s go and have a look at these 43 geysers folks What is offered for tourist consumption here is the place name of the destination itself. This act of consumption is couched in terms of a multimodal and interactive performance. The place name is displayed and described on a written sign, it is repeatedly produced by the guide (lines 7–8, 12–13, 15, 35), and the tourists are invited to say it as well (lines 1–2), albeit in a shortened version. The significance of the name lies partly in its length. The tourists respond to the guide’s fast rendition of the name in lines 7–8 with laughter. No doubt, the source of humour lies in the unimaginable complexity of the name, which the guide confirms with his rhetorical question ‘very, very long name, isn’t it folks’ in line 10.

Long place names are not infrequently turned into tourist attractions in other parts of the world, especially if they happen to belong to lesser spoken languages helping to ‘exoticize’ the destination. Figure 3 reproduces a postcard with a photograph of ‘The railway station with the longest name in Great Britain’ in North Wales: ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch’. (This name was apparently fabricated in the nineteenth century precisely to draw attention to the village – an act of pure ‘tourism reflexivity’ in itself – Urry, 2002). The Welsh place name on the station’s sign is clearly framed as a tourist attraction by appearing in white block letters on the red background (rather unusual for other railway signs in Britain). A guide to the name’s ‘pronunciation’ appears underneath, and a separate sign on the left provides the ‘translation’ of its constituent parts. The iconizing of the place name is complete by the act of recontextualizing it on the postcard, which is one of many that can be bought in the area. Returning to Extract 1, the guide explains the meaning of the name of the village weaving into it the military past of Maori people, the actions of the ritualistic dance of Maori men (the haka), and evocative scenery – the rising steam of the geysers (lines 12–36). This long section which introduces profound imagery based on Maori heroic history, old heritage and unique landscape is delivered in a rather solemn, even poetic tone. The text in lines 31–33 is particularly marked by slower tempo, level intonation throughout and pauses reminiscent of poetry recitation. There is also frequent lexical and phonological repetition introducing internal rhyme and creating coherence, for example, ‘dust rise’ (l. 23), ‘dust rising’ (l. 24, 25), ‘the rising dust’ (l. 31), ‘rising steam’ (l. 32), ‘uprising’ (l. 15, 34); ‘men would leap’ (l. 25), ‘men leaping’ (l. 26), ‘jumping men’ (l. 31); and repetition of ‘likened’ (l. 24, 27, 32). All of these formal features of the guide’s address are subsumed by Tannen (1989) under the rubric of oratory, or ‘public oral poetry’ (: 82), and used in conversational discourse to communicate ideas in a vivid and moving manner. Clearly, the guide engages here in more than a bit of metalinguistic translation and explanation; he puts on a poetic performance of place to create involvement with his audience.

The use of visual repetition to create a verse-like effect can also be found in our postcard example (Figure 3). The four key linguistic elements seen on the postcard: the place name, its ‘pronunciation’, the ‘translation’, and the English gloss at the bottom of the card, are roughly equal in length and can be seen as four verses in a stanza. The composition of the postcard with some visual, phonological and semantic repetition aspires then to the status of a poetic text rather than simply an image of a sign emplaced at a railway station. Considering Extract 1 again, in line 36, the tenor of the guide’s speech changes. After a short pause, the guide says in fast tempo ‘when we shorten it to this version we try not to

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pronounce the W-H as F’ and then pauses for about two seconds looking at the tourists with a broad smile. However, it seems to take a while for the tourists to realize that the guide has now shifted to a playful key, jokingly suggesting a possible obscene version of the name ‘Whaka’. He even finds himself in need of filling up the ensuing pause with a comment ‘for obvious reasons’ (l. 38), by which time the tourists finally ‘get the joke’, and respond with some laughter.

The funniness of the joke is not a key issue for us. What we find more interesting is that the guide shifts so freely and rapidly from the lofty and poetic key to a ribald, playful one. Although they seemingly occupy the opposite sides of the rhetorical spectrum, they are both unmistakably deliberate, scripted performances aimed at creating a degree of spectacle, drama, and audience participation. And in both examples referred to in this section, the source and object of the tourist gaze is the place name of the tourist destination used not as an index of place but as part of the place’s linguascape. As we see in the next extract, this commodification and strategic-playful deployment of language is prevalent in a number of other types of exchange. Small talk For all its mythologies and ideologies, visiting a tourist destination is at core a business transaction, or a series of transactions, in which tourists consume (or graze on – cf Zygmunt Bauman above) performances of local scenery, heritage, customs, stories, and so on, alongside the purchases of even more tangible goods and services, such as meals, souvenirs, and postcards. Not unlike in other types of service encounters, business transactions in tourism are replete with instances of small talk, or relationally-oriented acts of verbal sociability (cf. J. Coupland, 2000). We explore some relational aspects of specifically ‘selling and buying’ discourse elsewhere (see Jaworski et al. in prep.). Here, we focus on just one instance of phatic talk (Malinowski, 1923) taking place between a tour guide and tourists visiting the PheZulu ‘cultural village’ in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In Extract 3, a group of tourists gather at a ‘cooking hut’, where a demonstration of traditional Zulu food preparation is about to take place. The tourists and the Guide (Patrick) are sitting in a circle and, while waiting for the demonstration to start, Patrick feels compelled to fill the time by initiating a phatic sequence with the tourists. This is a typical example of a group of relative strangers gathered in close proximity in a small, confined space (a temporary ‘with’ in Goffman’s 1971 terms) where substantial stretches of time are filled with talk aimed at avoiding silence (McCarthy, 2000 refers to such participants as ‘each others’ captive audience’). Relying on the repertoire of stock formulaic phrases typically used in small talk sequences, the guide settles on the question ‘Where are you from?’, found in a wide range of similar contexts in our data, as well as many other conversational encounters (cf. Myers, 2006). Extract 2: The cooking hut – ‘Where are you from?’ (The personnel listed below is common to Extracts 2, 4 and 5 coming from the same episode in the cooking hut.) Patrick = guide TZW = ‘Traditional Zulu Woman’ PT1 = tourist from Poland (mother) PT2 = tourist from Poland (son) PT3 = tourist from Poland (father) ET1 = tourist from England (father, husband) ET2 = tourist from England (son) ET3 = tourist from England (son)

