The epistemological structure of mobilities: Tourism, touring and consumption in the days of terrorism

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to revolve around two problems which, though imagined as different, can be addressed altogether. On one hand, the advance of terrorism as a major threat to the tourism industry, while – on the other – we discuss the ontological nature of tourism as a rite of passage, which is vital to keep the political legitimacy of officialdom. At the time, paradoxically, social scientists shrug off tourism as a naïve commercial activity, while the main tourist destinations are being attacked by jihadism. This suggests the disinterest of ones associates to the interests of others.

Design/methodology/approach

The author holds the thesis that tourism derives from ancient institutions, which illuminated in the growth of Occident and the formation of hospitality. Capitalism hides the importance of tourism as a mere trivialization as a bit-player. However, a closer look reminds precisely the opposite. The recent attacks perpetrated at main destinations reveal tourism as an exemplary (symbolic) center of the West, a source of authority and power for the existing hierarchal order.

Findings

The issue captivates the attention of scholars, officials and policymakers, and at the same time, epistemologists of tourism receive a fresh novel debate regarding the origins of tourism.

Originality/value

It is a great paradox that tourism would be selected as a target for jihadism but at the same time a naïve activity for social scientists or at the least by the French tradition. Despite the partisan criticism exerted on tourism as an alienatory force, this work showed two important aspects, which merits to be discussed. At a closer look, tourism should be understood as “a rite of passage” whose function associates to the revitalization of those glitches happened during the cycles of production. Second, and most important, tourism accommodates those frustrations to prevent acts of separatism or the rise of extreme conflict among classes.

Citation

Korstanje, M.E. (2018), "The epistemological structure of mobilities: Tourism, touring and consumption in the days of terrorism", Journal of Tourism Analysis: Revista de Análisis Turístico, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 54-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTA-02-2018-0006

Introduction

Although tourism and hospitality have experienced a rapid growth that resulted in countless changes for modern lifestyle worldwide (Crouch, 1994; Vanhove, 2011; Pigram and Wahab, 2005), its experiential nature makes it sensitive to global threats and dangers (Larsen and Brun, 2011; Korstanje and Olsen, 2011). Over the recent years, the rise of jihadist terrorism beyond the borders of Middle East paved the ways for new urgent policies to protect tourist destinations. Academicians of all stripes devoted considerable efforts and resources to understand and mitigate the negative effects of terrorism (Tarlow, 2006; Schroeder et al., 2013; Bassil, 2014; Bassols, 2016). Living in a world manipulated by emotions (Bigne and Andreu, 2004; Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008), undoubtedly terrorism woke Western nations from the slumber they were.

Still further, some voices alerted on the problems of this fast growth as the main causes of a much deeper epistemological crisis to grasp an all-encompassing model to define what tourism is. As Tribe (2010) puts it, the epistemology of tourism faced a serious crisis because of the dispersion of produced knowledge, as well as the indifference of an international academy in setting a clear unified agenda to be followed by scholars. In this respect, “the indiscipline of tourism” exhibits some claims revolving around the fragmentation of the different studies and approaches among academics, which prevented the maturation of the discipline as a serious option (Tribe, 1997).

As the previous backdrop, this paper aims to resolve both the problems – though apparently different in essence –by not only exploring on the nature of tourism as a rite of passage but also explaining why modern terrorists target leisure-spots and tourism to perpetrate their attacks. At a first look, we hold the thesis that tourism should be defined as a rite of passage, whose chief goals correspond with the revitalization of the frustrated ego. Like the state of sleep that rekindles the body for a better performance once the subject awakens, tourism handles higher levels of anxiety and frustration. The importance of tourism, oddly to keep the society united, is directly conducive to the means of production each society develops. As the founding parents of anthropology envisaged, leisure and tourism play a leading role in two different directions. On one hand, it endorsed the legitimacy of authorities or officialdom, while on the other, lay-citizens embraced the cultural values of their respective societies. With this in mind, it is not accidental that terrorists appeal to vulnerate tourists to undermine the credibility of nation-states and officials. What is more than important to discuss is to what extent terrorism appeals to political instability to affect the basis of nation state and its legitimacy. Here, two significant assumptions should be made. First, the safety and security of foreign tourists depends on the hosting state, which should be held accountable for its deeds by other tourist-delivering governments. After the attacks in Bali (2002) where almost 88 Australians were killed, Indonesia reported to Australia what would be the next steps and protocols to find the responsible terrorists, as well as making the necessary arrangements for repatriating remains. This happens because tourism rests on the anthropological roots of hospitality, which activates reciprocity between two or more parts (states). Second, and most important, the credibility of Indonesia, which in the international relations, was seriously affected in view of its incapacity to protect visitors coming from the First World. This paper inscribes into the sociology of tourism as the main genre but explores other subthemes as mobilities, the theory of non-places, terrorism and political violence. For some reason, the caveats in the sociology of tourism were not replicated by anthropology, which advanced interesting steps in the recent years.

