 Hello there it's Thursday at noon. I know it is Do you remember our arrangement Thursdays at noon on CFUV Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first-person plural You make it sound excessively attractive That's what I have in mind This year the Victoria literary arts festival Celebrated its 10th anniversary With three times the number of authors and nearly twice the number of events as last year the lineup of 28 authors presented a variety of novelists poets and nonfiction writers from Canada the United Kingdom Ireland France Australia the US and Japan Audiences could attend readings themed discussions on-stage interviews and conversations In venues throughout downtown Victoria including art galleries heritage sites Gardens and major theaters our interest in culture and cultural production Let us to look into the festival in an age when books are beginning to appear passe and low-tech We have found that literature continues to influence culture even in high-tech cyberspace book clubs Quotations from favorite authors and lists of best reads prevail reading is still popular and still a part of what constructs culture In a way one could view the worldwide web as both reproducing literature and creating more varied forms of literature after all much of the web is text-based and Requires both good reading and writing abilities to make the experience worthwhile festivals such as the annual event here in Victoria Provide an opportunity for readers to meet their favorite authors and to become a prize of the latest good reads We were not disappointed among the wonderful writers in this year's lineup was pico ire Ironically it was surfing the net that first introduced us to pico's work Several quotes by him are popular among bloggers. That is people who write online journals The first quote we read by him remains our favorite Quote may we remember as we log on that half the world's people have never used a telephone and Recall as we chatter that most of those around us have no chance to speak or move as they choose Close quote seeing his name on the literary arts festival list prompted us to investigate his writings further We were excited by what we found Like us mr. Iyer has spent a great deal of time Completing culture power and the global community His work has a personal flavor and his insights into the nature of culture within a global community are sensitive and even hopeful at times He sees commonality even among difference Unlike us he has traveled quite a bit his writings are most often categorized as travel writing Born in Oxford England to Indian parents Moving to Southern California at the age of seven and crisscrossing the world as an adult Mr.. Iyer has called himself a no where in Someone who does not quite fit into the preconceived cultural categories This makes him a different kind of travel writer His writing like his travels in his cultural background is hard to contain in just one genre This year he came to Victoria to highlight his latest book Abandoned which is his second novel after we investigated his work. We knew we wanted to talk to him We inquired and were excited to have our request for an interview granted When we met with mr. Iyer we were delighted to find a gentle soul whose one-to-one persona did not differ at all from the sensitivity of his words in print He generously sat and discussed the ins and outs of the future of the global village in troubled times The place of literature and culture and the ways in which writing interacting and traveling can make the world a better place to be These contemplations seem important in a time when wars conflicts and disputes seem to be rooted in cultural differences and misunderstandings In addition traveling the globe is easier than ever, but it is also more fraught with problems than ever attacks on tourists Global health threats such as the recent SARS crisis and environmental concerns regarding fossil fuel usage Provide layers of complexity to the idea of travel reminiscent of the archetype of the stranger or the concept of the other The traveler occupies a position that is both outside and inside social discourse More than a voyeur the traveler changes the destination by visiting it Today on first person plural we consider the place of the traveler in an episode recall He's a real no warrior Noted traveler someone who has moved and spoken freely in many venues and someone who has reflected upon other places in other cultures Your words suggest that there is great variation among people and that these variations create classes of haves and have nots The events of the last year or two seem to be rooted in culture clashes especially among cultures with varying degrees of power and with horrifying results Is there a common ground where people from different and unequal backgrounds can meet? How do we celebrate our differences without the celebration leading to deadly conflicts? Well, I very much think there is a common ground and uh, I think all of us who travel have had the experience of certainly finding yourself in Mongolia or Vancouver or San Francisco or whatever Surrounded by people with whom we don't share a common language and instantly finding we can communicate through a smile through body language Who just something fundamental human and I think travel always reassures me in my faith in humanity Both in my sense that in the poorest parts of the world people are amazingly kind the people who seem to have nothing Lavish everything on those of us from very affluent places But also affirms my sense in humanity in the sense of Being reminded of that we have as much in common as we have a part and in fact in the new novel that I just brought out called abandoned A few years ago as I was living in California while Washington was ostensibly at war with radical or political Islam I read as many people have read that the single most popular poet in America Them and now is an Islamic poet Rumi the great Sufi mystic from the 13th century And so I thought that even as we were concentrating so much on all that Washington and