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ET4 = tourist from England (wife, mother) HT = tourist from Hilcrest (grandmother of ET5) ET5 = tourist from England (grandson of HT) ZT1 = tourist from KwaZulu (1, female) ZT2 = tourist from KwaZulu (2, female) ZT3 = tourist from KwaZulu (3, female) CT = tourist from Cape Town (female) RT = researcher/tourist (male)

Patrick is sitting at the entrance to the hut while the tourists enter and settle down. As the cooking demonstration is getting delayed due to one of the performers’ absence, he has just initiated a series of getting-to-know-you questions amidst general laughter. TZW, visibly disinterested in what’s going on around her sits among the tourists waiting for her colleague to come in and start the show. 1 PATRICK: (to PT1 and PT2) niphumaphi? phuma kuyiphi icountry? where are you from? from which country? 2 PT1: (2) (looks quizzically) 3 ZT1: (translating) where have you come from? 4 PT1: ah Poland 5 PATRICK: ah: now (points at ET1) wena? and you? 6 ET1: UK England 7 PATRICK: OK (points at ET1’s sons) nina bafana? what about you boys? 8 ET1: all of us 9 PATRICK: UK (.) nalomfazi? UK?

and this woman? [is she from the UK?] 10 ET4: England as well 11 PATRICK: OK umfazi wkhe this is his woman 12 ET1: we are all together 13 PATRICK: wena ma? (.) niqhamukapi? and you, mother? where do you come from? 14 HT: er Hilcrest (=a town nearby) 15 PATRICK: ah (.) just around the corner 16 HT: ja (general laughter) yena (indicating her grandson) 17 yena England (1)

yes he comes he comes from [England] 18 PATRICK: five minutes from here driving (general laughter) 19 HT: (laughing) you see you lucky 20 PATRICK: (looking at PT4) wena ughamukaphi mfowethu? where do you come from brother? 21 PT4: from Poland 22 PATRICK: ah: OK wena? and you? 23 ZT1: KwaZulu (laughs loudly and with others laughing too) 24 PATRICK: ah khona la (turning to ZT2) nawe futhi? just here and you too? 25 ZT2: ja Maritzburg yes Maritzburg [‘Pietermaritzburg’]

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26 PATRICK: OK eMugungundlovu? (Zulu name for Pietermaritzburg) 27 ZT2: eMugungundlovu ja 28 PATRICK: wean? (.) nawe futhi eMugungundlovu? 29 and you? are you also from eMugungundlovu? 30 ZT3: ja 31 PATRICK: u: gogo ke yena a:nd the granny here? 32 CT: from Cape Town 33 PATRICK: ah so uyapraata Afrikaans (‘praat’=Afrikaans for ‘speak’) you speak Afrikaans?