The nature of tourism

Over decades, theorists and academicians have interrogated on the nature of tourism (Smith, 2001). One of the dichotomies to reach some consensus was the dissociation of two contrasting viewpoints which inevitably created a gap almost impossible to bridge (Tribe, 1997). The economic-centered paradigm includes all studies and positions that debate tourism from its economic nature, alluding to the management of tourist destinations and individual motivations as the key factors of tourism industry. Tourism management brings an interesting reflection into the foreground while it introduced management as a guiding discipline in the applied research. This family of theories is oriented to understand the creation and evolution of tourism cycles without mentioning the innovative features or the risks that can threaten the destination (Weaver and Oppermann, 2000; Ryan, 2002; Dwyer et al., 2009; Fernández and Rivero, 2009). Rather, a second wave known as tourism-as-social-institution signaled to the social roots of the activity, which dated back to the end of Second World War and the expansion of aero commercial industry. For the founding parents of the sociology of tourism, there was nothing like tourism in the ancient cultures or much time earlier than the advance of industrial revolution (Boorstin, 1962; MacCannell, 1976, 1992, 2001; Urry, 1990, 1992; Urry and Larsen, 2011). Hence, this wave stipulates that tourism serves as a mechanism of escape aimed at revitalizing after the daily frustrations of work. Thanks to tourism, not only society keeps working but also capitalism – as a leading project – expands worldwide. The sociologists of tourism toy enthusiastically with the belief that tourism consumption not only mediated between citizens and their institutions but worked as an alienatory force that internalizes the mainstream cultural values of capitalism into citizens to protect the interests of a privileged elite (MacCannell, 2001; Meethan 2001, 2003). Echoing the original worries of Les Anneé du Sociologique and its most reputable members, Mauss or Durkheim (2014), the advance of industrialism would surely disorganize the life and social bondages towards more exploitative forms passing from the “mechanic” to an “organic solidarity”. MacCannell toys with the same belief, posing money and trade as mediators between the self and the authentic experience.

This tradition, somehow, has not been inoculated in German-speaking countries. Swiss-born economist Krippendorf (1987) developed an interesting model to understand tourism which needs further attention. His original approaches versed on discussing the nature of motivations in holidays as something else than behavioral attitudes. While human needs are physiologically met by the articulation of diverse institutions, relax is culturally practiced as a rite in different cultures. As Krippendorf adheres, the rank-and-file workers are trapped between the wall and the deep blue sea, since they are daily exploited by the capitalist production. These frustrations should be redeemed by the introduction of pleasurable activities within specific circles of consumption, holiday-making. As a sacred-space, holidays subvert temporally the rules of productivity while the mainstream cultural values of society are internalized. Departing from the thesis that leisure and economy are inextricably intertwined, Krippendorf applauds the idea that once the productive system turns more oppressive further forms of consumerisms arise. The decline of happiness in Western cultures derives in the needs of new experiences that take people from the humdrum routine they are in. One of the symbolic functions of tourism appears to be the emulation of lost-paradise, or the Eden, from where humans were energetically exiled after the original sin. The eternal quest for pleasure, per Krippendorf, is nothing other than the need to return to Mother’s womb. The myth of lost Eden revives this biological necessity. Though for Krippendorf, each culture molds a different idealized stage – comparable to tourism – no less true is that capitalism has expanded to index peripheral economies while the workers are subject to a climate of exploitation that engenders resentment and irreversible material asymmetries. This does not mean that tourism – as a commoditized form of leisure – results from capitalism but countless forms of evasion adapted to the means of production of every society (Krippendorf, 1975, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1995).

