The word tourism in the Visayan dialect is lulinghayaw which means to take a trip for pleasure. The other Visayan words related to tourism are laag, libud and suruy which all refer to strolling or roaming around leisurely. But tourism is more complex than simply about tourists or turista and pleasure; it is also controversial.
In English language, tourism is derived from the word tour which means travel as exemplified by the European Grand Tour during the 18th century. It was a travel to best places that covered for as long as three years and, therefore, available only to the aristocracy or the upper class. Tourism became a business as there were several rich people who looked for places to visit and enjoy particularly during the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Today, similar with other countries, tourism is a major industry in the Philippines which has to compete with her Asian neighbors to entice more foreign tourists to come and spend in our country. It is associated with foreign reserves and economic growth due to the jobs and livelihoods it can provide to the host destination particularly in the food, entertainment and service sectors.
While the Philippine tourism slogan “It’s more fun in the Philippines” tickles the imagination of tourists that the country has more amusing experiences to offer, the new tourism branding of Dumaguete City as “Dumaguete is simply the place to be” provides options to tourists who seek for clean and austerely satisfying place to visit. Certainly, tourism promotion requires money in order to generate more money.
However, my concern of writing about this topic is not to discuss about tourism as a business of making money. I am teaching Anthropology of Tourism under the Anthropology Program of Silliman University and my interest is about the interaction of the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of tourism–matters which the people involved in the industry have also to understand if they wanted their businesses to be sustainable.
Marc Miller and Jan Auyong, on a paper titled Remarks on Tourism Terminologies: Anti-tourism, Mass Tourism, and Alternative Tourism (1998), consider tourism as a sociocultural process operating in certain environment and involving the interaction among brokers, locals and tourists that constitute its social elements where each is necessary for it to efficiently work.
The brokers include those in the public and private domains; the former refers to government agencies regulating the industry while the latter constitute persons who are into the business of serving the needs of tourists, both domestic and foreign, who just come and go for a given period. Meanwhile, the locals are residents who are not involved in the tourism business, but they are affected by or can also impact the quality of the industry.
The cultural elements of tourism is seen on how the industry impacts the way of life of locals and the behaviors of tourists and alters local culture when promoted as touristic commodities. Meanwhile, the places where tourism activities and experiences are staged constitute the ecological elements–composed of the biotic and abiotic components that offer awesome spectacles to tourists. As a whole, the ecological along with the social and cultural elements constitute the tourism system.
In the tropics, like the Philippines and Negros Oriental in particular, these natural elements and places include the sand, sea and sun for tourists wanting to experience coastal tourism; and the mountains, forest, rivers and lakes if they are seeking for adventure tourism. The Yahoo on-line poll survey, asking where tourists want to go, shows that more than half love to experience nature and this put the Philippines in the advantage as a destination as well as our province.
Certainly, more tourists arrival means more jobs, but any form of tourism, even ecotourism, has also its bad side or has potential to become bad with its excesses when not regulated. Anti-tourism group considers tourism to corrupt culture with its commoditization, to encourage immoral behaviors like prostitution, to reinforce the economic disparity between tourists and locals, to spoil natural beauty and biodiversity and so on.
But it is actually not tourism per se that is bad; the culprits are the people that constituted and created it. If a host destination has a government, as public broker, that does not have a tourism master plan to guide and regulate how the industry should operate when it started; and private brokers who solely work for profit without concern about the vulnerability of nature and culture; then, the tourists would be more careless as long as they enjoy the value of every money they spent.
This becomes worse when the locals are not vigilant enough to raise their concerns over the negative impacts of irresponsible tourism, perhaps blinded by the material benefits offered to them as spillover even if these are not sustainable, environmentally or culturally.
Therefore, a sustainable tourism system has to be designed as a cautious interaction among responsible brokers, locals and tourists. And the recently concluded Tourism Strategic Planning Seminar-Workshop to capacitate various stakeholders in crafting the tourism development plan of Negros Oriental was an important undertaking toward this direction. But with regards to its content is a matter to examine in the future.