Although the working language of the tour guide is English, he unexpectedly starts Extract 2 by asking two of the Polish tourists the ‘Where are you from?’ question in Zulu. This clearly baffles PT1 (PT2 looks rather worried throughout the entire episode, see Extract 4, below), and her quizzical facial expression and a two-second silence in response to Patrick’s question elicit a translation from ZT1 (‘where have you come from?’, l. 3). Visibly relieved, PT1 responds ‘Poland’ (l. 4), preceded by the discourse marker ‘ah’, indicating recognition of information (akin to Schiffrin’s 1987 analysis of the discourse marker oh). Setting the tone for tourists’ self-identification due to their country of origin, Patrick moves on to the next person (ET1) who infers (correctly) that Patrick’s turn in line 5 is a request for the same information from him. This pattern of Patrick’s code-switched interrogation of the tourists continues throughout, until he addresses tourists from South Africa, who are partial (HT) or first language Zulu speakers (ZT1, ZT2, ZT3). The self-identification of these tourists as ‘locals’ creates much laughter and further banter, which partly suggests the non-normativity of local residents visiting tourist attractions in ‘their’ area. Interestingly, Patrick ignores RT (Crispin), whom he had talked to before entering the cooking hut, and he already knows that Crispin is British but had lived in South Africa for twelve years before returning to the UK. What is interesting for us here, however, is not the nature of the ostensibly sociable talk initiated by Patrick to kill the time. As we said earlier, small talk generally, and ‘Where are you from questions?’ specifically, are unremarkable in the context of tourist–host encounters – albeit often organized around a common repertoire of topics (e.g. ‘is this your first time here?’, ‘how are you liking it here?’, ‘where else have you been?’). What is remarkable and noteworthy is Patrick’s use of Zulu with the tourists that he knew (or should expect) would not to be able to understand him. We suggest that as a sequence outside of the transactional part of Patrick’s performance in the cooking hut (explanation of the meal preparation), he code-switches to Zulu as a playful, if somewhat teasing act of language (dis)play. Because of its relational rather than instrumental focus, the ‘Where are you from?’ question in Zulu does not carry much propositional weight. However, it visibly unsettles PT1, who may have felt marginalized by Patrick’s use of Zulu, having her entire linguistic repertoire obliterated (cf. Blommaert et al, 2005, quoted above). She is then ‘rescued’ from sociolinguistic oblivion by ZT1, and responds in English – the lingua franca of international guides and tourists in many destinations, redefining the cooking hut as a place of safe and legitimate participation. The fact that Patrick may expect some of the tourists not to understand the propositional contents and pragmatic force of his questioning in Zulu is compounded by his apparently impertinent – or at least cheeky – forms of address and reference used throughout: ‘nalomfazi’ (‘this woman’) in line 9, ‘umfazi wkhe’ (‘this is his woman’) in line 11, and ‘gogo’ (‘granny’) in line 30. Such usage of a local language by guides/performers to other, or even insult, foreign tourists is not uncommon (cf. Senft, 1999), and it appears to be an effective strategy for disempowering otherwise powerful and privileged tourists. It is also relatively harmless if the tourists remain oblivious to such verbal attacks through linguistic

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ignorance. What makes Patrick’s behaviour a little surprising is that some of his addresses are fluent Zulu speakers. Just the same, the sequence in Extract 2 demonstrates that social banter and verbal play in the context of tourism appears to assume positions of intimacy (teasing, mild insults) normally reserved for intimates, for whom the safety of their close relationship override the threatening nature of such verbal attacks (constituting positive politeness acts in Brown and Levinson’s 1987 terms). In part, these exchanges merely add to the linguascape; they are, however, also instances of quintessential tourist talk – banal, familiar exchanges which can be easily transposed and exotically reframed for the ‘safe-adventure’ of tourism. Another such example is the greeting game. Greetings Jaworski (2009) suggests that viewed sociolinguistically, the tourist experience is enacted and mediated predominantly through the speech act of the greeting. Functioning in the liminal space of tourism, greetings are recontextualized and commodified in ways that violate their ‘normal’ felicity conditions (Duranti, 1997). In the context of New Zealand, for example, one of the key resources for packaging Maori heritage for tourists has been the commodification of the Maori greeting, the hongi, which involves two people pressing their noses against one another. In Tamaki Maori Village in Rotorua, tourists can have a picture taken in a makeshift photographic studio of doing a hongi with an actor against a photographic backdrop of idyllic rural scenery and a wooden carved totem pole (Figure 4). Images of Maori people performing a hongi can be bought on postcards and posters in numerous souvenir shops across New Zealand. The tourist website NZ Tramping <http://www.nztramping.com/> has this to say about hongi:

Hongi is a traditional Maori greeting, which literally means “to share breath”. Hongi is done by pressing one’s nose to the other person when they meet each other. It is believed that when the two noses meet, people exchange their breath and the visitor becomes one of the local people (tangata whenua). The beginning of this ceremony is believed to be in one of Maori legends, in which gods made a woman from earth, and god Tane (in translation from Maori Tane means Male) breathed life into her through the nostrils. She then sneezed and came to life. Her name was Hineahuone, which means ‘earth formed woman’. After the visitor is greeted, and for the remainder of his stay, he is obliged to share in all the responsibilities of the hosts. What a beautiful and tender greeting! It says a lot about the whole Maori nation. http://www.nztramping.com/new-zealand-history/hongi-in-new-zealand%E2%80%99s-traditions/ (accessed 17 March 2009)

However, despite what the tourist guides and websites may suggest, it is virtually impossible for a tourist to perform a hongi with a Maori person other than in the context of a paid performance. Our next example is in fact an instance of a commodified greeting exchange (involving a hongi) between a Maori guide/ coach driver and an American tourist en route for a night’s entertainment at Tamaki Maori Village at Rotorua, New Zealand. The tourists are collected by several coaches from hotels in the area. Once all the tourists are on board, their designated bus (waka, ‘boat’, ‘vessel’), the guide/ driver welcomes everyone and announces that the tourists will not only experience Maori song, dance, food, etc., but will also ‘become’

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Maori for the night. Each busload of tourists is branded as a ‘tribe’ (iwi) with a ‘chief’ (rangatira) (‘elected’ from among the tourists; the chief seems to usually end up being white, male, American), and the driver offers to ‘teach’ the tourists some Maori language – typically just one phrase/ greeting formula Kia Ora, ‘Hello/ Good Luck/ Good Health/ Thank You’ to be repeated in unison by the tourists following a prompt from the guides and other performers. The ‘chiefs’ become privileged participants in representing their ‘tribes’ in the Village Welcome, ‘gift’ presentation, various speeches throughout the night, and so on. One of such privileges includes the performance of a hongi with the guide/ driver in front of all the other tourists on the bus. The following extract presents one such sequence on the bus before its departure for Tamaki Maori Village, some 12 kilometres away from town.

