Cultural tourism and its discontents: A personal essay on the ethics of travel

Probably not many people can say that they bought an international airline ticket to Bali, Indonesia in a state of blissful ignorance towards the island’s mythic image as a timeless and exotic Eastern paradise. A place just waiting for Western visitors to lose themselves along the white sand beaches of Sanur and rediscover their true selves across the expansive rice terraces rising along the Southern volcanic slopes.

But I did.

All I knew about this island as my best friend and I finalized our flight information in a delirious, admittedly ill-informed and adventurous moment three months ago from his bedroom in California was that it was humid, probably had some vegetarian food I’d never had before, and that people played gamelan there. We had had the privilege of playing gamelan, or Indonesian percussive music, at our elite pseudo-public four year University which, by the way, we had just graduated from, knowledgably endowed but still novice to the world and its wiles. 

We began our journey in Ubud: the island’s “art and cultural capital,” now overrun with near-identical tourists shops, cheap spas, sleepy warungs, and particularly vocal men with motorbikes who offered insistently to serve as our taksi. I knew something was a little off on Day One:

I’m having a surprisingly averse reaction to this place! I don’t like that I am a tourist here, contributing explicitly to an industry which I find, on the whole, vapid and exploitative. Sure, the $20,000 rupiah that I paid for lunch helps this Balinese family in immediacy, but step back and consider the long term and global consequences of this ever-expanding industry: we are already sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop, planning our afternoon Reiki chakra massages. Why are they marketing to me? Why does the surface level of this city feel like I never left home?

Indeed, this question would haunt us through the rest of our travels and travails across the island, travels which we would ultimately deem necessary to cut short. As our questions about the specific touristic culture of Bali continued to expand, we discovered an expat library which housed several historical and anthropological accounts about the intersections between Balinese culture and tourism. The analyses therein confirmed my early sneaking suspicion that something wasn’t quite right.

A Violently Abridged History Lesson

The history of Bali is violent, in much the same way that most other places who have had their land perpetually squabbled over, stolen, and occupied have a violent history. It is a mundane and sobering truth; the Balinese fought the Dutch through the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, were occupied by Japan during World War II, and squabbled over territory amongst themselves and the neighboring Javanese long before either of these modern players arrived. Most notable in the island’s history of violence are the early puputan, or mass ritual suicides committed by the Balinese in dignified protest against the encroaching Dutch armies, and the more recent 1965 anti-communist purge led by Indonesian Army General Suharto which eliminated an estimated 5% of the island’s population.

This violence, simultaneously extreme and all too common, has been deliberately obscured from international purview since the 1901 Dutch adoption of the “Ethical Policy” as a way to mitigate the damage done to their own image as benevolent colonial administrator after the puputan suicides. This “Ethical Policy” intended to protect and preserve Balinese cultural and material welfare as “a living museum” of primitive life. In the 1920’s, Bali opened to tourism and was visited by Western anthropologists, artists and elite tourists who emphasized and propagated the image of the Bali as an idyllic and peaceful island, home to nature-loving and “primitive” peoples.

Why do literally millions of people retire or vacation to this small island year after year? In 2013, over 3.2 million people visited Bali, an island approximately the size of Delaware. It cannot be simply that Bali has a pleasant climate, beautifully terraced hillsides, impressive waves and pristine white beaches, although these natural accoutrements are true (and besides, the beaches – especially along the North coast – are increasingly polluted). Rather, Bali is quintessentially a “cultural touristic experience”: the Balinese offer their very selves, or rather, a static and superficial representation of themselves to visitors, and it is this representation which lures millions from virtually the entire planet to it’s eroding shores year after year in increasing numbers.

Recognizing an opportunity for profit, the Indonesian government under President Suharto has encouraged this imaginary ever since the 5-year New Order economic plan of 1969. Suharto deliberately encouraged Indonesian tourism most particularly in Bali in order to increase both foreign revenue and international status. Bali, always something of an anomaly for being a predominantly Hindu island within a predominantly Muslim country, is certainly the more palatable choice for Western tourists, who harbor ever increasing anti-Muslim sentiment and suspicion. In Bali, religion and culture have been deliberately preserved in order to sell these aspects to visiting tourists in an unsettling exchange, each for something the other doesn’t (or doesn’t believe himself to) have: money, or culture.

The problem with this kind of one-dimensional rendering of Balinese culture as idyllic and paradiscal is that it obfuscates both the island’s complex past and it’s multifarious present. After leaving the “cultural capital” of Ubud, we moved North into a village located on the mountain ridges which run down from the Bedugul caldera. Here we were able to hear from a Balinese naturalist guide about his own opinions on Balinese culture. It was obvious that our acquaintance, whom I’ll call Nyoman, was in some significant sense secular and also particularly well informed about national and international politics. However, Nyoman made it explicit to us that his entire family relied on the tourist industry in one capacity or another – whether through homestays, restaurants, storefronts or touristic and transportation services – to survive and that is was thus instrumental to his daily livelihood to participate in the expected ceremonies and rituals. Even as Nyoman joked lightly about an upcoming ceremony, some degree of reverence was apparent in his tone. This ostensibly contradictory juxtaposition indicates that while the Balinese are to some extent coerced into participating and perpetuating traditional belief structures to appease the cultural appetite of the tourist, they also consider the seriousness of these rituals with dignity and respect.