the Islamic world didn't share Here were Americans turning in their time of need to an Islamic poet and that suggested exactly to go back to your question This place of commonness and in so far as there might be any Resolution between these two forces it seemed to exist maybe in the cultural plane I feel that politically governments and institutions are always defined by Interest in our ideologies and always thinking about us versus them But culturally and on an individual level I think we're much more fascinated by the other and I've tried to stress What what brings us together rather than what pulls us apart? Do you think I like that kind of I don't want to call it a dichotomy but kind of contrasting the political to the cultural And that's one thing that we've thought about a lot in our work is that there is that working in politics or working Towards political solutions often don't work out because they're about you against me They they're kind of us them mentality in it So in your travels when you're talking about connecting with people from different cultures. Do you sometimes Feel that otherness. I mean are you aware of Ways other than fighting or conflicting that you can respect that otherness without destroying it or Mocking it into you know, like blurring it to where it doesn't exist anymore Yes, yes, because I think when I try to travel is to be drawn towards otherness The act of traveling is to be fascinated by the other something different from what you have at home And to be pulled into it and pulled into the mystery and and and romance of something you don't understand And what you also find and what I find constantly when I travel is that most of the people I meet Are fascinated by the otherness of me to to them I'm this exotic coming from this land of plenty And the closest they can Get to this country that often they dream about so more specifically when I've been in the middle east for example Or almost anywhere I find that the people I meet and not are often quite suspicious of or hostile to America the Washington government and yet the same people of course fascinated by American culture long to see American movies Long to make American friends some of them actually long to become Americans themselves And so while they think of America as their formal enemy Inside their hearts and especially in their imaginations They're devouring everything of America that they can get and then when I come back from those trips to california I find my friends there aren't very interested in the Assad government in Damascus or whatever But long to hear about sufi concerts ghazals The Moorish after texture in its origin that's so much a part of california and again have that same Attraction really towards the other as you are saying and so I suppose My my journeys have really been voyages into the other and into trying to understand the other And through that into seeing how much the other has in common with us I'm for example, I read this book just now abandoned about The Islamic world and I think one reason I did that was that I'm of Hindu origin And so I felt for all my years I've heard a lot about the hindi perspective and the single most important thing for hindi is to travel to the other side of the street And see the world who thinks he knows as it would look to The person he regards as his enemy and and in those ways To try to dissolve a sense of enemy and ally because I think the imagination is the one faculty whereby we can Work through and around our differences and actually come to that common ground Are you optimistic that these kinds of things can translate into more material wealth for people or More equality and material Well, and can translate into less war less conflict those kind of things That's a good question and because I think that is a serious problem that in in some ways at a time when Our magazines and our commercials tell us that we're living in a smaller world And we're all part of a global village it seems to me that the distances and differences between us are actually greater than ever before I remember reading a few years ago that three american individuals have the same net worth as 48 whole nations of the world And even in america, which is a relatively democratic and prosperous place One individual mr. Gates has the same net worth as 100 million people So I suppose my travels have in some ways been about affirming and asserting that commonness we're talking about But they've also told me that beneath that surface in some ways the differences As you were saying between the house and the have nots are increasing Many people worry about the effect of tourism and feel that we're spoiling destroying the cultures that we visit And that's partially true, but I've always been um a great Believer in tourism partly because I think we actually do bring revenue to the rest of the world and more than that We bring information and whenever I've been to a very closed or oppressed country Whether it's cuba or bummer or north korea My sense is that what those people are crying out for more than anything is some contact with the rest of the world They're living in a vacuum even just to know that they have a friend in canada or america opens a small imaginative window for them So I'm a great believer in in trying to take what we can to those places But you're right in suggesting that I don't think those inequalities are going to go away quickly And I remember a few years ago When the movie the sixth sense was so popular and it seemed to me to speak in a small way for what's going on Around the world because everywhere I went in the world people were watching the same movie But it was almost as if they were they were seeing a completely different film and story When I went when I was saw it in japan where I lived part of the time People were not at all Unsettled by the ghosts in the sixth sense, but they're very startled by the psychologist because they don't have psychologists in japan They have ghosts everywhere, but they're not when they were psychologists In I think parts of the