Extract 3: The Maori Greeting

G = Guide (Driver) K= Kenny, the ‘chief’ tourist T = Unidentified tourists 1 G: for you people from different tribes (.) this is how we the 2 Maori people will usually greet each other (.) grab my right 3 hand Kenny (.) (off mike) stand up stand up 4 (Kenny stands; he towers over the driver) 5 T: (light laughter) (1) 6 G: now go down on the step (Kenny goes one step down) 7 T: (laughter) (2) 8 G: ok we- (.) put your left hand on my shoulder Kenny (1) ok 9 (.) now what we do, we press our noses together twice (.) 10 and then we say kia ora ok (.) nice and gentle (.) don’t go 11 (thrusts his head forward quickly towards Kenny’s face; 12 Kenny tilts his head backwards in a reflex) 13 T: (light laughter) (2) 14 G: and whatever you do: (.) don’t kiss me. [ 15 K: (inaudible speech to Guide) 16 T: (continued laughter) (2) 17 (Guide and Kenny perform a hongi, cameras flash) 18 G: kia ora: didn’t he do well (.) how-bout a big round= 19 T: (applause 4 sec.; loud female voice) yeeeahh 20 G: =of applause for Kenny (.) my people interpret the hongi 21 like this when the two noses come together (.) it’s the 22 sharing of common breath creating a legion of friendship 23 (1) as a point of interest for you, we the Maori tribe here in 24 Te Arawa are familiar to all this area of Rotorua and Bay of 25 Plenty (.) we are the only Maori tribe in New Zealand that 26 hongi twice (.) all other tribes do it once (.) that’s our 27 trade mark. (.) we’re now gonna pull out rangatira our big 28 kahuna, the big chief Ken here to the entrance way (.) I’ll 29 make the official welcome the challenge you’re gonna 30 have a wonderful evening (.) kia ora 31 T: (loud voices) kia ora

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Although the hongi is framed as a typical Maori greeting (lines 1–2) and as a way of establishing ‘a legion of friendship’ (line 22) between two people, the guide’s display and ‘lesson’ in Maori etiquette has an undercurrent of cultural subversion and resistance to dominant ideologies of tourism. The guide does not unambiguously adopt a stance of a friendly, deferential and subservient host. Under the guise of humour reminiscent of genres where mock-aggression and mild humiliation are part of the participation ritual (e.g. TV quiz-shows), he positions Kenny, the archetypal powerful and wealthy westerner about to be exposed to ‘Pre-European lifestyle experience of customs and traditions’ (http://www.maoriculture.co.nz/ Maori%20Village/Home), as a relatively powerless and ignorant ‘foreigner’. In order to ‘teach’ Kenny the hongi ritual, the guide instructs him to adopt appropriate body posture. When Kenny comes to the front of the coach and faces the guide, the guide unceremoniously orders Kenny to go one step down, to reduce the difference in their height – having their faces at the same level is more amenable to hongi and symbolically maintains a proxemic equilibrium between the two men. The driver uses unmitigated directives, ‘stand up stand up’ (line 3), ‘now go down on the step’ (line 6), reminiscent of an adult disciplining a child, and this ‘bossing’ Kenny around elicits outbursts of laughter from the onlookers on the coach. In lines 10–11, the Guide teases Kenny, implying that he is likely to hongi inappropriately – ‘nice and gentle (.) don’t go (thrusts his head forward…)’. The Guide’s hyperbolic head-but is clearly an exaggeration for comic effect as he cannot realistically expect Kenny to act in such a foolish manner. The Guide also seems to intentionally frighten Kenny with his mock head-but only to elicit a reaction of slight panic from Kenny and more laughter from the other tourists. Another ridiculing turn at Kenny’s expense is the Guide’s teasing, heteronormative joke, ‘and whatever you do:? don’t kiss me’ (line 14). The Guide then proceeds with the hongi (line 17) and again positions Kenny as a child-like figure who deserves a ‘round of applause’ as a reward for his performance (another game show-like feature). The Guide then appears in total control of the situation, a knowledgeable expert, as well as a mocking director–choreographer of the scene, blatantly ‘othering’ Kenny by adopting the key of teasing and ridicule. Extract 4 demonstrates another example of the ‘tourist greeting’, this time turning tourists into performers for other tourists, and their Guide (Edensor, 2000, 2001). At the end of the ‘Where are you from?’ sequence in Extract 2, the PheZulu group is threatened by another silence, and one of the tourists from South Africa (as if assuming the role of ‘host’) suggests that some of the other tourists display their foreignness through the verbal display of their native language.

