German?

LET THE SHOW BEGIN                      CULTURE!

"Our vacation is sacred to us!" - Or something like almost every German would talk about the usual two to three weeks out of the year. Holiday for us means leisure, rest - but especially travel to get to know foreign places, taste exotic food, see breathtaking nature or just lie in the sun on the beach. For us, German, which we call "world travel champions" were, until recently, part of the annual holiday to normal. But what does tourism for those countries that are traveled? What global influence our annual trip delusion? And what we want it - except rich tan and romantic sunsets?

We ask Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild, the research on the anthropology of tourism among others at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

fluter.de: Woman Römhild, what about the cliché image of white European, with the sangria in buckets and the hotel's own entertainment program can be fine in the summer in Mallorca?

Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild: Still pretty much the concept of mass tourism says it already: As before, the vast majority of Europeans in the "package holiday" on the go. The "Standard tourists" booked this "all-inclusive wellness package" at a tourist service provider and must worry about anything - often leaving not even during his vacation the hotel grounds. Another form of mass tourism - at least as popular - is the city tourism, mainly short trips of 3-5 days.

But globally, and this mass tourism is by no means a "white", north European phenomenon: the high number of Asian European travelers and tourists from the post-socialist Eastern shows this as well as the fact that Germany, Europe and the global north are themselves immigrant societies - and therefore also many of the tourists coming here as a transnational, postcolonial Europeans are traveling. The rigid categories of holidays territories and Urlauberherkünfte how it has shaped the classic tourism research, from reality for a long time - crosses - and often not only today.

And what about the so-called individual tourism?

"Individual tourism" forms of its self-starting it were the other pole of tourism: It is self-organized holiday, considers himself individually, which by the way does not exclude that he does not still runs on mass-tourist paths.

Then there is the category adventure or sports, the still thriving sex tourism industry - and do not forget: business, make up a separate segment of the tourism industry.

If you travel, you must always use both tourist ...?

At the global level does not work this standardized shortening, as we use it in Europe, of course. There are a number of borderline cases that can not be clearly assigned to the "tourism". Perhaps we should therefore not talk about tourism, but mobility. Someone who travels on a tourist visa, but then decides to stay at the resort and to work there - this is still a tourist? Or devout Muslims, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Pakistani seasonal workers in the Gulf states - tourists? The tourism concept is strongly influenced by the west and includes in particular a pleasure character. In Latin America, Africa and large parts of Asia you will surely be mobile, but not necessarily be understood as a "tourist".

Travel is a privilege that we do not appreciate?

In the northern and western European countries traveling is a social standard for almost all population groups. Irrespective of the different forms of being in transit, traveling is a cultural capital that is natural for the modern man, he can almost always travel when, how long, and where he wants. These possibilities have mainly residents of formerly colonized countries due to the political border regime not - they get a visa at your fingertips.

That travel is also a political issue, many tourists does not seem to care. Most people are still mainly to good weather and fine sandy beach, right?

When traveling, it is primarily an out everyday experience. We want to see your holiday something which is contrary to our daily lives. All the more interesting it is then observed again that we yet again see in the distance situations, we know: spaghetti at the buffet in Egypt, the nightly bingo round at the hotel in Tunisia. But we feel - perhaps because the sun shines continuously or people look different - that we could escape our everyday life. Holidays are always a trying out alternatives to routine and, interestingly, we are particularly "vulnerable" for places that premodern us or particularly appear originally "pristine" nature or the simple lifestyle of fantasized of us Greek fisherman who every evening in front of his house drinking a glass of red wine, are perfect projection of our desires.

Romantic pictures that you draw there. But what if the reality on the ground does not correspond to the projections?

The lofty goal of the individual or alternative tourists to interact with the local people in dialogue to get to know the "authentic life" often fails already brought to the ideas of the "other" that make a dialogue of equals impossible. Nevertheless, the imagination is the great capital of tourism and despite the hidden racism, with the idealizations or exotisisms - "the fiery southerners" or similar - accompanied, lies in the satisfaction of these needs enormous economic potential for the holiday countries.

So they play good with and presented in a "cultural show"?

If they want to benefit from tourism, they are forced to face the projections available, this is true. Again, to think that all locals to victims would be too one-sided - because they, in turn, develop formats, how to use tourism for itself.

For Example?

In my research I have come across in Greece again and again to people who make the impossibility of such authentic representation advantage: For example Albanian waiter in Crete, which are believed to Greeks - simply because they corresponded to the stereotypical image of the Greeks. The search for authenticity in tourism is not uncommon for staged spectacle to the satisfaction of the visitors - and simultaneously creates a framework for migration. There are actually often immigrants, on the borders of Europe, at the same time are indeed the main tourist areas, first find work -. Namely, in the hotels, restaurants and clubs for tourists In this respect, it may be said, constitute the majority of migrants of what we want to experience as "authentic" - and get also presented.

Biography: Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild is a professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The question of the interrelationship of globalization , tourism and migration constitutes one of its research priorities. Your mobility research emphasis placed on the Mediterranean, which is in a sense "hotspot" for tourism and for migration.