In the opposite direction, MacCannell (1976) dissects the nature of tourism as the direct results of combined factors, which oscillate from working hour reduction and the technological breakthrough proper of industrial revolution. Taking his cue from Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Erving Goffman and Karl Marx, MacCannell contends that the figure of Totem as the great articulator of politics in primitive tribes sets the pace to tourism in modern societies. The process of secularization, which means an ever-increasing reduction of religiosity in the urban cities, leaves an emptied center that is fulfilled by tourism and consumption. The consumption of authenticity, MacCannell adds, is also the thread that holds society together. As a sacred-object, the totem confers political authorities to chiefdom whereas it provides with a valid explanation about the universe. In the urban societies, things are not to easier, and more complex ideologies are necessary. Whether Krippendorf and MacCannell shared the same view on tourism as an instrument of escapement, the former accepted ancient forms of tourism, while the latter circumscribed tourism to the industrial logic. Ultimately, Salazar (2015) centers a critical diagnosis of tourism which deserves attention. While traveling, tourists are in quest of the otherness, but it is previously constructed by the wider media stereotypes externally designed to commoditize what is gazed. In this token, tourists start from previous cultural narratives where a real engagement with the alterity is replaced by consumption. The native is subordinated and silenced to what tourists crave.

The discussion between management and social sciences has not only not been closed but also prevented the unification toward a shared definition. In this vein, Korstanje and Seraphin (2017) acknowledge that the advancement of sociology of tourism shows two important caveats. On one hand, it is heavily influenced by French philosophy, which not only echoed the initial concerns of Durkheim about the advance of the free trade but also fleshed out a pejorative view of tourism – as an alienatory or disciplinary mechanism of control. This viewpoint led scholars to misjudge the nature of tourism or similar forms of tourism in ancient history. Paradoxically, the sociologists of tourism – such as MacCannell, Augé and Virilio – contributed to the creation of a negative connotation on the activity that impeded its consolidation as a leading discipline. Most certainly, historians of tourism turned their attention to Middle Age instead of delving in ancient history. In consequence, they precluded that tourism was born with the industrial revolution. As Vidal-Naquet (2001) – a well-known Latinist – evinces, thousands of ancient travelers visited the supposed tomb of Achilles during fifth and sixth centuries BC. These testimonies coincide with the leisure consumption described by Paoli (1963) in his book, Rome its people, life and customs. With some differences, Romans practiced similar forms of leisure and tourism to modern times. Equally important, an etymological look suggests that the term feriae (Latin), which means “leave”, was used to give Roman citizens a temporal permission to visit relatives and neighbors at their birth-places. In that way, the empire not only granted the cohesion between the center and its periphery but also revitalized the trust of Roman citizens and the central authority. It is safe to say that this institution antecedes the modern holidays to the extent of some Indo-European languages, as German and Portuguese share the same etymological root, as Die Ferien (German) and das Ferias (Portugal). It is important not to lose the sight of travels and tourism that seem to be conducive to the expansion of empires, and Sumerians, Babylonians and of course Romans, which constructed the paths to move the armies in the days of warfare, while the same was used to touring in peacetimes. As stated in the introductory section, whether anthropology eluded the same one-sided argument as sociology, there is no clear way to frame Marc Augé. For this reason, in the next section, we shall scrutinize closer the main problems of the theory of non-places, which was originally formulated by Marc Augé to explain the origin of tourism.