Extract 4: The cooking hut – ‘Say hello in Polish’ (This Extract starts a few turns after the end of Extract 2) 1 CT: they (indicating Polish family) should say hello in Po:lish [ 2 KT2: in Po:lish 3 PATRICK: that’s just what I’m looking for 4 CT: ja (laugh) 5 PATRICK: (to Polish mother and son) how do you say hello in Polish? 6 (2) 7 PT1: (quietly to PT2) no powiedz (.) pan się (unclear) chce 8 żebyś powiedział cześć po polsku powiedz cześć= well say it (.) the gentleman (unclear) wants you to say hello in Polish say hello 9 PT2: (turns towards his mother and hides his face)

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10 PATRICK: =how do you say hello in your language?= 11 PT1: (to Patrick, softly) =cześć hello 12 PATRICK: sorry? 13 PT1: cześć 14 PATRICK: (looks at other tourists, smiles) I can’t say it 15 (general laughter) 16 PT4: nothing ((for)) easy 17 (general laughter) 18 RT: cześć 19 PATRICK: (to RT) can you say it? 20 RT: cześć 21 HT: cześć 22 PT1: cześć 23 PATRICK: (surprised tone) have you heard it before? [ 24 RT: cześć I have a friend who is Polish I 25 know dziekuję and that’s it thank you 26 PT1: (nods and smiles, outburst of general laughter)

In an instance of ‘reverse crossing’, PT1 is made to demonstrate one of the Polish greeting formulae to the guide and the other tourists. This situation is a mirror image of that in Extract 3, where it was the guide ‘teaching’ the tourists how to use local greetings. The initial move to ethnotype the Polish tourists as ‘Polish’ by CT is premised on her request to hear a sample of the Polish language and a greeting formula is chosen as a token Polish expression. The request appears to be unexpected and does not trigger immediate compliance. There is a pause of two seconds (line 6) followed by the PT1’s request for her son (PT2) to say cześć (‘hello’) in Polish (lines 7–8), rather than spontaneously offering to demonstrate it herself. The elicitation of the Polish greeting by CT and KT2 seems like a childish game – it is reminiscent more of requesting a small, pre-literate child at a family gathering to recite a poem, spell his or her name, or ‘count to 100’ rather that requesting expert advice on the use of a second language (which is not known to CT and KT2). The embarrassed boy struggles not to have to perform (line 9), and finally, his mother says the first, soft instance of ‘cześć’ (line 11). Patrick does not quite grasp the pronunciation of the word and asks for repetition (line 12) but even after he hears it again (line 13), he still appears confused and uncertain how to pronounce the greeting. Two participants try to rescue Patrick from his embarrassment. The father (PT3) declares the Polish greeting is rather hard to pronounce (line 16), possibly in the hope of closing off further attempts for anyone to say it, followed by RT’s demonstration of his ability to do so (line 18). This triggers four more repetitions of ‘cześć’ by RT, HT and PT1. Most of the ‘universal’ criteria for identifying greetings (Duranti, 1997) are violated here (cf. Jaworski, 2009). The greeting crops up as part of an ongoing (though faltering) interaction, rather than in the liminal moment of the conversational opening; the perceptual field among the participants is already established, rather than in need of being established; there is no adjacency pair format (the greeting is displayed by various participants rather than inviting a response in kind); the form and content are not predictable to non-Polish language speakers (except for RT’s snippets) diminishing the ‘safety’ of its formulaicity; and so on. Thus, the use of the greeting formula cześć does not constitute a greeting in terms of Duranti’s criteria – a fact seemingly recognized and acted on by PT2’s refusal to take part in the

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‘show’. In the fleeting context of tourism, the recontextualised greeting – or its performance, representation, learning, repetition and metapragmatic commentary – may constitute the focal and exclusive orientation of talk, as is the case in Extracts 3 and 4, a form of (dis-)play through which national and ethnic identities are elicited, enacted and appropriated. Teasing The light-hearted tenor of touristic encounters has been clearly manifested in the four extracts above. Humour is unsurprisingly a common element of tourist texts and interactions, frequently with insulting overtones (cf. Pritchard and Morgan, 2005) due to the preoccupation of tourism with hedonistc pleasure, unrestrained consumption and the oxymorinic promise of ‘safe adventures’. Extract 5 is the last episode in our PheZulu cooking hut sequence leading up to the cooking demonstration everyone has gathered to watch.

Extract 5: The cooking hut – ‘You don’t cook in UK do you?’ (following on directly from Extract 4) 1 PATRICK: (laughs) OK well so (.) I’m- (3) I forgot my name 2 (everyone laughs) I’m stupid (3) (leans out of the entrance 3 way; to a group outside) come here guys tell me my name? 4 RT: (laughs) could be Patrick but- (laughs) 5 PATRICK: ja: ja: I’m Patrick er (.) Angigquize Qakala (= ‘Mr Easy- 6 Go-Lucky’; pronounced with two loud clicks) is my 7 African name and (looks at his watch) this is now the 8 kitchen hut where you ladies (points at some of the female 9 tourists) do all the cooking because only ladies must cook 10 men just relax (1.0) (turns to ET1) you don’t cook in UK 11 do you? 12 ET1: er (looking at other tourists) yeh I do (laughter from others) 13 PATRICK: hum (.) your wife’s a lazy cook= [ 14 ZWP: ABEZE (to people outside) let them come 15 ET1: =yeh yeh I enjoy cooking= 16 PATRICK: =but you don’t have to= [ 17 ZWP: ABEZE (even louder) 18 ET1: =no I do have to (.) (wife laughs loudly) she’ll (pointing to 19 his wife and looking at everyone else with a smile) she’ll 20 tell me off if I don’t (laughs) 21 PATRICK: (2.0) (playfully) shame (pointing at ET4) you are naughty 22 (2.0) don’t let your husband cook (general laughter)

