EVERY summer,
people all over the world become acquainted again with a deep truth....that
people from different countries observe different customs not only of speaking, but of eating,
sleeping, gesturing, counting change, observing boundaries of personal space,
tipping cab drivers, standing in lines, avoiding certain topics of conversation
at dinnertime as unbearably disgusting is a truism one probably can never be
reminded of too often.
Especially this
year, which according to statistics compiled by
This is good news
for
But it is bad
news only in those isolated cases (which you hear about if you talk to cabbies,
tour guides and certain sarcastic individuals in sales) where the awe of Mr.
Martins revelation is supplanted by the ugly reality of a culture clash a tip denied, a personal boundary
violated, or a long line at a drug store counter jumped by a family, who
forever thereafter shall be remembered by the offended party present (an
acquaintance of mine) as those ugly Europeans.
Let it be said
that no group holds a monopoly on the title of ugly. Tip-stiffing, line-jumping,
excessive price-haggling,
sidewalk-blocking-when-stopping-suddenly-to-take-pictures-of-a-person-playing-the-steel-drums
none of these are unique to any
national group.
Expedia, the
online travel service, conducted a survey of tourist boards around the world
that rated British tourists as the most obnoxious. Some people in the tourism
world claim that the Chinese, the newest wave of world travelers, are even more
so.
Whatever. Is it time, at least, for
retiring the term ugly American from the dictionary of foreign
phrases?
The answer,
according to experts in the rarified field of tourism anthropology,
is a possible yes.
Ugly
behavior in tourists is almost always in the eye of the people being toured;
and Americans are no longer the only, or even the dominant group of tourists
out in the world. We are now as often toured as tour-ing.
And New Yorkers,
it turns out, are just as likely to be exasperated being toured by tourists
unfamiliar with their local mores about tipping or standing in check-out lines,
say, as the Achuar tribesmen of Ecuador are to be
offended by tourists who sit on certain sacred rocks.
The Achuars have actually developed a list of rules for
tourists, said Sharon Gmelch, an anthropology
professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. If you are a man, you are
not to look directly at a woman, for example. You are not to sit in certain
sacred places, or touch anyones person. Youre not to
take pictures without asking permission. Some of these rules might work
in
Nelson H. H. Graburn, a professor of anthropology at the
They told
her that Israeli, French and American tourists could be the most
difficult, Professor Graburn said, but that
what distinguished Americans was that they could be loud and demanding, and
then would invariably apologize and give them big tips.
To be an ugly
tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martins statement. It
is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as
cultural difference, wrote Prof. Inga Treitler,
the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, in
an e-mail message.
Valene Smith, an anthropology
professor at
They have
only been traveling widely in the last five years or so, but they are touring
in numbers no one has seen before by the thousands, she said.
They behave as they would at home there is a lot of pushing and shoving.
Very few speak languages other than Chinese.
Last summer, in
an incident widely discussed among travel experts, she said, 40,000 Chinese
tourists descended on the small German city of
It was quite
a mess, Professor Smith said. No one was prepared ahead of time. The
Germans were quite upset.
And so, my fellow
Americans, this summer let us host and be hosted as travelers in a world in
which we are no longer alone; a world where we can venture forth with the
unschooled of other nations, and join hand in hand in ignorance of all the
different words those French have for everything!