islamic world Just the notion of a single mother would be more unsettling to them than anything else in that film It doesn't translate to that cultural context then when I saw the movie in california The big shock was just the bruce willis could act And so it's as if with titanic or jenna filo pezzo, whichever of these cultural forms you take This you see them all around the world But really each culture is translating it into their own language in a way and so they're not seeing the same thing As that's and it gives the illusion of sameness But deep down it only accentuates the difference in some ways A good example of that would be clear. Jebron's the prophet which remains a perennial bestseller in the states Yeah, no, that's right And I think one reason that I wanted to investigate roomy and sufiism in this book Was very much my sense that he's become almost a successor to calio jebron And that a lot of people around me I too maybe would devour roomy poems and if we like them We'll forget conveniently that he's of islamic origin or that we'll Misunderstand them that his poems. I think which we'd like love poems are really about his relation to his god But we take them as just love poems and use them to woo the girl across the table from us at the pizza joint Your your writing is quite personal And uh, even you know the writing that you've done. I've read a couple of essays of what Just about your travels. You do it kind of from your own point of view Um, and you call yourself a know where you which is a which is something that I relate to Having traveled all over north america in the last few years We spent Uh 15 months wasn't nine months out of 15 months in a hotel. So oh my god Being vagabonds across north america Uh, so I I related to that I wonder if you could kind of Talk about what the pitfalls are to that kind of of life where you're always sort of moving and And going somewhere and being mobile And I mean I have a sense that you're having a lot more fun at it than I did So, um, you might also could talk about you know, what whether the rewards are Yes, I mean, I think the main pitfall to use a variation of your word is vagabondage I mean being caught up in in that sense of perpetual motion where you're moving and moving and moving But you don't necessarily have a sense of direction or um an investment in where you're going and you're right I think one thing that I've been interested in a lot and I've been writing about a lot Uh, but I think of as the new people of the 21st century almost who are living in the cracks between cultures in the passageways between places Starting with my own example because I was born in england to indian parents and we moved to california when I was seven So from the time I was eight years old I was not really indian and not really indian not really american And really regarded that as a rare and very fortunate position to be in that I had access to many cultures But I wasn't imprisoned in any of them Um, and I think that makes me a sort of honoree spiritual canadian because so many people in canada are really in this situation Much more than I they have so many cultures inside them. You're listening to first person plural on cfu v 101.9 fm victoria So I've I've looked a lot at the possibilities of these um new kind of people who can in some ways Look beyond the divisions and conflicts of their parents Let's say if you if an indian grows up in india He thinks of pakistan as the enemy that when he comes to toronto or vancouver He has more in common with the pakistani that he meets them apart and they've brought together actually by their somewhat common background And so I've been interested in the way that For example when cabinet attendant comes down the aisle passing out the disembarkation forms and they ask for very simple answers to questions Where do you come from? Where are you going? What's your citizenship? What's your home address? More and more of us can only give essay length answers to those uh questions So that in some ways is is to me the good thing that when my grandparents were born and all of them were born in india Not very long ago all four of them had this very precise sense They knew what their region was what their caste was what their tribe was who their enemies were And now many of us like me are free from that but the drawback as you were I think suggesting in your question is that if you're living in the cracks between cultures You wouldn't fall between the cracks almost like falling between the gratings and the sidewalk You can end up neither here nor there you end up I think in the spiritual equivalent of one of those airline Airport passageways long gray impersonal places and you don't feel the sense of belonging And I think the good thing about the modern world is that more and more of us get Construct our sense of identity from scratch. It's not given to us the way it was to our grandparents But the drawback is if you don't very consciously answer the question Who are you and where do you belong? You end up totally lost and you crave some sense of affiliation or solid ground Beneath your feet which you don't have and so I think for me my sense has been that since I didn't have Physical sense of home when I grew up Anytime in my life that there's a great importance in constructing some inner sense of home That I take with me everywhere I go the way a snail does And that can be either a person or a set of beliefs or a place you always go to for example A few years ago. I noticed that I had 1.5 million miles on united airlines alone And I don't even like united airlines I mean if you can fly a system is one of those strange things where you spend six days in l and you get the seventh day free So at that point I realized well what I probably need most in my life is stillness And so I began going to a catholic monastery several times a year I'm not catholic But just to have this sense of sense of nurse and changeless nurse and have an ankle really and so for now 12 years I've been going four times a year to a catholic monastery just to