When the ‘Polish greeting’ exchange fizzles out in fits of laughter, Patrick decides to start the core part of the event focusing on the cooking demonstration. He begins by introducing himself, but after a three second pause in line 1, he quips that he had forgotten his name. Whether he really forgot his name or not, his faltering start becomes a pretext for creating a humorous situation at his own expense when he positions himself as the butt of his joke (cf. ‘I’m stupid’, line 2). Once RT (who had met him already) suggests ‘Patrick’, Patrick recovers from his lapse and declares that in addition to being called ‘Patrick’, he also has an African name, Angigquize Qakala, which he over-pronounces with two loud clicks for ‘qu’ and ‘q’

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(line 5). In fact, Angigquize Qakala appears to be a nickname, or pseudonym, a type of self-naming behaviour of tour guides we have observed on numerous other occasions (for example, the guide/ driver featured in Extract 3 introduced himself at the beginning of the tour as ‘Dennis the Menace’). Angigquize Qakala glossed in Extract 5 as ‘Mr Easy-Go-Lucky’ (lines 5–6) can be literally translated as ‘I don’t care type’. The nickname serves then as another display of an ‘exotic’ feature of the local language (the clicks), and signals the relaxed, even irreverent disposition of Patrick towards tourists, or life more generally – whether the tourist gets this or not. What is even more significant in this extract is Patrick’s overtly sexist but playful framing of the cooking hut as the female domain ‘this is now the kitchen hut where you ladies […] do all the cooking because only ladies must cook men just relax’, lines 8–10). We do not know whether Patrick here unreflexively perpetuates the entrenched patriarchal ideology permeating much of the Zulu society, or whether he plays another trick on the unsuspecting tourists. The latter interpretation seems more plausible (despite Zulu machismo underlying his gambit) as in line 10 he turns to ET1 in the act of male collusion and solidarity asking him ‘you don’t cook in UK do you?’. Perplexed ET1 (comparably to PT1 in line 2 of Extract 2, and PT2 in line 9 of Extract 4) looks around as if in search of a bailout from answering an awkward question. With no help arriving, he confronts Patrick by admitting to taking on this ‘unmanly’ activity, which produces bursts of laughter from the group as his shaky masculinity gets exposed. Continuing with his sexist jibe, Patrick playfully insults ET4 (as well as ET1 by treating her as a non-present, or, at best, a ratified overhearer) by teasing ET1’s wife for being ‘lazy’ (‘your wife’s a lazy cook’, line 13). This exchange continues for four more extended turns (line 15–16, 18–22) in which ET1 tries to save face by first maintaining that he enjoys cooking (line 15), and then falls prey to Patrick and colludes in the sexist tenor of the banter by stating ‘she’ll tell me off if I don’t [do the cooking]’ (lines 19–20). Patrick does not relent even when this sequence comes to an end, and insists that ET1 does not ‘have to cook’ (line 16), that ET4 is ‘naughty’ (line 21), and that she should not allow her husband to cook (line 22). Throughout lines 10–22, when Patrick targets ET1 and ET4 as the butts of his jokes, there is much laughter and Patrick delivers his lines with a ‘smiley’ voice, although his tone is also ambiguously stern and reproachful. On the part of ET1, ET4, and the other tourists, laughter may then be a good-natured reaction to the perceived humour of Patrick’s comments, but the loud laughter by ET1 and ET4 (especially in lines 18 and 20) may also be a display of their vulnerability to Patrick’s ridicule and inability to defend themselves, both highly salient threats to their ‘positive faces’ (Brown and Levison, 1987), as Patrick blatantly questions and rejects the value of sharing domestic chores in their marital arrangements, and they lose self-control manifested by the outbursts of laughter. Finally, what also strikes us about this particular exchange is that, as with the heteronormative hongi jesting in Extract 1, a shared frame of reference is clearly assumed; specifically, the deployment of gendered cultural practices and interactional norms (or stereotypes) as a kind of global – or, at least, intercultural – common ground for play. It is this which alerts us to the globalizing habitus of tourism. Being a tourist, doing tourism: The performance of contact

Whenever discourses travel across the globe, what is carried with them is their shape, but their value, meaning, or function do not often [sic] travel along. Value, meaning, and function are a matter of uptake, they have to be granted by others on the basis of the prevailing orders of indexicality, and increasingly also on the basis of their real or potential ‘market value’ as a cultural

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commodity. … Mobility, we have to understand, is not mobility across empty spaces, but mobility across spaces filled with codes, customs, rules, expectations, and so forth. Mobility is an itinerary across normative spaces, and these spaces are always somebody’s space. (Blommaert, 2005, p. 72-73)