The theory of non-places

The French ethnologist, Marc Augé coins the term non-places to denote the alienated life at leisure-spots, airports and tourist destinations. In the book Non-lieux. Introduction a une antropología de la submodernité, which found the light of publicity in 1992, Augé talks of “non-places” as spaces characterized by anonymity and depersonalization. Not only the travelers’ identities are radically transformed, through the liminality of these spaces, but also the tradition is effaced. The concept of non-places arrived polemically to social sciences to discuss further on the advance of modernity and globalization. Taking his cue from previous ethnographies in Africa, Augé defines “place” in view of the relational perspective created by history and tradition. If a place can be defined as a space of tradition, a non-place exhibits the opposite character (-istics), a much broader tendency toward the nothing (Augé, 1996, p. 83). This existential perspective is reinforced by Augé’s personal fieldworks at Paris’ Airport (Augé, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2008). He realizes that, in particular, modern tourists are hyper-mobile agents enshrouded in a veil of anonymity. Until travelers are checked out by the customs and migratory officers, they lack citizenship or identity; they are mere consumers who wander at the airport shopping malls. The idea here is that with the involvement of corporations in airport design such spaces are stripped off any association with the land in which they were built. Even the identities of global tourists are only validated before boarding their flight (Augé, 2001, 2002, 2008). The question of whether airports produce “anonymity” is linked to the antinomy between remoteness and closeness, affecting even perceptions of the very subject of anthropology. Augé situates the origin of anthropology in the place of the other, which is an exotic, different place. Nowadays, however, the other is more like us and lives more like us. This means that the anthropological boundaries formed around notions of “us versus them” dissipate or are being blurred (Augé, 2001). For Augé, today, the traditional foundations of Western epistemologies are challenged because modern ethnologists have to re-evaluate the tools and methods by which they study far-away others, who are more and more like us (Augé, 1996). Neither hospitality nor politics are part of the concerns that guide Augé’s books. Rather, oriented to admit that mobilities and velocity are prone to change the sense of places, Augé acknowledges that the saturation of present, where consumption is centered, implies the destruction of pastime and tradition.

In L’Impossible voyage (The Impossible Trip), the French ethnographer frames a critical diagnosis of tourism which is defined as an industry of fantasy. Under the exclusive auspices of global capitalism, tourism – generally – and tourists – more specifically – travel to distant landscapes and cities only to find what they desire, exhausting any direct contact with the otherness. Tourism suggests the fictionalization of the World while the proliferation of image and idealized landscapes mediate between citizens and their institutions (Augé, 1997).

Though eloquently for some social geographers and theorists of mobilities, Augé not only glosses over the role of nation-state and airports in the good-exchange rite that fosters tourism consumption but also puts the horse before the cart, misjudging the intersection of human networks and travel machines (Cresswell, 2001; Lash and Urry, 1993; Urry 2002; Tzanelli, 2007). As John Urry noted, the subjectivity of perception (gaze) cannot be operationalized by direct observation, as Augé did, lest by a much broader cultural matrix that precedes the tourist-gaze (Urry, 1990, 1992, 2002; Urry and Larsen, 2011). The thoughts struck us that like MacCannell, Augé is strongly influenced by the radical turn of French legacy, which theorizes on tourism as an alienatory – or at the best a predatory force. Last but not least, in a recent work entitled Mobilities Paradox, a radical analysis, Korstanje (2018) calls the attention on the fact that Augé misjudged the nature of airports. After collating evidence from self-ethnographies at most important airports Korstanje argues convincingly, which far from being spaces of anonymity, airports represent spaces of discipline, where passengers are scrutinized and strictly-surveilled by the nation-state. Through this rite, the state gives hospitality to the incoming aliens. The tourists (candidates) are undergoing disciplined security checks that emulate the most important values of hosting-society: mobilities, trade and security. The migration office will check the identity of travelers, while Police and Customs check their properties and luggage. The rite closes once the involving candidate is reintroduced into the world of consumption at the duty-free shop malls. As exemplary centers airports are often targeted by radicalized terrorist cells to cause political instability and mistrust in society. In consequence, this observation led us to re-think tourism as a rite of passage, a point which would be addressed in the following lines.

Tourism as a rite of passage

The discussion revolving around the roots of tourism took two wrong paths. The economic-based paradigm adopted a materialist definition, posing tourism as the result of technological shifts and the development of main economies situated in Europe and the USA. Rather, for the critical turn which is previously determined by the influence of French sociology- tourism works as an instrument of alienation and social control. Of course, over years, both positions struggled in vain to reach some consensus respecting to the nature of tourism. Unlike sociology, anthropology advanced a lot in articulating a convincing theory, which rested in the evidence collated in different cultures and times (Nogues Pedregal, 2009). One of the founding parents of modern anthropology, Malinowski (1944), accepted that social institutions result from the projection of psychological individual needs, or at least, institutions are crystalized according to how efficient such needs are fulfilled. In view of this, humans are moved for some biological instincts, he enumerated as metabolism, reproduction, safety, movement, bodily comfort, growth and health. While the reproduction leads culture to the formation of kinship, the bodily comfort and movement pave the ways for the rise of leisure travels or plays. It is unfortunate that Malinowski never deepened on the ways native used to escape from routine or the lines of recreational behaviors in non-Western tribes. This has been a gap, which few ethnographers liked to fill. Nonetheless, his legacy inspired some others authors such as Van Gennep (2011) to decipher the nature of travels. In his book Les Rites de Passages, he contends the cycle of production needs moments of disruption which accommodate the role of members into a new status. Each community develops its own rites of passage, where peoples, roles and status are mutually negotiated and exchanged. One of the aspects that define these rituals consists in displacement out of home, placing the candidate in a state of temporal isolation to be lately introduced in a new status. This separation leads to the differentiation of genres – males and females – or even of cosmologies – sacred and profane. Hence, the rites of passage are marked by three clear-cut stages, separation, liminality and incorporation. The efficiency of rituals depends on each stage performing exactly as designed. If something goes wrong, the authority of officials is also seriously affected. Besides, these rituals are oriented to detach the person from the group they belonged to and be introduced in a new group, dotted with new rules and a new identity. Candidates should show not only their worthiness and virtues but also skills as new free-men.

