Living with Tourism: Negotiating Identities in a Turkish Village (Routledge Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism, and Mobility, 1)

222 Pages·2003·1.86 MB·English

by  Hazel Tucker

Living with Tourism
Tourism is now recognised as a major player in the interaction between the local
and global, especially within economic and social processes. Accordingly, signifi-
cant attention is being paid to the practices and experiences of local
communities as they are visited by and serve tourists. Living with Tourism,
however, redefines the ‘community’ that is of interest when considering the
effects that tourism has on culture, by providing an ethnographic account of
both the toured and touring community.
Living With Tourism is an in-depth analysis of the interactions between tourists,
the local community and place in the ‘moonlike’ cave-land of Göreme, a World
Heritage Site in Central Turkey. It demonstrates the implications that commu-
nity ownership and participation in tourism have for the politics of
representation and identity, and also for the nature of the tourist experience. It
is shown how, together with host communities, tourists themselves are continu-
ously negotiating their own identities and experiences in interaction with the
people and places they meet.
Living with Tourism develops a dynamic notion of culture and tourism sustain-
ability, and therefore provides new insights not only for scholars of tourism, but
also for those in the areas of anthropology, geography and social studies who
wish to gain a deeper understanding of this global phenomenon in the contem-
porary world.
Hazel Tucker has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Durham
and is a Lecturer in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago, New
Zealand. Dr Tucker teaches courses on tourist behaviour, social and cultural
change and tourism, heritage interpretation and qualitative research methods.
As well as publishing in the field of tourism, she has published articles in area of
social and oral history.
Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
Series editor: Professor Michael Hall
Associate Professor at the Centre of Tourism, University of
Otago, New Zealand
The aim of this series is to explore and communicate the intersections and rela-
tionships between leisure, tourism and human mobility within the social sciences.
It will incorporate both traditional and new perspectives on leisure and
tourism from contemporary geography (e.g. notions of identity, representation
and culture), while also providing for perspectives from cognate areas such as
anthropology, cultural studies, gastronomy and food studies, marketing, policy
studies and political economy, regional and urban planning, and sociology,
within the development of an integrated field of leisure and tourism studies.
Also, increasingly, tourism and leisure are regarded as steps in a continuum
of human mobility. Inclusion of mobility in the series offers the prospect to
examine the relationship between tourism and migration, the sojourner, educa-
tional travel, and second home and retirement travel phenomena.
The series comprises two strands:
Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility aims to
address the needs of students and academics, and the titles will be published in
hardback and paperback. Titles include:
The Moralisation of Tourism
Jim Butcher
The Ethics of Tourism Development
Mick Smith & Rosaleen Duffy
Tourism in the Caribbean
Trends, Development and Prospects
Edited by David Timothy Duval
Qualitative Research in Tourism
Edited by Jenny Phillimore and Lisa Goodson
Routledge Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility is
a forum for innovative new research intended for research students and
academics, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:
Living with Tourism
Negotiating Identities in a Turkish Village
Hazel Tucker
Living with Tourism
Negotiating identities in a
Turkish village
Hazel Tucker
First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2003 Hazel Tucker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-98767-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0–415–29856–3 (Print Edition)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
Göreme: an introduction 5
The wider context of tourism development in Göreme 10
Studying Göreme: the fieldworker, the field and the work 15
Structure of the book 20
2 Imaging Cappadocia: the construction of a tourist place 23
Scripting Cappadocia and Göreme 24
The ‘lunar landscape’ 27
Christian Göreme 29
Göreme as a cultural landscape 34
Touring Cappadocia 36
3 The tourists: in search of serendipity 43
Tourists in Göreme 44
Some tourist portraits 45
Tourists, non-tourists and the ill-fated plot 51
Avoidance of the pre-planned package tour 56
Budgeting for possibility 59
Temporal opening to possibility 61
Interacting with the authentically social 62
The search for serendipity, not touristic surrender 66
4 Continuity and change: gender and production in Göreme 69