Each of the exchanges presented here constitute a series of language games, playful moments which help to realize the performance of contact between hosts and tourists (and, elsewhere, between tourists and tourists). Each demonstrates the particular – but not unique – ways that language and other semiotic material is entextualized and recontextualized for touristic purposes. They also show how certain values, meanings, functions are not necessarily reinvented, refashioned (see Blommaert above) but often endure over time and extend across space – were it not for this, the staging of tourism and the stylizing of tourist or host identities would not be possible. In other words, each of these games, while specifically situated and locally meaningful, also has a transposable, generic significance which plays out more generally. Each game is a stock-in-trade of tourism discourse – it is how we know we are doing tourism and being tourists (or hosts). In tourism, these language games are ubiquitous and help to establish an ‘imagined community of tourists’ (more on this below). They are also inherently normative, structuring (or determining) creative acts and/or acts of resistance. It is in this way that tourism discourse – the globalizing tourist gaze (Urry, 2001) – still tends to flatten and homogenize other people’s spaces. First, sociolinguistic items may well circulate but they are not always reinterpreted or refashioned; second, mobility in itself – the movement of people and sociolinguistic items – normativizes space and the places of exchange. The specifics of tourist–host interactions inevitably emerge from and are dictated to a large extent by the centres of power – the ‘global core’. Tourists set the agenda and hosts must typically fashion themselves in the image (or imagination) of the tourists. Host dwelling places become place names (cf. Extract 1; Figure 3); host languages become impenetrable codes and ciphers of local communities (cf. Extract 2); greetings become trademarks of ethnic identity (cf. Extract 3); names become nicknames (cf. Extract 5), and so on. The ‘global semioscape’ (Thurlow and Aiello, 2007), is clearly not an equal playing field. While there is always huge potential for speakers or designers to rework semiotic repertoires (symbols, sign systems and meaning-making practices) in circulation, some people’s ways of speaking, design practices, aesthetic preferences dominate and set ‘the standard’. In the context of tourism, this type of semiotic agenda setting is evidenced in, for example, the fashioning of traditional Zulu craftwork into ‘curious’ for touristic consumption, which must also be constantly refashioned in accordance with the changing tastes and, indeed, fashions of Western consumers – as is the case with the Zulu beadwork nowadays designed with the utilitarian/lifestyle demands of a Westernized market. One aspect of most tourist interactions is that they are also typically one-off. While doing our fleeting ethnographies of Whakarewarewa and PheZulu, our repeated visits to these sites proved quite inexplicable and rather amusing to the guides who recognized us from previous days. Tourists visiting theme parks are not ‘regulars’. In their global flow, they reappear as types, not tokens, which allows each performance of the hosts to maintain the aura of spontaneity and uniqueness – a paradox given the meaning of performance as ‘never for the first time’ (Schechner, 1985: 36, cited in R. Bauman, 2004: 9). The inherent fleetingness of tourist–host encounters creates a further paradox of instant and short lived ‘friendships’. Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) diagnosis of post-modern relationships as ‘liquid’ provides some clues here, especially in relation to what he terms the ‘adiaphorization’ of human relations (Z. Bauman, 1996). For Bauman, lasting friendships, relationships and marriages are increasingly difficult to achieve, human life being driven more by enjoyment and seeking aesthetic

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pleasure rather than responsibility and commitment. In this vein, identities become fragmented and somewhat schizophrenic as blending them into cohesive lifestyles poses an obstacle. One of the obstacles, certainly, must be the short duration of some of these relationships, especially when they last no longer than a day. This is why the performance of a hongi between the Guide and Kenny in Extract 3 may be glossed as ‘the sharing of common breath creating a legion of friendship’ (line 22), but its chances of establishing anything more than a passing sense of ‘communitas’ between both men in the liminal space of the tourist experience (Turner, 1977), however good-willed and genuine it may be, is destined to be terminated once the evening is over. Yet, much tourism is premised on the idea of being instantly welcomed to hosts communities as ‘friends’ (cf. Jaworski et al. 2003), and even finding romance (if only being an acceptable face of sex tourism, Piller 2009; Ryan & Hall, 2001). The fact of the matter is that most of these relationships, at least exemplified in our data here, terminate as rapidly as they begin. However, sociolinguistically, they manifest a number of familiar but recontextualized strategies typical of intimate behaviour. While many of these are commonly associated with threats to the social actors’ positive faces (Brown and Levinson, 1987), Sifianou (1992) suggests what may be perceived as a positive face threat in one community/ context, may constitute a positive politeness strategy (assuming closeness and intimacy) in another: • nicknames, terms of endearment, and downright derogatory terms of address (cf.

