In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on March 9, 2009

When I was growing up, vacations used to mean getting away from it all.  Not any more… When Leslie and I head off tomorrow, we will be carrying two laptops plus the usual electronic suspects (and our dog… the cat stays here).  Indeed, almost half of the pre-vacation shopping consisted of getting electroic paraphenalia.

When Marshall McLuhan started talking about the Global Village in the 1960′s, I doubt if anyone really understood what this would mean in terms of travel and the concept of “vacation”.  Did he ever foresee a vacation that would read:

Day 1: Arrive, shop for necessities (coffee, beer), smell the beach, log in for symposium

Day 2: Awake to view a beautiful sunny, warm beach; check email, outline first paper, have lunch, check online symposium, work on second paper, have romantic dinner (only 1 laptop!).

Etc…..

Well, despite the pressure (and Mike’s comments!), I am actually plaqnning on getting in some relaxation; you know, walking along the beach, drinking beer, swimming in the ocean, drinking beer, sailing, drinking beer, teasing the dog, drinking more beer.

In many ways, it is a bad sign that almost all of the restaurants on the beach at Cabarete have high speed wifi.  Are we becoming so addicted to our electronics that we cannot relax and enjoy life without them?  At least I will be leaving my Crack…, er BlackBerry at home.

This really isn’t maudlin thinking about the past; it is actually an introspective attempt to engage with some of the ideas Martin Coward uses in his book Urbicide that forms the basis of the CT Lab symposium.  In one of his earlier articles, Martin talks about the anthropocentrism of much of the security studies literature and one of the core thrusts of Urbicide is to avoid such an anthropocentric analysis of conflict.

In many ways, Martin’s critique parallels comments I’ve been making about AO “confusion” in Asymmetric Warfare.  I am planning on using the first couple of days of my “vacation” as a form of introspective analysis – how dependant am I on electronics?  How does the built environment, the “spatiality”, of the vacation area influence production and “style” of the community?  It’s not that I haven’t looked at things like this before – I have – but I have never sat down and thought / lived it through looking at it as a site of overt conflict.

Years ago, Leslie and I travelled to Punta Cana (south shore of the Dominican Republic) and stayed in a resort there with some friends.  It was an incredibly beautiful beach, a great resort (except for some really strangte music!), and fantastic service.  At the same time, within 24 hours I had come to the conclusion that it was spatially organized along the lines of a plantation with the tourists being the crop.  We have never been back to Punta Cana, and we are unlikely to go back in the future.

Cabarete, were we are going, has a totally different spatiality from Punta Cana.  It is not dominated by huge resorts – the Box Stores of the Tourism world.  Rather, it has everything from 400 bed resorts to small places with 20 or so, plus quite a number of small condominiums, family houses, villas, etc.  It also has some amazing resaurants that many people would turn their noses up at assuming that architecture equated with the quality of food.

In some ways, the spatiality of Cabarete reinforces its life as a tourist destination, but this spatiality is also reinforced by some very conscious decisions on the part of the people who live and work there.  Over the 10 years or so that Leslie and I have been going there, we have made a lot of friends who live there including amongst the beach venders.  In many places in the Carribean, beach vendors “ruin” the experience; not in Cabarete.  Indeed, the beach venders act as the guardians of peoples experience of the beach (okay, yes, they may try and sell you junk, but not most of the time).

One of the insights that Martin notes is that urbicide is aimed at the “soul” of a people; the centre of their social relations that is channelled by their built environment.  If his argument holds water, and I think that some of it certainly does, then the beach venders in Cabarete act as the overt “guardians” of the strange, symbiotic relationship that is a tourist destination.

Category: Communications Theory, Tourism, Working Ideas
Tags: Cabarete, Urbicide