make sure that I have some strong sense of Of well I'm going to say family but community and home and something that never moves even while I'm moving around the world Yeah, I used to admire our cat because we took our cat on all of these travels And the cat the cat every hotel room has a bed, right? And so the cat always attached herself to the bed and it was like if she walked into the room and knew there was a bed She was home. Yes And and it just amazed me of course it drove the maids crazy because she got very upset when they came in and tried to Make up her bed but But I always I thought I was learning kind of a lesson from her because she picked up on In ways that I didn't really the kind of commonality to all of those places That we went that no matter what we stayed in whether it was a suite or You know a little shack on the whole, you know Hole in the wall place somewhere on the road There was always a bed Yes And because she was working out of instinct and following that instinct that we have too But we sometimes forget about or argue or something that she needs that that homing instinct Yes, and she's a pretty amazing cat because of that because Cats generally don't travel well and she's that's right. She's gotten good at travel My cat gets sick every time she's in the car. So you're well ahead of me. No She still gets sick in the car. That's why you didn't enjoy traveling as much as I do You've mentioned your new novel and I was curious because I look back Over you know, I'm anticipating talking to you We kind of look back And look to the works that you've done and you've kind of divided your works up between fiction And non-fiction and I wondered if you could kind of put the writer's hat on for a little bit and talk to us About what fiction accomplishes that non-fiction doesn't advice versa And why you choose, you know, most writers kind of pick a genre and stay in it But you seem to be Comfortable Yes Talking and much like you're traveling that's right comfortable in different genres It is and it is much like my traveling because I think it speaks to a kind of restlessness And interest in adventure and challenge and not wanting to stick down Even to the rootedness of one genre and wanting to try something different every time But I think Fiction is a way of getting at the same issues that I'm thinking about in travel, but through a different part of me And I think the way I do it non-fiction I've done a lot of writing about places about travel And what I tend to do is go to a place for two weeks Take hundreds of pages of notes go back to my desk and bring the notes into a kind of order So that I think non-fiction for me is almost a journey towards knowledge and clarity and making sense of the world And fiction for me is a way um It's it's almost a journey into mystery and into a sense of what I don't know and in this new novel I begin in california, which is a place that I know somewhat because I've lived there on enough since i'm seven And I move towards iran, which is a place. I've never been to and in fact in this novel I have 30 pages of vivid fairly detailed description of iran and I deliberately didn't go there Before writing those pages. I've never been there to this day because I wanted to apprehend it through the imagination I thought if I went there I'd instantly be in my sort of travel writers non-fiction mode And I take lots of notes and I'd squeeze them in whether they belonged or not So you're right to suggest that the excitement of fiction for me is that it's a new territory. It's terra incognita It's a form I haven't done very much of and I don't know exactly how to do and that's part of the appeal. It's a way of Looking around the corner So each time I finish a book I want the next book to be as different as possible from the one just concluded So in fact, I've just brought out this novel abandon, but my next book. I know is I've already finished as non-fiction into series of travels and the book after that will be Fiction and I think it's a way to try to keep myself fresh I don't if I feel myself falling into my habits or rats I think that the reader is going to feel that sense of weariness and miss the sense of discovery that I think is where the energy comes from So I'm always trying to shake myself up Is there a buzziness between the line between non-fiction and fiction? I mean you were talking about Not going to do the research in iran Um, I wonder if if that isn't one more thing in the post-modern world That's becoming a little hard to say that's That's a and that's b and never in between shall mean absolutely. There's a great fuzziness. You're right It's one of the book boundaries. It's really collapsed in recent years. I remember pull through wrote a whole series of Stories about travels a few years ago and when they appeared in the new yorker, they were described as fact and fiction Uh, a vs nipal wrote a book a few years ago called away in the world And when it came out in england it came out as a work of non-fiction Secrets, I think they called them the same book came out in america and they called it the novel Bruce chatman's books You know and I now remain mentioning the three major travelers of recent years. Bruce chatman pulled through in vs nipal Bruce chatman's books too. You really can't tell how much he's made up and how much he's reported and that's part of the fascination So you're right and it is a fuzzy line though I find for myself the clearer I make that line The better and I tell myself at least that because I've written a lot of non-fiction about real people in real places When um, I do fiction. I want to take a holiday from that. I want to make Make everything up. But having said that I once wrote a book about a year I spent in japan and the woman I fell in love with and the friends that I made real people and real events And as soon as the book came out I found us in the fiction section And then a couple of years later I wrote a novel about cuba and I had this horrible protagonist He's always drunk and a terrible attitude towards women as