Tradition and the Declarative Reach of Tourism: Recognizing Transitionality—The Articulation of Dynamic Aboriginal Being: A Critique of Swain's Overview of Continuity and Adaptation in "Australian" Aboriginal Reality, With Relevance for the Discerning Presentation of Mutable/In-between Peoples Elsewhere

Abstract

Tourism increasingly has an important role to play not only in the interpretation of distant/removed populations for tourists, and in the fresh projection (i.e., in the enunciation) of populations who have been subjugated or suppressed by another "colonial" or "dominant" population of some kind. In recent years, for instance, a number of Aboriginal groups and communities in Australia have begun to embrace tourism not just for the direct economic gains it might bestow upon them, but because they can use their participation in the industry to explain aspects of their culture to other people. And Aboriginal groups have also become keen to use the projectivity and the performativity of tourism to draw attention to their particular claims for those lands and territories from which they have been dispossessed over the past 200 years, or more. It is therefore important that those who work within tourism in Australia—and, likewise, those who work in other places where a disempowered or developing primal population is now besieged by (or otherwise actively courts) the industry—become conversant with contemporary change within Aboriginal culture. This article thereby seeks to explore the cosmology of certain Aboriginal populations in the northern half of the Australian continent to show how indigenous spirituality (among other things) has gone through, and is still going through, profound modification over the last several decades. The problem is that those who work in Tourism Studies tend to be heavily oriented (after the field-leading writing of MacCannell, Cohen, Graburn, and Wang et al., on matters of "authenticity," per se) to overarching notions of TRADITIONALITY. To some extent, as Thomas has argued in Anthropology, Travel and Government, such objectivist-flavored and essentialist-minded writing has restricted the field's vision over culture, and has held back the field's held awarenesses about the ordinary TRANSITIONALITY of life and cosmology (i.e., about the ongoing dynamics that generate continual change and regular variation within societies in the order of things). To that end, this review article on (Australian) Aboriginal spiritual reverence provides a critique of Swain's recent examination of indigenous religiosity and selfhood. It draws from Bhabha to advance general understanding of the spiritual uncertainties and ambiguities of everyday cultural "being." And it also draws from Horne to advance specific understanding within Tourism Studies (for those who manage/promote/research sites that have an Aboriginal focus or part content) as to how current representational and interpretive work can be rendered more "relevant" and "empowering" for contemporary/emergent/transitional indigenous people. Tourism can beget new healthy vibrant futures. Tourism can articulate stale old knowledge, and can continue to help cripple misunderstood/misrepresented peoples. Tourism certainly matters, cosmologically. Though Swain himself does not focus upon the articulative power of tourism, per se, there are many lessons for Tourism Studies that could be drawn from his examination of the changing state of Aboriginal spirituality today—a thing that so many tourists from the "West" or from "North Atlantic" metropolitan nations wish to see/to visit/to experience (as is already well documented in the literature). Anyone who reads Swain's work closely will realize how difficult it is for outsiders (in the tourism industry and elsewhere) who work with indigenous societies to understand the local/Aboriginal allocation of meaning to things during the world's giddy contemporary moment of increasingly transitionality for supposedly "highly traditional" peoples. Indigenous responses to objects, to practices, and to beliefs introduced from the outside cannot be readily and axiomatically explained through some highly predictable classification system that describes some fixed indigenous cultural order. Objects, practices, and beliefs that are appropriated by indigenous populations ought not be essentialized and thereby seen exclusively as what they originally "were," but should more commonly be recognized for what they in fact "become" after locally creative recontextualization by particular indigenous population(s). All sorts of objects, and practices, and even beliefs, can have a rather different and promiscuous life under the imaginative exchanges which occur as indigenous societies variously and variably transitionalize. Because tourism will be an increasingly common site for such engagements in the difficult-to-read ordinary enactments of the politics of value during the 21st century, it is vital that Tourism Studies cultivates critical interpreters like Swain who have been trained to examine how Aboriginal/indigenous populations indeed deal on the ground with things and with conceptual persuasions introduced to them—and to their mythic imaginal—through tourism.