The New Interpretive Impetus --- the Reach Beyond: A Liquid Modern Critique of the Nomadic Conceptual Capacity of Tourism Studies Today

This presentation is the first of two cousin working papers on the fate of culture under globalisation / glocalisation and the found intermingling of populations. It focusses upon the changing role of culture and identity under liquid modernity, and it constitutes an applied extension (to Tourism Studies) of the ideas of the sociologist of surveillance, Bauman.

It will address the following four points about the new impermanence of heterogenous space, under the globalising imperatives of liquid modernity, where seemingly:

1 = the world distribution of capital and information has become exterritorial, and governments have had to cede control over economic and cultural processes to politically-resistant ‘market forces’. Consonantly ‘culture’ today tends to be a matter of ‘offers’ within the consumer-orientated market place – a means of seduction;

2 = the old / established right of nations to self-determination is slowly evaporating, and the identity-guaranteeing sovereignity of nation-states has corroded. Accordingly, nations are turning from being territorially cohesive bodies into evermore mobile and spatially dispersed associations of spiritually allied units;

3 = ‘culture’ is not so frequently found to be (nowadays) the messianic force by and through which (under high nationalism) it had been . . . i.e., enlightening, converting, reflecting, perfecting local / national citizens … but had becoming a perpetually widening polylogue; and,

4 = ways of life have tended to drift in varied and not necessarily coordinated directions, where cultural relations have become rather less ‘vertical’ and more commonly ‘horizontal’. As old certainties and loyalties are consonantly swept away, people are prone to seeking new belongings / new cultural identity storylines which are decidedly different from the old narratives built on an assured naturalness of historical belonging.