far from my experience I hoped as I could make it and as soon as it came out everyone put took it to be a memoir And so it's a little different travel section Exactly, yes. People were saying, yeah, how could you be a drunk all the time? I'm actually a teetotaler, but still Yeah, so even for the reader it's unclear often. Yeah, we've often thought that The business section is always interesting to go through When you go into a bookstore because there are like hundreds of different variations of what makes a business book And so we thought if we ever wrote a book that we would tag it as business Let it show up there and make it more legitimate It's simply a question of putting the genre label on the back of the jacket That's instilligidimation as far as we could tell with the term business And with travel too actually As long as it's another well any place is a place you travel to so When you think about it You've come to victoria to be part of the arts festival the literary arts festival here Is this something that you do often go to different festivals? Not so often. The the actual reason I'm here right now is that I came to this festival last year It's such a wonderful time that I was really excited and pleased when they invited me back and I knew I wanted to come spend more time in victoria But uh, not a great deal There are writers who can almost make a profession of hopping from festival to festival these days because Which I think is a very positive sign And we were just talking about it at a festival event yesterday My sense at least that um, this is supposedly the age of the internet and the age of visuals and tv and mtv and those kind of things and the age of the book seems to be receding And yet in my experience there's more interest in books than ever before more good books being produced And that a festival like this, which is just about books, which is meant to be yesterday's form 400 people were sharp really interested with this very searching questions And it's a very nice affirmation sitting in my little desk in roge Writing these books. It's easy to feel that i'm just casting them out into a black hole But when you come, yeah, it's nice to me and people are reading books and thinking about them and getting changed by them Do you think literary festivals help local culture in any way? Definitely, I mean, I think you have a great advantage in victoria because I suspect there are a lot of readers and book lovers here already And the festival just confirms rather than creating that sense But I think definitely and making reminding people that Writers of books and books are as great a source of wisdom as what you'll find in the cineplex or what you find in tv Or all those the rival forms or what you find in the internet And I think something in the human spirit is cries out for the kind of stories in the kind of space that only books can provide So I don't see Books receding over the horizon at all and I think festivals are a nice way of sort of Concentrating the energy and for me as a writer one purely selfish thing that I love about festivals getting to hear all the other Writers who might never would meet and have the opportunity to listen to otherwise So when I come to a festival like this, I spend most of my time just racing from writer to writer wanting to hear them Great Anything else you want to have? No, I mean, I think we probably covered all your Grand pretty well We appreciate your time And taking time out during the festival. Oh not at all and hope you enjoy victoria in spite of the hail I will and I mean I maybe the one other thing I can say is that Because I've written a lot about globalism and this whole new sense of community and society that's taken shape across the world I mean, that's one reason why I love coming to canada because it seemed to me that Canada is more ahead in thinking about the global world than any country I know anywhere and canadian literature has done so much to try to visualize new kinds of community And so I'm in the u.s. I'm probably a little notorious among my friends There's a great champion of canada and canadian literature But as soon as I come here, I feel that I'm actually taking a little step into the future and so Um, the more that canada can influence the world better as far as I'm concerned Yeah, you may or may not realize that we're from the states No, no, no, no, I'm saying this because we agree with you. Yeah, you're with your feet. Yes the First thing because the first I guess 35 40 years of my life I was very sheltered living and you know, I mean we moved a couple times but I didn't really get outside of the united states and outside of the southeast united states very often and Coming to canada had a lot of culture shock, you know, I can imagine I sort of expected it to be Um Similar enough to the states that it would feel home life. Yes, and the very first thing that I That overwhelmed me and said wow, I'm in I'm in a different place Is that more of the world was available to me so much more. Yeah, I mean just watching television. Yeah Even corporate television Yeah, I I started hearing things and learning things about people and places in the world That just doesn't seem to get on television in the united states. There's there's um a myopic view of the world there and so You know, I haven't been a world traveler But I felt like the world opened up to me since I've been in canada. That's right I think you're a world traveler just by living in canada. I actually came I was in canada by chance the week of september 11th in ottawa And I was so impressed that the kind of voices and responses I was hearing then So far ahead of what I was hearing in america and that's comparable to what I'm now hearing in america 18 months later But it's as if it took america a long time to catch up with canada doing what I also notice as a traveler Wherever I go in the world, I'll meet disproportionately 100 times more canadiens than the americans, whether it's south america or asia Uh, you meet lots of australians and germans and english, of course, but the huge numbers of canadiens Oh, every summer they go on holiday Yeah, it's interesting places which people don't do so much south of the border Yeah, uh, that was something that took some getting used to too is that uh, people take longer times off In the states, it's a weekend here a weekend there Exactly, and I think that was dividends for the people traveling to latino cultures for the first time are shocked at the cs Everyone simply takes a nap or two hours in the afternoon Everyone in canada as far as I can tell takes august That was an enormous enormous shock at least every one of victoria. Yeah I think that's enlightened Good. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. It's a pleasure meeting. Well, I really appreciate you coming in here and Accommodating me slightly difficult surroundings. Well, we hope that it'll turn out well on the radio You're listening to first person plural. I'm carl wilkerson We hope you enjoyed our conversation with pico ire author of abandon and the global soul in the next half hour Patty and I reflect upon our own travel experiences The stories of travel and the archetype of the traveler The interview with pico gave me A lot of food for thought One of my goals is to be a world traveler, but I've often thought about that in terms of what that means culturally because I've Been to talks before where people have presented their trips to places and have been uncomfortable with it because Seems like they don't quite get the historical perspective of Europe with the rest of the world You mean they did the restaurant tour or they did the fake authenticity tour Either way, they did the tour that said I'm consuming somebody else's culture and that bothers me a little bit, but I don't know how you can do it Without I don't know how you can travel without Doing that to a certain extent when you travel you Even if you attempt to do it authentically what you often get is the tour Well, the mere fact of transportation the circumstances under which you gain transportation contextualized somewhat If there's not consumption going on there's at least a meta level of some sort Yeah, I used to work for a tour operator. This is sort of One of the things that contextualizes my thoughts about this In the mid 1980s for a year, I was the Office manager for a tour operator For people who don't understand what a tour operator is It's somebody who puts together the ground transportation The transportation to the destination the hotel And whatever sightseeing things you want to do while you're there Into a nice neat little package that lasts three days five days Seven days two weeks, whatever but it requires a coordination of effort on the part of the tour operator and all of the people who Live and work at the destination And this nice neat little package is not sold directly to The person who will be doing the tourer It's sold directly to the travel agent Who in turn sells it to the person who is going to be doing the tourer So it has lots of layers of bureaucracy involved in it everybody wanting their cut The advantage is that it usually comes out cheaper than if you were as a single person Contacting all of these different people and asking for rates because the tour operator does You know 15 or 20 of these a month And they get rates discounted on the basis of their volume But the funny part is I used to talk to all the travel agents when they would call and I would sell The packages to travel agents to talk them into Selling it to other people and they would ask me questions about cancun or jamaica or wherever we were Selling to and I had all of the details memorized and I actually at one point in my life knew the The order that the hotels were on the strip in cancun like which hotel was next to which one I could describe the outdoor area of the property The lobby of the property and several of the rooms of the property In details that made it sound like I had been there And in fact, I was told to make it sound like I had been there and so I fooled a lot of people into believing that I actually Have been to cancun and toured these different properties I basically sold a narrative and sold it as if it were my personal experience It's a fine line. I never quite said that I had been there But I was so good at describing it that everybody just assumed I had been there and I didn't correct the assumption Well, that's a real double-edged sword invariably one does sell the narrative of one's travel If not on the level of pico ire does then On a much more mundane level. Oh, look at our photographs of our trip to south dakota last summer. It was so picturesque Hence pictures. Yes One does sell that on some level But I was not actually selling my travel. I was selling somebody else's travel I was not I never actually took these trips. I've never been to cancun I've never been to chichen itza. I've never been to jamaica and yet I could talk about these destinations as if I had toured all of them in terms that convinced travel agents all over the southeastern united states To believe that I had been there and that I was highly recommending it Well, I'm going to come down firmly on neither side of the fence On this one on one hand first hand accounts have a certain Zest to them a certain quality to them that I find indispensable on top of which if there weren't a first hand accounts How would the rest of us learn anything about the empirical world? And and certainly my accounts my second hand accounts were based upon first hand accounts And of course they were and that's The other half of it. I'm not going to say that someone who's read a book about Hawaii for example can't possibly know anything about hawaii because they've never been there I've never been to hawaii and at a minimum. I can tell you the capital city And I can tell you why the big island is called the big island. So I'm going to say that both are Useful and feasible. I'm not going to privilege one over the other But do you have the feeling that Both the selling of the tour and the taking of the tour Still misses some of the