Wadi Rum
Towards the end of our summer school in Jordan, we were lucky to
get the chance to spend a night in the Wadi Rum desert. As expected, we were
actually very excited about the experience as we were imagining about living a
remote life for one night in the desert with the locals. We were surprised when we arrived at the
camp. It was a well-established camping site in between two rocky cliffs,
with around thirty rooms equipped with a bathroom for each. This was
far from our imagination. I
believe this expectation is provoked by our ‘tourist gaze’, a tendency to see a different set or landscapes that are not
ordinary (Urry, 1990). Interestingly, explained by Cheong and Miller (2000) the
tourist gaze is considered as the major mechanism by which tourism providers
operate in power relationship with the tourists. The tourist gaze works
similarly to the "gaze of experts" (Urry, 1990), in which people from
the more modern world try to interpret the activities of people from the less
developed one. However, at the same time, the tourists' knowledge is
constructed by the surrounding local people.
So, was it the tourists from the first
world country who had the power, or is it actually the locals who had more
influence? I was expecting that by staying one night in the desert will
mean that we depend our own safety and well-being to the Bedouins,
as we will be dependent on the resources that they give to us. Nevertheless, it seems that power relations also
play a crucial role. While the tourists have the economical power to pay for
the goods and services from the locals, it is the locals that determine the
type of entertainment or leisure that the tourists can get.
References:
Cheong, S. M., & Miller, M. L. (2000). Power and tourism: A
Foucauldian observation. Annals
of Tourism Research, 27(2),
371-390.
Urry, J.
(2002). The tourist gaze.
Sage.
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