As the previous argument given, tourists not only emulate the role of candidates but also renovate themselves from the world they want to leave behind. In consonance with Van Gennep, Victor Turner sets forward a model to understand the connection between passage and liminality. His interest was centered on an African tribe, Ndembu (Zambia), a case which facilitated his Doctoral thesis completion. Similar to Van Gennep, Turner writes that the rite of passage should be divided in three stages, pre-liminal phase (separation), liminal phase (transition) and post-liminal phase (reincorporation). The role of liminality is crucial to determine the new status of candidates, Turner adds. This happens simply because the transitional stage or in-between states are a valid mechanism adopted by community to bear ambiguity. Embedded in a limbo, candidates are tested to achieve a much deeper sentiment of communitas (Turner, 1995).

Korstanje and Busby (2010) continued the contributions of Turner and Van Gennep applying their main outcomes to tourism fields. As per Korstanje and Busby, the Bible offers a fertile background – as the book of all Christian myths – to understand the nature and evolution of tourism in the modern world. As a rite of passage, tourism not only sublimates the needs of returning to lost-paradise but also renovates the desire to accept the laws of the Lord. These rites should not be limited to aborigines or tribal organization simply because modern man performs many rites of passage (celebrations) as baptism, graduate trips, Christmas or the New Year to reinforce the communion with the divinity. In this respect, tourism seems not to be an exception. In the same way, the Lord rested in the seventh day, lay-people are morally forced to relax. The figure of renovation plays a leading role as not only necessary to detach from rules but also the redemption of sins. Not surprisingly, the oceans and sun mimic the ancient role of water and fire in the rites of passage:

We can conclude that renovation of norms that entails the return is enrooted in the figures of baptism, guilt, sacrifice and expiation. This moral process can be compared with social duties or rules visitors abide by every day. These forces not only determine individual behaviour but also pave the pathways towards a new reinsertion. This eternal return to day-to-day life (once the vacation is over) demonstrates an ambivalent nature. On the one hand, we change in some way but certainly it is unquestionable we are subject of a process of forgiveness. On another hand, there is continuity because we were introduced in the same real before our departure (Korstanje and Busby, 2010, p. 107).

As a civilizatory process, which reanudates the individual affiliation and members’ loyalty to a certain community, tourism ascribes to the needs of honoring the division of labor as a sacred-mandate (Korstanje and Busby, 2010). This point coincides with Eric Cohen’s development (Cohen, 1979), which widely analyzed the nature of tourist experience as something other than frivolous pursuit for pleasure. In sharp contrast with MacCannell and Boorstin, he claims that tourism emulates the quest of the sacred center – paragraphing Eliade. The idea of center-out-there explained by Turner, Cohen adds, explains the intersection of moral values with movement, or namely travels. Although every traveler is in search of its own experience, the needs of recovering the “lost paradise” through the consumption of authenticity prevail. In fact, Cohen narrows closely to MacCannell’s argument at the time he presents a refreshing alternative view, which remains associated to define tourism as a-sacred-pilgrimage.

