The Guardian portrays tourism like a big shopping mall. It has its own travels section, much like a business section, as a resource for interested travelers to shop for the best destination and the best activities. They offer 68 different options for types of travel, ranging from gay and lesbian travel, wildlife holidays, bars and clubs, beach holidays, and green travel. The only two options that fit under my topic of cultural tourism were cultural trips.
I found a very interesting article break down after doing some content analysis of the Cultural Trips section on October 23, 2011. Six of the fifteen articles focused on galleries, museums and theater, one article focused in the decline of tourism in Japan and the remaining eight articles forced on selling a city or country as a tourist destination. Four of the eight focused on food, nightlife, accommodations and architecture from Western states, like France. However, the other half featured locations from Papua New Guinea, Australia, Benin and Mexico.
The most noteworthy was from the Papua New Guinea article titled In the palm of your hand: sea kayaking in Papua New Guinea, in which I quote the following: “That evening, young men with white-painted torsos performed a traditional sing-sing to drums and guitars and children chanted stories about fishing”. Within this article the author, Susan Gough Henly, employs cultural stereotypes, beach tourism and generalizing statements to attract the tourist to this idyllic isolated spot. By describing expected encounters, like chanting locals, Henly confirms perceptions and makes the location seem safe and appealing to a tourist.
Within the Cultural-trip section, there is a list of 30 travel destinations, not one African country is listed, however New Zealand is. Investigating this link, I noticed that the top three articles were titled Rugby World Cup City Guides: Auckland/Wellington/Dunedin. Since the Rugby World Cup has been taking place in New Zealand, rugby type articles have dominated this section. Each “City Guide” has a small cultural aspect to it, the rest focusing on accommodations, bars, restaurants and shopping. Auckland’s section focuses on a cutting-edge contemporary art gallery, Wellington’s highlights the movie-making industry, and Dunedin’s features art galleries, all three failing to mention the Māori art and culture.
The next travel article is from February 2009, “Haka championships in New Zealand.” It focused on Māori performing arts, in particular on the national Kapa Haka competitions that bring together groups of professional performers to compete for the number one performing group of the nation. The article features 12 photographs of the performers and the All Blacks rugby players performing the haka with captions. I was pleased to see that the subject of one caption was exposing the debate over intellectual property rights to the Kamate, Kamate haka that has been appropriated by teams and advertising campaigns all over the world. I was even more surprised to read: “The haka is not exclusively a war dance (haka simply means to dance) - there are different versions performed to welcome distinguished guests, or to celebrate important occasions.” This aspect of the supposed warrior dance is rarely discussed at all, instead the haka is seen as solely an intimidation war-dance. Although this article discussed Māori performing arts, it was not a travel guide or solicitation for New Zealand like all the rest of the cultural tourism articles.
Notice that the New Zealand articles I have mentioned are largely based on none indigenous cultural aspects of tourism or haka-related culture, even though they are found under the section New Zealand and Cultural Trips. This exemplifies the idea of the haka as the culturally representative symbol. Within the New Zealand and Cultural Trips section, I could not find one article about the Māori, outside of the stereotypical haka performances.