The presentation focuses on the ways localities, nation-states and national or international activists (as the former’s spokespersons) respond to excessive cinematic touristification in reactionary or defensive ways. The cases upon which I draw are mostly episodic, but crucial for the current global climate of hostility against forms of strengerhood. Because established analytical frames on social movements do not assist in the study of most such episodic expressions of discontent, a new analytical model is devised to tease out their affective significance in the grand scheme of globalisation.

1. Sociology & Social Policy Research Culture Seminar Series 2018-2019
Reconsidering tourismophobia in cinematic tourism mobilities
Rodanthi Tzanelli (r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk)
The Hobbit Protests,
Auckland 2010
Image: Marty Melville,
Flickr.

2. Learning from the best (or worst?)
Self-immolation as reflexivity

3. The context and the concept: (cinematic) overtourism
tourism mobilities over and beyond and destination capacity and the host’s
ability to manage
• Second decade of 21st century marked by overtourism, producing socio-economic
and cultural problems, regarding population management, environmental
pollution, hospitality provision and deterioration in permanent resident/citizen’s
well-being
• Nation-states caught unprepared, especially with massive influx of middle-class
Chinese tourists in Europe, adding millions to the millions of visitors to tourist
attractions
• Convention of 60 Ministers and private-sector leaders in November 2017 to
discuss ‘the issue’ at a summit co-organised by the United Nations Overtourism
• 21st-century global tourist development identifying/developing a new niche:
cinematic/film-induced tourism, which leads to generation of multiple mobilities,
which necessitate management (governmobility)
• But can we manage the heart of hospitality caterers? What is the effect of such
pressure?

4. The context and the concept:
tourismophobia – is it just about class?
• Originating, together with concept of ‘tourism monoculture’ in Spanish contexts of urban
overtourism, and referring to hostility against tourist visitors by organised (unionised) labour
• But terms are recycled by native mass media to both communicate social discontent with the
pressures linked to tourism growth and to discredit social movements and civil society groups
involved in its contestation (Milano 2017)
• My thesis wedded to tourist development from moving image industries, and finds original
definition unhelpful in that:
(i) It does not examine the true heterological discourse hidden in tourismophobia (exclusion of
tourist subject from politically and culturally demarcated land/heritage as pollutant)
(ii) It does not account for the experiential and performative/embodied aspects of this hostility
or the complexities of its cultural rationale
(iii) It reduces complex entangled global processes of cultural communication to ‘politics’, thus
also celebrating reason over their affective/emotional power (which can also be dangerous)
(iv) It is incurably European in its conception, reiterating the ‘captive mind’s’ (Alatas 2004) tourism
monoculture!

5. Sociology facing camping:
tourismophobia as an axial malaise
• Overtouristified now, spectacular domains of
heritage broadcast local complaint: we have
replaced Agamben’s (1998) ‘state of exception’
• This is the new ‘state of invasion’; ‘poor migrants’
is been replaced by ‘poor locals’, who are rendered
homeless by AirBnB entrepreneurs and tourist
hordes
• Tourismophobia: the urgency to exclude the
‘accursed part’ (Bataille, 1995), which is both the
civilised other of tourism and the uncivilised other
of underdevelopment!
• Overtourism/tourismophobia encapsulate:
1. The unique experience of incompleteness as a
creative human being, able to master a beautiful
world for well-being purposes (class)
2. The affective experience of reacting to this inner
conflict by repeating comforting patterns of a
shattered identity (ethnicity/nationality)
Social theory has traditionally interpreted the camp as an anomaly, as an
exceptional site situated on the margins of society, aiming to neutralize
its 'failed citizens' and 'enemies'. However, in contemporary society, 'the
camp' has now become the rule and consequently a new interrogation of
its logic is necessary.

6. Sociology facing camping:
tourismophobia as an axial malaise
• Collection of tourismophobia cases from different continents and cultures to
uncover sociological patterns of similarity and difference
GAPS & CORRECTIVES:
• Conventional cosmopolitan theory seriously lacking exploration of
affect/emotion, and too Eurocentric (and often androcentric/racialized), despite
its programmatic statements to the contrary 
• Eisenstadt’s (2003) focus on Axial World civilisations dominated by religion
specifically (this, though useful topically, also too Eurocentric in its Weberian
conception and lacks class element)
• Habermassian theory reduces human experience and action to reason 
• ‘Mobilities paradigm’ ditches the entire sociological tradition  (Urry 2003) BUT
makes a valid point about the outdatedness of sociology as part of Western
modernity!

7. Sociology facing camping:
filling in gaps but not ignoring traditions
• I suggest a critical use of mobilities in a sociological synthesis of
phenomenology with materialism: affect before discourse, unlike
Butler’s Foucaultian premise of performativity, to understand
‘responses’ to cinematic overtourism
• I suggest a modified study of atmospheres, critical but receptive of
Germanophone critical tradition: tourismophobia as iconoclasm (Latour
2002)
• At the heart of my question stands the aesthetic legitimation of
atmospheres as forms of creativity and art (By whom? Why?)