As per the previous argument, Graburn (1976, 1983) presents an interesting conceptual framework that helps understanding tourism beyond the paradigm of the commercial activity. For him, tourism should be understood as a rite of passage, which emulates “a sacred-journal” where the cultural values are validated, accepted and negotiated. The figure of “play” is vital in his argumentation to accept the idea that host-guest meeting revolves around to higher levels of uncertainty. As Graburn observes, tourism escapes to the commoditization of culture, as it is practiced by many classes and groups; rather, it activates a dream-like logic, which intersects with magic:

The food and drink might be identical to that normally eaten indoors, but the magic comes from the movement and the non-ordinary setting. Furthermore, it is not merely a matter of money that separates the stay-at-home from the extensive travellers. Many very wealthy people never become tourists, and most youthful travelers are, by western standard, quite poor (Graburn, 1989, p. 24).

In dialogue with other authors, as MacCannell who developed the binomial Totem-Tourism or Cohen who worked on the idea of lost-paradise, Graburn (1989) defines tourism as a “sacred-pilgrimage” where the play reproduces the borders of an idealized wonderland. Valent Smith, in consonance with Krippendorf, has said that the host–guest encounter denotes the principle of hospitality, which is the touchstone of tourism. Aside from the economic factor, tourists are motivated from the needs of evasion and physical displacement from the routinized life. Oriented to revitalize the deprivations of social life, tourism contributes notably to the cohesiveness of society.

Tourism and terrorism

Once tourism is defined, it is important not to lose the sight of the interests for terrorists to vulnerate innocent tourists. Though specialists and pundits agree there are antecedents of terrorist cells that target tourist destinations –to set an example the assassination of Israeli team in the Olympic Games held in Munich –in the month of September of 1972) (Tarlow, 2014) or in the Massacre of Luxor, -Egypt, 1997- (Sönmez, 1998), no less true is that the attacks to World Trade center on 11 September of 2001 inaugurated new tactics for emerging radical groups. Unlike its predecessors that looked to harm the integrity of important persons such as celebrities, chief police officers or politicians, “jihadist terrorism” weaponized mass means of transport against innocent tourists and civilians (Diken and Laustsen, 2002; Diken, 2011; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Hall et al., 2012; Korstanje, 2017). Luke Howie alerts that terrorists do not want a lot of people dying, but a lot of people watching! While terrorists need to captivate the attention of global publics through the articulation of violence, fear and extortion, mass-media profits from the terrorism-related news creating a vicious circle which is very hard to breach (Howie, 2012). As a distinguished professor, David Altheide argued that terrorists instill a discourse of panic not only for their claims to be unilaterally accepted by state but also to forge popular forms of entertainment which are conducive to governments (Altheide, 2006, 2009, 2017).

In the mid of this mayhem, many policymakers focused their attention on the negative effects of terrorism jeopardizing the organic image of international destinations (Mansfeld, 1999; Baloglu and Mangaloglu, 2001; Arana and León, 2008; Mansfeld and Pizam, 2006; Korstanje and Tarlow, 2012; Saha and Yap, 2014; Korstanje, 2015). Innovating in crueler and shocking tactics, terrorists perpetrate their attacks in paradisiacal tourist destinations, malls or leisure-spots. Over the recent years, a wider range of explanations were aimed to give some hint on why tourists are killed by terrorists. For the sake of clarity, all these theories can be grouped in three families: economics theory, psychological theory and anthropological theory.

At a first glimpse, one of the pioneers of economics theory does not come from tourism fields but from economics. In a seminal work, The Political Economy of Terrorism, authors wonder whether terrorists select tourism consumption sites for their blows. Paradoxically, although this book became one of the most cited studies of terrorism research, it remains unknown for tourism-related scholars. Enders and Sandler (2011) explore the rational interests of terrorists as the interplay of costs and gains. They hold the thesis that far from being maniacs or hatred-filled psychopaths, terrorists are rational agents who ponder benefits and discard risks. Under the theory of gain-maximization, which is enrooted in the core of classic economics, Enders and Sandler clarify that as tourists are unfamiliar with the visited places and the presence of security forces is slim, tourism destinations offer lower costs for their attacks. At the same time, the gains terrorists often obtain are higher, as the news is globally packaged and disseminated by the media to be consumed by a vast audience. The efficacy of terrorism to disseminate terror rests on the fact that lay-people think that what happened at the affected destination may repeat at a later date anytime and elsewhere. That way, the economy of terrorism reveals two important things. On one hand, the surprise factor adjoined to randomness play a vital role in fabricating a message of fear, which is conducive to terrorists. On the other, the easy access to hotels and beaches makes tourism more attractive than other places to terrorist activity. With the benefits of hindsight, the economics theory emphasizes on the importance of “precautionary principle” and the multivariable analysis to understand why some destinations are more vulnerable than others (Ryan, 1993; Pizam and Smith, 2000; Pizam and Fleischer, 2002). The economics theory focuses on the negative effects of terrorism laying the foundations of a new platform which measures the resiliency of destinations in contexts of risks (Paraskevas and Arendell, 2007; Uriely et al., 2007; Fyall et al., 2012; Tarlow, 2014).