Göreme lives 70
Göremeli/people of Göreme 75
Gender segregation: the duality in Göreme life 76
Memories of a life past: social change in Göreme 85
vi Contents
5 A community in competition: the business of tourism in Göreme 91
Getting into tourism 92
Tourism business and employment today 99
Volcanic eruptions: competition, fights and gossip 103
Consequences and experiences of tourism business 114
6 Close encounters: interactions between hosts and guests 118
Packaged interaction 119
The authentically social in Göreme village 120
The power in hospitality 122
Hospitality in the tourism realm 125
Restricting hospitality 128
Close encounters of a more ‘real’ kind 134
7 Romantic developments: new and changing gender relations
through tourism 137
Fun and romance 138
Traditional gender relations 141
Long-term relationships 143
Caught in the middle 149
Developing business through romance 152
Developing romance: changing village life 156
8 The continuation of Göreme as a ‘tourist site’: politics of place
and identity 159
The discourse of preservation 160
Villagers’ experiences of preservation discourse 163
The inevitability of change 166
Emergent culture: the Flintstones of the future 169
Experiencing the hypo-reality of Göreme 172
The continuation of Göreme as a tourist site? 176
9 Conclusion 182
Writing tourists into destinations 182
Living with tourism in Göreme: a postscript 187
Bibliography 190
Index 208
List of Illustrations
Figures
Figure 1.1 Göreme village tourist map. 7
Figure 1.2 Map of Turkey highlighting the main route travelled
by backpacker tourists. 10
Figure 2.1 Tourist map of Cappadocia showing the main
tourist sites. 37
Plates
Plate 1.1 Göreme village. 6
Plate 1.2 The centre of Göreme village. 8
Plate 2.1 Miniature ‘fairy chimneys’ are sold at souvenir stands
nearby full-size ones. 29
Plate 2.2 Byzantine frescoes in a 1,000-year-old church. 30
Plate 2.3 The coach park by the Göreme Open-Air Museum. 31
Plate 2.4 A hotel built to resemble the ‘fairy chimneys’ of
Cappadocia. 40
Plate 2.5 The kind of vernacular accommodation that backpackers
prefer to stay in. 41
Plate 3.1 Exploring in the valleys around Cappadocia. 58
Plate 3.2 Boiling pekmez (grape syrup). 64
viii List of Illustrations
Plate 4.1 Example of Esin’s photographs. 74
Plate 4.2 Making bread to last through the winter is a full day’s
work, shared among a group of women. 84
Plate 5.1 A new tour agency is built. 98
Plate 6.1 ‘Turkish hospitality’: a tea-house owner entertains
tourists by playing his saz. 126
Plate 8.1 The National Park plan in action. 161
Plate 8.2 Erosion of the fairy chimneys. 169
Plate 8.3 Flintstones imagery used in Göreme’s tourism. 171
Acknowledgements
I owe special thanks to the people of Göreme for their friendship, openness
and generosity during and since the conducting of my fieldwork. I am espe-
cially indebted to the Köse family, particularly Abbas and Senem, whose
support and kind hospitality were invaluable to my fieldwork. Many thanks
are also due to Arif Yasa for his help with transcription of interview tapes, and
to Mehmet Bozlak, Kaili Kidner and Lars Eric More for their practical
support. I am indebted to all of the Göreme villagers I interviewed, including
Mustafa Mızrak, as well as to the employees of the Ministries of Culture and
Tourism and of the Göreme Tourism Co-operative who helped me in my
research. I would particularly like to thank Dawn Köse, Andus Emge, the
Tekkaya family, Ali Karataș, Hüseyin Uludag, Osman Atak, Mehmet Dașdeler,
Hacer and Hikmet, Havva, Zubeyde, Zahide and Top Deck, for sharing infor-
mation and friendship with me during my stay. Of course, the many tourists
who shared their time and conversation with me also contributed greatly to
this work.
In Durham, I extend my warmest thanks to Dr Tamara Kohn for her contin-
uous encouragement, support and enthusiasm as I produced this work in its
doctorate form. A number of people also contributed their time to discuss
research and ideas, including Michael Carrithers, Mary Thompson, Arnar
Arnason, Rachel Baker, Will Buckingham, Chris Fuller and Stephan Jamieson.
This book is largely the result of research funded by a scholarship from the
Anthropology Department at the University of Durham. I am very grateful for
this and other financial assistance provided by the British Institute for
Archaeology in Ankara travel fund, the Durham University Council Fund for
Students Travelling Abroad, and a Royal Anthropology Institute ‘Sutasoma
Award’. I would also like to express my appreciation to Ann Michael and
Andrew Mould at Routledge for their support for this work.
My thanks go to Fez Travel for the use of the map of Turkey in Chapter 1,
and to Matt Hall for his assistance in preparing the maps. All of the
photographs are my own.
In the latter stages of working on this book, I have greatly appreciated the
company and support of my colleagues and friends in New Zealand. In partic-
ular, I would like to thank Michael Hall for his wine and wisdom, Donna Keen