8. Unfulfilled states of being and collective performativity:
Bloch facing Butler
• Though small in scale, lay responses
formative of full-scale ‘movement’: Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1988) ‘molar’ (highly
organised, easily represented and expressed
and aligned with state or non-state actors)
and ‘molecular’ assemblages (disorganised,
vital, operating below the threshold of
perception and associated with ‘becomings’)
• Performative aspects of such micro- and
macro-‘movements’/responses as ‘sigillary
signs’, unfulfilled symbols that may
encapsulate a desired image of how things
might be – the principle of hope (Bloch 1985)
• Repeated performance in them as inchoate
whispers of desire awaiting full articulation
(Butler with hermeneutics (Alexander 2007)!)

9. Epistemic misalignment: host localities turn their behaviour inwards, and juxtapose
established cultural modes and native affective atmospheres to cinematic
touristification imports (post-colonial contexts) (Mignolo 2009)
Mumbai, Slumdog Millionaire industry:
Blocking creation of images by visitors, manipulating digital
image-making in liaison with business
Rio de Janeiro, City of God: in liaison with NGO (Tourism Concern) and
native academic activism appropriating tools of movie-makers in film
school that works with Rocinha schools to offer practical and theoretical
workshops on subjects like animation and human rights. So far: 3,500
students, over 150 workshops, and over 150 short movies.

10. Hostipitality: Derrida (2000): hospitality and hostility form challenging blends in
environments guided by legal regulations of human mobility, alliance, and
communication (mostly Western and European contexts). A response may borrow
from or revert to religious tropes, but its nature is essentially aesthetic
Dubrovnik, Croatia: Game of Thrones filming crew and tourists
‘desecrating’ Catholic Church of St Nicholas. which takes a
hardline stance against public nudity, acts of sexuality and
“immorality” (Cercei’s walk of shame). Dubrovnik’s Catholic
Church aligned with discourses of heritage conservation.
Norway Frozen: the alleged cinematic overtourism is set to be
tackled especially in Geiranger and Flåm, villages in the region’s
two UNESCO-listed fjords, Geirangerfjord and Aurlandsfjord
(over 700,000 tourists a year – just ca.200 residents).
Administrative management = local nomination of
Reinebringenmountain as a ‘forest of s***’

11. (Post)industrial disobedience: Activism taken up by groups in creative markets, which seek to adjust the conditions
under which they provide immaterial forms of labour (post-Fordist environments of flexible capital accumulation,
which involve postnational conglomerates or contingent strategic alliances between different postindustrial
organisations, such as film and tourism) (Piore and Sabel 1984; Esping-Andersen 1994; Lash and Urry 1994).
Controversy commencing with a redundancy but
escalating in WB threats to move the production of the
Hobbit outside NZ, and a debate on the regulation of
the movie/tourist industry.
Labour MP Trevor Mallard: ‘New Zealand’s sovereignty
is finished’ (Murray 29 October 2010)
Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson on activism: ‘we were
not prepared to see thousands of Kiwi jobs disappear
and … the hard work of the many talented New
Zealanders who built our film industry put at risk’
(Telegraph 29 October 2010).
An international artistic community’s creative labour
used to amplify the ‘labour of national memory-work’
(Gabriel 2004 : 149–50), transforming a group of films
into expressions of patriotic commitment to
marketable-invented memory (Anderson 1991 : 193;
Huyssen 1995).
Striking as touring/pilgrimage that replaces pre-colonial
heritage with a ‘digitopia’ (or simulated retrotopia?? –
Bauman 2016)

12. More questions…
• Tourismophobia’s nature is essentially heterological, in that its ‘heterogeny’ (the tourist,
tourism (mobilities)) is indefinable ‘and can only be determined through “negation”, i.e.
in relation to what it is not’ (Bataille 1985: 98)
• Science, rationality or religion do not define heterology on their own – as a result, it is
better to examine it in aesthetic terms through its ‘seemings’ (Peirce 1998)
• Unfortunately, this task always reduces its performative/emotive nature to a spectacle:
‘the heterogenous can only be rendered as art, as spectacle, through a mimetic gesture
that gives expression to its unassimilable forces’ (Carolyn Dean 1992: 229)
• The captive mind (Alatas 2004) or the art of the possible? (Rich, 1991): a turn to
‘cosmetic cosmopolitanism’ as an education of desire that may overlay local realities
(Nederveen Pieterse 2006b : 1250) or that may pluralise them?
1. Cosmopolitanism as reiteration of ‘great European heritage of nationalism’, producing
citizenships and excluding the ‘other’ – we enter ‘phenomenology of whiteness’
(Ahmed 2014; Fortier 2012; Hunter 2016)
2. OR a creative dialogue that forms ‘exit routes’ from poverty and isolation?