The Cost of Cultural Appetite

No culture is static and no culture is ever so confined by its oppressors as to remain unchanged. Culture is slippery, and can transform and mutate and slip through even the most thoroughly cemented brick and mortar confines. However, there is still a certain kind of irony to be observed in the Dutch-Indonesian effort to preserve so-called “authentic” Balinese culture in order to sell that culture back to the purportedly “culture-less” visitors of Europe and North America. These visitors are, of course, not literally devoid of culture; it is simply that they perceive of themselves as such because their culture is highly individualized.

The resulting consequence of this kind of state-sponsored insistence on traditional culture is that the Balinese perform a complicated public cultural performance through such daily rituals as ceremony and temple attendance and the making of banten or religious offerings even as they retain and expand dynamic and modern private lives. Balinese culture is shifting along with globalizing trends while simultaneously maintaining traditional culture in order to survive in a late capitalist economy where their only commodity up for retail sale is themselves.

Tourism colleges are perhaps quintessential of the dynamic and complex relationship between modernization, traditionalism, Balinese culture and Western desire. These colleges instruct the youth of Bali in English about Euro-Austro-American customs and behavior, as well as restaurant, hotel management, and other kinds of service sector labor and management. The point of this cultural training alongside job training is to make Western tourists feel more comfortable in their consumption of the Other’s culture. It is crucial to identify that this training operates in supreme irony: to note that the very thing which Westerners come to partake in – namely “exotic” Balinese culture – is obliviated by their very presence, necessarily modified and morphed into something more artificial and more palatable.

After a brief interlude to the north coast of Lovina (and after the decision to cut our travel length solidly in half), we retired, half in jest and half in disoriented curiosity, to the South-eastern family-tourist nirvana of Sanur. We felt suddenly and suspiciously comfortable; Sanur had beautiful white soft sand beaches set between dazzlingly blue seas and expensive Italian restaurants. It had coffee that didn’t taste like popcorn. It had the most pathetic Legong dance performance I have ever seen, set out of pace to a recorded soundtrack. It had rock music and pool tables and giant chess boards. Never have I felt like more of an American than at that moment; I felt comfortable, and it was so not okay that I felt comfortable.

What with the touristic tendency to insist on accumulating greater similitude rather than greater difference (that things be just different enough to still be comfortable), I worry that Sanur (and presumably Kuta and Seminyak) shine as warning signals for the rest of the island: that this is the last and final state of the capitalist tourist economy. This wasteland of enjoyment: a stripped down, washed-up imitation of an American resort, replete with fancy hotels (toilet tissue fully stocked) and European fine dining experiences where visitors can haggle good-naturedly over the $4-5 price of a locally produced sweatshop shirt and spend their languid evenings reading Eat, Pray, Love, digging their toes into the sand.

Should You Travel?

Before my friend and I left for Bali, we were inundated with the usual guidance and recommendations from friends, family, advisors, teachers, and others whom all emphatically instructed us: TRAVEL. It mattered not where or why, apparently. What mattered only was that we do go. Now, in hindsight, I am not so convinced by this vigorous and vague directive. Should I travel again? Should you? Where, why, by what means, and with what intentions? It is generally true that the Balinese experience elevated standards of living from the money introduced to their economy through tourism. It is also true that the island is suffering from over-development and environmental degradation in the form of polluted and eroded beaches, water shortages, and prevalent plastic waste clogged in rivers. My brief presence in Bali, however small, contributed both literally and symbolically to this paradoxical progression.

During our trip, two Balinese men lamented wistfully (while they sold us some mass-produced trinket) that they cannot afford to travel and have hardly ever left their hometown, let alone the island of Bali. This probably wouldn’t be so cognitively unpleasant for them and others like them in and of itself if the Balinese were surrounded predominantly by other people who also didn’t travel. After all, one can’t possibly feel too bad about what one does not even know one is missing. However, the Balinese are surrounded by tourists who have travelled thousands of miles for thousands of dollars to visit them all year round. And not only do they have to see those tourists faces everyday and endure their presence; they have to make a living pandering to their stupid holiday whims. I do not wish this perpetual sense of paucity on anyone.

“But Sarah,” one might arguably present “even if you don’t bring your physical presence to Bali, or any other tourist destination, your privileged existence contributes to someone’s perpetual sense of paucity all year round, even in America.” And this person would be right. I am of upper middle-class means; I have gone to college. Those experiences can sometimes put others around me at some kind of experiential disadvantage (I’ll spare the more elaborate theory, but suffice it to say that the Have’s only Have on the backs of the Have-nots). But it is also simply true that two wrongs do not make right. Personally, refraining from spreading and representing what negative influence I can while abroad is still better than simply observing that I am complicit in various kinds of social inequality and throwing all good intentions out the window. The least I can do is not cart my fleshy intrusive privilege halfway around the world for someone else to massage.

Let’s be blunt. In Bali, I contributed financially and symbolically to structures of oppression which I purport to resist at home. Of course I cannot help but contribute at home too – and it takes and will continue to take a lot of thinking and communal effort to minimize inequality even in my own neighborhood – but the novel situation of Bali and it’s tourist imaginary as an invented holiday snack for the peace-utopia-spirit-community-culture starved of Euro-Austro-America has thrown my privilege into stark disparity. Realizing this, and continuing to participate, could only serve to make me more of an asshole. Which is why I made the informed decision to leave Bali two weeks before our original departure date.