Tourist Bubble in Amman

 Night view of Amman

It was 11.05 p.m. Jordanian time when we first arrived in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. The hilly landscape of Amman kept me and twelve other students in awe while we went through the town. In the first day we went to the King Abdullah I Mosque. To be able to enter the mosque, visitors need to cover parts of their bodies as a symbol of modesty. When we enter the mosque, Omar, our Jordanian tour guide explains everything about the mosque. At that time the mosque was empty; there was no prayers in the mosque, as prayers are regarded as holy activities in which visitors cannot directly witness the prayer. So, not only that the visitors cannot witness it themselves, there was not any opportunity to have any conversation with local Muslims in the mosque. This means that there is a certain limit that the tourists can have access to, even if they try to find the ‘authentic’ experience.

This notion reminds me of the theory posed by Daniel Boorstin (1964), namely the tourist bubble. He explained that instead of providing the means for tourists to experience local culture, mass tourism isolates tourists from the authentic culture within a closed environment; the tourist bubble. In most cases, tourists are exposed to a staged performance, in which the locals are pretending of doing the rituals that “they would normally do”, while it is not necessarily their authentic activity. It entails that the tourists are driven to passively consume these spectacles, which simultaneously reduce their agency to understand the experience in many ways. As can be seen from the example of the mosque, instead of experiencing “the local culture”, we were categorized as tourists and hence can only access a certain part of the culture that the locals choose to show. Then the remaining question is, were we actually experiencing the "local" culture or instead, were we immersing even more in a bubble that we created?

 The terrace of King Abdullah I Mosque

 The main hall of King Abdullah I Mosque

 The Islamic Museum, located outside the mosque

The women had to cover their body parts using the clothing shown above

References:

• Boorstin, D. (1964). A guide to pseudo-events in America. New York: Harper.