As we consider the way tourism as intercultural communication possesses both things and feelings, we are drawn to consider the work that occurs in the reroutinising of everyday life and in the doing of tourism. The work of tourism we see as enabling a certain possession of things and of feelings but not in the narrow sense of consumer culture alone. It is crucial, at this juncture, that ‘work’ not be understood in the restricted sense of paid work, but more widely, perhaps as task or as commitment to an endeavour. Just as it is crucial that exchange is not seen to occur only in capitalist relations. For us to speak of the work of tourism, of the having of things and feelings that come to us as a result of participatory actions in the world, a wider definition of work is required than that which dominates both sociological literature and popular understandings in the West. In other words, and this is a key point, our understanding of the work of tourism requires us to reach out beyond the tropes of the alienated modern and the Romantic or exotic idealised other to a sense of work as encompassing rest. For us to argue, as we do, that tourism creates opportunities for the rewriting of the rules of everyday life, for a certain embodied reflexivity and a privileging of the imagination in the West, we are drawn to reconsider the binaries of paid work and paid rest. This sense of tourism as work is perhaps best (although as we shall see in the next chapter not exclusively) seen in youth hostels. Hostels were an important site of creativity, and self-creation at the heart of living, of life, cooking, washing, cleaning. People sharing space and time, negotiating values, sometimes effortlessly, sometimes uncomfortably. It was here, in the midst of the labours that this involved, in this nonprivatised spontaneous communitas, that, as we argued earlier, intercultural communication flourished. The creation of any community, it would seem, requires a hard, common task. Its structures of exchange are material figurations around everyday needs, practices and objects. Tourism as intercultural practice, then, cannot have a value divorced from everyday life and its embodied materialities, and the feelings this engenders of renewal, labour, cultural change and dislocation, to name but a few.
Tourism and Cultural Exchange: Interactive Nature of Tourism