culture Yes And the extreme example would be the planned tours that the English did for quite a few years Back in the old days. I can't think of a really good pop culture reference I can well actually yes, I can If you look closely in the Early minutes of Tommy the film Oliver Reed is supposed to be a tour guide at one of these places and and Margaret is visiting with her kid And they're satirizing if that's a word used under the circumstances. I think mocking would be a better word That kind of tour but that was enormously popular in the uk for a long time And I've even heard reports that it's coming back and that seems just mindlessly Overrationalized to us But at the same time one does want A guide of sorts one doesn't just show up there having no idea what is going on Sure, so it begs the question and economically it should be pointed out that The guy who ran the ground transport the person who did the touring and the sightseeing places Were all locals who were making a good living in the local economy by doing this. I'm sure they were and therefore Some of the tourism at least. I mean, I'm sure that for every Tour guide who was available for these tours who was making fairly good money There were a bunch of other people who were local who were making next to nothing In order to support the tourism industry. So I don't want to mislead here. It's a complex picture nonetheless if the I mean When tourism doesn't happen in places like this The local economy does go down So there is a certain amount of Importance placed upon this by the locals It's not a one-sided deal There is a cash 22 a lot of places that make their money on tourism Are selling the local culture in effect I can think of one right off the bat Victoria yeah That you nodded at me as if you wanted me to continue having no idea what I was going to say No, I knew what you were going to say. I was just going to get you to say it very well And so I have but the thing is the packaging of the culture alters it somewhat Yeah, like I don't think of victoria is mary old england But certainly it gets sold as A taste of mary old england And I say that having lived in the queen's neighborhood. So Just right up the hill from where we live is the lieutenant governor's House which is where the queen stays when she's in town every 25 years or so continuing my Use of authoritative references from british pop culture There's an exchange in one of the black adder series Where one character claims to be as british as queen victoria and black adder responds So your mother's german. You're half german and you married a german I don't think anybody comes here expecting to see us running around on the streets and leader helsen But the packaging of the culture alters it somewhat And that's inevitable one presents one's culture and this is the proof that the presentation of the culture Can be distinct at least in one definition thereof from the culture Yeah, I think a real good indicator of how the power dynamics work Is a very simple one when you look back at my tour operating years The people who lived in cancun who worked with us On a regular basis spoke and wrote english I never had to learn spanish in order to do my job And yet I spent a great deal of time on the okay, this will show my age telex machine Communicating with a number of people. I would say that I probably Had communication with 30 or 40 people in cancun If you count all of the hotel Operators all of the tour operators all of the ground transport We had an airplane that flew back and forth between cancun and chichen itza And I talked to them So there was probably about 30 people that I communicated with in cancun on a regular basis And I never had to learn how to communicate with them in spanish And for them to do what they needed to have done They knew probably more than two languages. They knew english My guess is that they also knew french and possibly even japanese Because it was a very popular destination with all of those countries Montreal strikes me as a place that is faced with this dilemma as well My impression has been that the covet qua speak english better than everyone else speaks french And as much as they dislike having to do so That's something that would come up in the tourist industry straight away If they want people to come there from other parts of canada, they're going to have to put up with a certain number of them speaking english That's not a political reality, but it is a business reality at least in the short term Sure, and there are places in canada that I find Really interesting vis-a-vis the um language issue One is prince edward island, which I went to on business last year But took a day to do some touring And of course, uh, if you're not familiar peis biggest tourist destination is Green gables What a surprise Yes, I can't remember the name of the town where the house of green gables is This is actually fiction But they've converted a house to look like the house in the book that you can go to And actually visit You also can find the author's home on the map and go by and see it And there is a gift shop On every other piece of property in which you can buy all of the red-headed pig tailed little girl dolls That you would ever want to buy You can find out about this in english and in french according to the bilingual law in canada But if you're so inclined you can also learn everything you ever wanted to know about ann of green gables in japanese Why because every summer huge tour buses full of japanese tourists show up and Learn everything they can about ann of green gables. It apparently is one of the most popular children's books in japan the translation of it and most of the people in pei Learn how to speak japanese if they are in the tourism business You're listening to first person plural on cfu v victoria's public radio 101.9 fm 104.3 cable And on the internet cfu v dot u vang dot ca Giving sociology an edge And one never knows and something like that is just going to happen out of the blue I've heard it expressed that jerry louis is considered a genius