Gendered 'living Like The Other' In Turkey

Some tourists, those who decide to stay a longer while than other tourists in a place they like, might ‘fetishise the idea of ‘living like the locals’ (Davidson 2005: 46). One of the ways Davidson suggests they might do this is through ‘integrating themselves within and among local, indigenous communities, learning from them forms of experience and knowledge rejected and repressed by the West’ (2005:51). Some might even enunciate their sense of belonging by becoming tourism entrepreneurs and playing the role of host to tourist guests.

Related to this, Soares (1998) talks about globalization as increasing the opportunities for copying which may be related to a desire to perform one’s own fantasies about the ‘other’. Soares adds that, therefore, ‘mimicry can be a weapon against the political reification of identities’ because ‘the experience of being something else challenges reified identities and brings the possibility of circulating, shifting, and changing to the forefront of social and cultural life’ (1998: 295). Such mimicry is riddled with paradox and contradiction, however, because it is never possible to fully become the other.

This paper considers the gendered dimensions of such tourist attempts at ‘living like the other’, at belonging and at becoming ‘other’. Drawing on my long-term ethnographic study of tourism relationships in Göreme, Turkey, the paper discusses the different ways in which foreign (yabanci) women and men experience and negotiate their attempts at ‘living like the locals’. The discussion will focus on the variable paradoxes and contradictions which foreign women and men face when attempting to live in Göreme for an extended period, as well as on how the paradox of it never being possible to fully become the other is different for each.