Rather, the psychological theory delves into the borders of personality to predict under what factors the process of radicalization occurs. Those scholars who embrace psychology to explain the evolution of modern terrorism pay attention to the role of frustration, poverty or resentment as the key factor toward hate and terrorism. In the same way, modern tourism flourishes only in consolidated democracies or developed cultures dotted with the benefits of freedom and mobilities, it is important to look at failed states or undemocratic nations as fertile grounds for authoritarian and radicalized minds. As a result of this, the hostility against Western tourists hides a repressed psychological resentment, which is ultimately rechanneled through violence. As a factor of democracy, tourism should be applied in non-Western nations to avoid any sign of political instability that places western tourists in jeopardy (Sönmez, 1998; Sönmez and Graefe, 1998; Scheyvens and Momsen, 2008; Rashid and Robinson, 2010; Scheyvens, 2012).

Finally, the anthropological theory goes on a third way. Terrorists move to undermine the trust of citizens in their authorities cutting their performance as travelers, affecting not only the credibility of the nation-state before their citizens but before other states. As through the performances of touring – gazing – citizens renovate their trust and loyalties in the nation-state, not surprisingly any failure in the rite leads towards a sentiment of vulnerability, which is facilitated and exploited by terrorists. The importance of tourism to keep the society united is directly proportional to the attention paid by ISIS and others radicalized cells. What terrorists want is to erode one of the most important symbolic cores of Western civilization: hospitality. In the book Terrorism, Tourism and the end of hospitality in the West, Korstanje (2017) ignites a hot debate around the problems of West to conceive the alterity. Over centuries, the same sense of restricted hospitality that helped European expansion, nowadays is being used by terrorists as a weapon against the liberal thought. This exhibits the fact that the same means of transport situated as the pride of Western civilization are being weaponized against civilians. As a result, the trust in the other not only plummeted but also allowed the emergence of radical discourses (as anti-tourist movement or Islamophobia) in the main maturate democracies. At the time when fear knocks the doors of heaven, the borders are tightened (Korstanje and Clayton, 2012; Korstanje et al., 2014; Korstanje, 2015; Bianchi, 2006; Bianchi and Stephenson, 2013). What sounds particularly interesting, associates to how modern tourism commoditizes death as a form of media entertainment in new more morbid forms of consumption as Thana-Tourism, War-Tourism or Dark-tourism, but very well this seems to be a much deeper-seated issue that merits to be continued in the years to come.

Conclusion

It is a great paradox that tourism would be selected as a target for jihadism but at the same time a naïve activity for social scientists or at the least by the French Tradition. Despite the partisan criticism exerted on tourism as an alienatory force, this work showed two important aspects, which merits to be discussed. At a closer look, tourism should be understood as “a rite of passage” whose function associates to the revitalization of those glitches happened during the cycles of production. Second, and most important, tourism accommodates those frustrations to prevent acts of separatism or the rise of extreme conflict among classes. As discussed, the French philosophy flouted tourism as a commercial travel glossing over the contributions of anthropology in the fields, as well as ancient forms of tourism, which escaped to the attention of scholars to date. Anthropologically speaking, tourism activates long-dormant channels of solidarity that – in the threshold of time – have drawn hospitality. It is not surprise that terrorism targets tourist destination to undermine the trust of citizens in their authorities, in view of the importance this institution has for the society. Doubtless, tourism and terrorism are inextricably intertwined. As terrorists look to destabilize Occident, the best course of action seems to be affecting the sources of solidarity, as the rites of passage that keep the society together. The dilemma is that the major contemporary threat of tourism – terrorism – most likely is the main conduit to overcome the prejudices and stereotypes of part of the modern sociology.