Recognizing Emotion and its Postcolonial Potentialities: Discomfort and Shame in a Tourism Encounter in Turkey

This article addresses the fragile and potentially problematic nature of the meeting of tourists and local ‘hosts’ by shifting the discussion away from the authentic/fake binary and focusing instead on emotion in the worldmaking tourism encounter. This is done through interrogation of one particular encounter which took place in Göreme, central Turkey, between a local woman, a German couple and me. The problematic nature of the encounter exposed the point that tourism encounters are not reducible to questions of discourse alone and that, if we are to understand tourism encounters more fully, it is necessary to examine closely their emotional and bodily dimensions. Moreover, it is argued that recognizing and acknowledging emotion, and particularly shame, presents the postcolonial potentialities of tourism and Tourism Studies in that the discomfort of shame can produce a positive disruption of the otherwise inherently colonial relationship between tourist and other. In turn, reflexive interrogation of my own discomfort prompts discussion of researchers' ability to know what is going on in the production of local worlds and, indeed, to be aware of their own often-powerful role in the worldmaking function of Tourism Studies.