‘Temporary belonging’

Abstract

Indigenous art centres located in remote in Australia are increasingly engaging in cultural tourism initiatives to diversify their income streams and advance the community's economic and cultural sustainability (Jones, Booth and Acker, 2016; Australian Government, 2016). This art centre momentum goes against the grain of a perceived lack of interest in Indigenous cultural tourism more generally. Early research into Indigenous cultural tourism in Australia found that attractions based on Indigenous culture ranked low relative to other activities (Ryan and Huyton, 2002). Surveys reflected that Indigenous cultural tourism appealed to a minority socio-demographic band of tourists. Furthermore, initiatives that promote Australian Indigenous culture as a tourism product question their eflectiveness in generating desired returns to Aboriginal communities (Ryan and Huyton, p. 631). The data suggests a key problem pertains to tourist perceptions that they see little of what is a developing Aboriginal cultural revival (Ryan and Huyton, p. 631). 'Showcase' cultural tourism is clearly not the future, but more participatory models of community-embedded cultural tourism appear to have the potential to counter this problem. A great deal of current scholarship surrounds debates regarding the benefits of Indigenous engaging in the tourism enterprise (Bunten, 2008; Butler and Hinch, 2007; Jones, Booth and Acker, 2016; Ryan and Aicken, 2005; Zeppel, 2001). Even more scholarship engages with questions over what constitutes an authentic tourist experience (Gmeich, 2004; MacLeod, 2006; Skinner and Theodossopoulos, 2011). Cultural tourism sits firmly at the intersection of these debates because it involves relationships between people and places; different perspectives of history and traditions; and appreciating the complexities of different lifestyles (Smith and Robinson, 2006). This chapter does not specifically address the tortured territory of defining an authentic tourism experience, nor does it attempt to weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of immersive cultural tourism for Indigenous communities. Instead it speculates on the idea of a tourism experience of 'temporary belonging' to provide some insight into the encounter between and visitors in the context of participatory indigenous cultural tourism. It takes an 'in-between' approach to a cross-cultural sense of community belonging in the context of tourism. I have adapted this concept of 'temporary belonging' regarding from ongoing tourism discourse pertaining to tourists' emotional attachment to place (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Coleman and Crang, 2002b; Chambers, 2010). Indigenous represent a special case study of place in the tourism context because their very being is intrinsically related to place. Indigenous are people of a specific locality - they are the people of places (Butler and Hinch, 2007). The very word 'Indigenous' means belonging to a place. So there is an apparent corollary between tourists' emotional attachment to place and their emotional attachment to Indigenous communities. I want to explore this somewhat elusive emotional link through a tourism experience of what I call 'temporary belonging'. The temporary aspect of this concept concerns the fact that people act differently in different contexts. They perform certain roles depending on the kind of event or activity they are participating in. We act respectfully at funerals, attentively at lectures, and are socially responsive at parties. The nature of the event in no small way determines how we act. This is crucial to tourism studies, of course, where the nature of the tourism event determines the tourism experience (Coleman and Crang, 2002b). The place of the tourism event is not a static element but a performer in its own right. Coleman and Crang's edited volume Tourism: Between place and performance is particularly relevant here in terms of how it approaches concepts of place in tourism as an interstitial dualistic 'performance' of tourism. Places and visitors perform tourism in this context, and this text particularly engages with ideas that defeat the oft-lamented dichotomy of place 'as either authentically experienced by locals or simulated and staged for visiting consumers' (Coleman and Crang, 2002a, p. 4). People and place are conflated within the terms 'local' and 'visitor', and thus place becomes animated through the activities that occur between the people of its spaces. The book attempts to hover around this local belonging and the tourism experience, and it offers a reference point, or mindset, for the situation of temporary belonging. The idea of performance helps observers appreciate that tourism is a particular context of the social condition where, as previously mentioned, people 'act' in a certain way. This does not mean that they are necessarily behaving in a false or inauthentic manner, so much as responding to the conditions offered by place-based tourism encounters. I would argue that the temporary nature of our fundamental understanding of what cultural tourism is - a temporary inhabitation, or a temporary time-travel - is a significant, if subliminal, psychological aspect of tourists' encounters with host communities. Arguably the most successful cultural tourism experiences involve a sense that one belongs to a host community, no matter how temporary. 'Between' is a key term for Tourism: Between place and performance because the volume advances a dualistic model where 'cultures and belonging work in terms of a/not-a, inside and outside categories' (Coleman and Crang, 2002a, p. 5). This refusal to categorize 'performers' as either inside or outside helps in understanding a concept of performed, or temporary, belonging. In this chapter I am simply reconfiguring this performed oscillation between being inside and outside place to that of indigenous communities, and arguing that it engenders a tourism experience of 'temporary belonging'. Temporary belonging is perhaps intrinsic to the concept of tourism itself, but it assumes greater significance in an age of global translocation (Smith and Robinson, 2006; Burns and Novelli, 2006; Zakin, 2015; Burns and Novelli, 2008). Diaspora, displacement, and dislocation in contemporary global lifestyles tend to diminish a sense of belonging to a community, or of being involved in a community. Even if we ourselves remain within one community today, these tend to change and move around us. We do not experience community belonging in similar ways to the more static global environment of the past. Within this mindset the participatory cultural tourism experience potentially offers a sense of community belonging that may be lacking at home. This (latent) desire to belong flowers within the temporary inside/outside conditions of the participatory cultural tourism experience. Different kinds of tourism undoubtedly impact the condition of temporary belonging. It is important to emphasize that the precise nature of the relationship between host and visitors is crucial in determining the tourism experience. In this chapter I focus specifically on the growing trend of Indigenous community art centres that offer participatory cultural tourism initiatives. This aspect of the tourism industry is distinct to Indigenous cultural tourism that operates guided cultural tours of traditional homelands or culturally significant locations (Bunten, 2004; Aboriginal South Australia, 2016; Urban Indigenous, 2016). Whilst the latter are obviously participatory in terms of involving tourists in walks and various cultural activities, they are rarely embedded in for a period of time beyond one to three days. The point of my argument is not to ascribe value to different degrees of the immersive experience. Rather I aim to use the example of participatory art and cultural tourism to examine how this effect of 'temporary belonging' helps in new thinking about the future of cultural tourism. The tourism concept of temporary belonging also provides alternative models to the previously mentioned 'authenticity' debates surrounding cultural tourism. The art centres discussed in this chapter offer more extended participatory cultural experiences than other attempts to temporarily involve visitors in community life. Before explaining the concept of Australian Indigenous art centres and how they initiate participatory cultural tourism, we should undertake a more detailed consideration of what temporary belonging might mean in spaces shared by visitors and Australian Indigenous communities.