in france Yeah, it's amazing to me what crosses over in cultures I have no idea why ann of green gables is popular in japan And I have no idea why jerry louis is popular in france But it's interesting to me that once that thing happens. However, it happens. It does affect the local culture. I mean The people in cancun learn how to speak more than one language in order to accommodate The people in pei have learned japanese in order to accommodate the influx Of japanese tourists or at least they've hired a translator And this reminds me of zimmel's work about the stranger I mean most of the people who have talked about zimmel And talk about the archetype of the stranger talk about it in terms of immigration And in xenophobic kinds of attitudes But people running around the world Visiting other places certainly qualifies as strangers showing up in the local culture And certainly in the same way that zimmel asserts that the stranger is in fact Not outside the social realm But rather is a part of what makes the social realm social Certainly the tourist does that. I mean, I'm not sure that You can I mean, maybe you need a second archetype called the tourist. I'm not sure But I think a lot of the same things apply The locals know who they are In comparison to who the tourists are I certainly experienced this growing up in florida In florida, we made jokes all of the time about tourists We made jokes about the snowbirds. We made jokes about the europeans who came to the beach You know, you could tell who the tourists were because of 55 degrees fahrenheit Locals were running around with a sweater on And people from canada were running around in shorts There was a sense of who us was And us being people who lived and worked in florida And the in the sense of who they were and that was people who came as tourists to florida I'm sure that's true every place that has a significant amount of tourism at least the understanding that There are the locals and there are the tourists and that there's a certain front stage back stage split in the behavior. Definitely I want to ask two questions. One is that inevitable and two If a metropolis Decides to accept or pursue the tourism angle as a matter of public policy implicit or explicit Is it not limiting It's ambition to being exactly that if it is inevitable too wet is the metropolis not Determining at that point that his culture in the future is going to consist of that front stage backstage behavior That the limit of their ambition is going to be saying nice things to the tourists and complaining about them Enthusiastically behind their backs but always taking their money There's a sort of headiness glass ceiling. Yeah manifests itself Gee, is it inevitable? Well, I guess not because at some point or another Decisions can always be made Both in the front stage in the backstage That changed the dynamics Certainly to take an example In new orleans for a very long time Tourism was the major industry and then they discovered offshore oil And that changed the dynamics quite a bit In 1984 after the big oil boom Of the 1970s When the world's fair came to town They had to spend a lot of time teaching Locals on how to deal with tourists and that seems very odd I imagine but the tourism industry sort of got set aside during the 1970s in new orleans Is everybody got rich off of oil And so the next thing you know in the early 1980s in anticipation of this big influx of tourists There were charm schools held for The new orleans taxi drivers because they were considered so rude That everybody was afraid that it would turn people off from new orleans So they actually gave them protocol training. Yeah in order to renew your hacker's license in 1982 In 1983 you had to go To a class that taught you how to be polite To tourists when they came and to represent the city in the best light And I mean let's face it tourism was an old industry by that time But it was obvious that the front stage dynamics had changed Sometimes that lack of protocol is inadvertent And sometimes it's anything but one of the things that I noticed living in florida was There were two kinds of people there According to one taxonomy those making money off tourism and those not making money off tourism I saw more than one bumper sticker that said welcome to florida now go home. Yes and there was a kind of Especially with the snow birds especially in the winter When the population got much much larger. There was a feeling that Something from the outside was taking over Rather than being invited in and there were certainly a number of people who felt like okay, we have enough That's it. We only want so many people to come visit We've got enough now now the rest of you go away and that heterogeneity is probably the norm We've been talking about the locals Here and I want to point out the possibility That not all localized cultures are homogenous Yes, and I want to in addition to that Once you invite tourists in Something has to change in the local culture. It can't remain the same. I mean that's basically what zimmel is suggesting Is that once the stranger enters the picture it changes the social dynamics So an answer to your question before about once the municipality decides to make tourism part of The local economy and pursues tourism It changes the local Culture it changes the local economy So if you're going on a trip and you're wondering about how to Take part in the local culture You don't have to worry about it. The mere fact of your arrival will ensure that you have done so You have been listening to first person plural because how people get along with each other still matters First person plural Is a show created for community radio by carl wilkerson and dr. Patty thomas to examine social and organizational issues Music for first person plural is performed Composed and produced by carl wilkerson Except where noted For more information about first person plural dr. Patty thomas or carl wilkerson Visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com Or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com