Topic > Tourism, hybridity and ambiguity: the importance of Bhabha's "third space" cultures

This article critiques the contribution that Dr. Homi Bhabha has recently made to cultural theoretical thinking on the historical and temporal forms of ethnicity in 'post-colonial era moment. As tourism is often dubbed the business of “difference” and the “other,” par excellence, it synthesizes not only what tourism researchers can learn from Bhabha's powerful contemporary analyzes of identity and otherness, but also how Bhabha could fruitfully explore tourism as an important 'site' of cultural production and emerging belonging. In interpreting Bhabha's highly problematic notions (such as "hybridity", "ambiguity" and "interstitial culture"), the article challenges the field of tourism studies to develop more vigorous questions about everyday performative activities that tend, ethnocentrically, to essentialize people, places and pasts through tourism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Much has indeed changed in how social scientists have viewed “culture” over the past three decades, and Bhabha's thinking is clearly a product of that revised understanding. During this period, previously dominant views of culture as an omnipotent supraindividual “system” have tended to be dismissed as an illusory conceptual abstraction, and instead to see culture as a collective prime mover acting on the individuals contained within of a given society, attention has been shifted “towards the investigation of the real phenomena of individuals interacting with each other and with their natural environments”. Thus, an increasing number of social scientists have come to reject the idea of ​​culture as something concrete, in and of itself, over time. last three decades, and nowadays they have come to conceive of culture as a broader scope of communal thought in which the people of a given society participate. Today, for symbolic anthropologists like Geertz, what matters is not so much culture as a "system" but culture as a "context", where all acts and events are potentially significant but also always intrinsically ambiguous. Culture is not a cause to which events or actions can be attributed, but is a realm of contextual or situational meaning in or through which these events or behaviors can be made intelligible at a given time and for a given environment. Bhabha's research agenda – or, rather, his critical program – on the sense of disorientation and disturbed discriminations of postcolonial life constitutes an enormous contribution to the emerging transcultural inquiry within postmodern scholarship: cultural production theorists of tourism studios simply can't afford to do this. overlook Bhabha's new insights into hybridity – because, to repeat, tourism is largely, or an, imaginary business of creating “difference”. The true value of Bhabha's ongoing work, then, is that it emancipates awareness on vital questions of difference and critical questions of macro-social belonging, enriching our perspectives on the cultural orientations and geopolitical bearings of the messy, subject and mixed populations of the world. By revealing some of the complex ways in which communities artfully “become,” it not only questions the fixity of the boundaries of places and nations, but assails those who seek singular, within-discipline explanations of or for such macro-social bonds . in mind: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay It's time that.