Patrick’s ‘mfowethu’ (‘brother), ‘ma’ (short for ‘mama’ ‘mother’), and ‘gogo’ (‘granny’) in Extract 2; ‘Angigquize Qakala’ (‘Mr Easy-Go-Lucky’) in Extract 5);

• bold-on-the-record, unmitigated directives and personal questions (cf. Patrick’s

elicitation of tourist’s place of origin in Zulu, inquiry about CT’s ability to speak Afrikaans in Extract 2, elicitation of the ‘Polish hello’ in Extract 4, Guide’s ‘bossing around’ of Kenny in Extract 3, inference about ET1’s undertaking of the domestic chores in Extract 5);

• risqué humour and (suggestion of) obscenities (cf. the heteronormative ‘jokes’ of

Patrick in Extract 5 and of the Guide in extract 3; also, the Guide’s play with the pronunciation of ‘Whaka’ in Extract 1);

• teasing, ridicule and insults (cf. Extracts 3 and 5). Most extracts demonstrate hosts’ requests for tourists to perform displays of local (Extracts 1 and 3) or their own (Extract 4) languages, even though the latter is tourist initiated. Such performances, as well as responses to other questions (e.g. ‘you saw the haka on stage?, Extract 1, line 18; elicitation of ‘kia ora’ from tourists in Extract 3, line 31) require tourists to produce brief utterances in unison reminiscent of school students’ replies to their teachers’ questions and playing ‘language games’, to be found in second language classrooms, for example. The ambivalence in interpreting this behaviour among tourists, possibly a manifestation of their schizophrenic identities, allegiances and desires in the moments of tourist encounters is observable in their hesitant, reluctant, tentative or inconsistent responses to the Guides, especially when they are singled out, put on the spot as individuals, unable to ‘hide’ in the safety of a group and group response. Thus, Kenny in Extract 3 appears not only obedient but quite meek in following the Guide’s instructions, PT1 draws a blank when addressed in Zulu by Patrick in Extract 2, PT2 refuses to ‘say hello in Polish’ in Extract 4, and

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ET1 shifts from claiming drawing pleasure from cooking to ‘complaining’ that his wife would ‘tell him off’ if he did not cook. Nearly a billion people a year engage in international tourism of one sort of another, and many will face encounters of the type described above, out of countless other interactions which we do not have space to discuss here. Many tourists joining daily guided tours will remain strangers, maintaining convenient silence and avoiding eye contact. In their fleeting encounters with guides they will be largely addressed en masse and talked at rather than talked to. They may end up getting photographed with their guides or other local performers, they may ask each other personal questions, but ultimately they will only do so having bought their tickets and having left their tips. The more tourists pay, the more service/ interaction their money will buy (Sherman, 2007). In such case, any sense of ‘community’ – or of ‘friendship’ – is often then a function and result of economic exchange. Which is not to dismiss these exchanges as simply ‘synthetic’ or without basis (cf Fairclough, 1989, on synthetic personalization). Within tourism’s theatrical framework of ‘suspended disbelief’, the apparently ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fake’ are not necessarily obstacles to exchange; indeed, they invariably become the substance of exchange in a discourse which readily entertains the notions of ‘safe adventures’, ‘planned spontaneity’, ‘exotic familiarity’, ‘contemporary tradition’ and ‘genuine fakes’ (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2009; cf also Brown, 1996). It is this quality of the oxymoronic/paradoxical that often makes the moments and meanings of contact in tourism so hard to read or predict. Taking the sociolinguistic characteristics of the interactions, their commodified framing and recontextualised displays of poetic language, stories, place names, formulaic expressions and other snippets of verbal banter, instances of addressing interlocutors in languages they may not understand, code-crossing, language learning, explicit evaluation of linguistic and nonverbal performances (e.g. applause for Kenny in Extract 3, line 19), points to an increasing need to theorize encounters under global flows in terms of spatially heterogeneous, transcultural contact zones between people with distinctive, often conflicting social, geographic, historical and economic trajectories (Pratt, 1992). These are Rampton’s (2009) ‘communities of contact’ operating in re-scaled, hybrid spaces, where familiar repertoires, styles of speaking and genres change their meaning and value, speakers lose their confidence (Blommaert et al. 2005: 203), or claim power by subverting the dominant patterns of authority and privilege, as in the ‘playful’ moments of wealthy tourists in former post-colonial spaces having their self-assured status put into question and undermined. Throughout this chapter, we have emphasized the role of ‘learning’ (of languages, nonverbal behaviour, values, history, and so on) by the tourists. This behaviour is reminiscent of building of a community of practice through apprentices’ ‘peripheral legitimate participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger 1998). Clearly, the tourists are apprentices to their hosts, the old-timers, masters and guardians of their identities, heritage and authentic values and practices. However, the liminality of tourism with its fleeting relationships (the communities of contact) subverts the typical master–apprentice relation. Paradigmatic tourists can only ‘dip their toes’ in Maori or Zulu culture before moving on to try a different identity, lifestyle or behaviour at another destination where they will have a go at being a Chamula, a ‘peasant’, or an ‘astronaut’ for a day. The ‘tourist syndrome’ entails a life of endless grazing, says Bauman (above). So, it seems that the length of time needed for apprentices to become full participants is replaced here by the frequency of contact. This is why the ‘flattening’ of sociolinguistic items from, say, language to linguascape is a useful if not a necessary tool in managing the global business of tourism. It also allows (if not requires) tourists and hosts imagine themselves a community of practice and not just of contact, in the spirit of a neoliberal or neocolonial ‘global village’ and in the service of a global cultural industry.

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