This project is perverse: it is an analysis of the structural significance of the murders, executions and abductions of tourists. This perversity became unbearable a few days after initiating this project when a young, heavily armed, "white" man killed tourists and tourism workers at the edge of the globe from which I write2. The repulsive coincidence of this writing and that violence made thinking about dead tourists (and the living over whom they cast their shadows) all the more serious a proposition.3

Every traveler who has passed through the security cordon of an airport and been subject to the technologies of luggage x-ray and metal detectors, sniffer dogs and customs interrogation, security cameras, and the ubiquitous question "did anybody else pack for you?", knows something of the connection between tourism and terrorism. Indeed these features of travel have become so common as to pass almost without question, a naturalised artifact of the tenuous relationship between travel and violence. These concentrated technologies of transition are designed largely to regulate the flow of travelers under the scopic control of the State, represented by its functionaries: customs, immigration, police. This is the point at which the State attempts to regulate the flow of citizens, aliens, commodities, narcotics, biological materials, firearms and other prohibited substances: symbolic or potential violations against its authority. These places are also the site of enormous potential damage directed against that authority by acts of terrorist violence, both directly and by extension in an attack on "the people" whose protection is the official rationale for intrusive regulation

Security cameras, x-rays and random searches are designed to screen out these potential incendiary threats. Ironically, while the State is officially acting to protect mobility through this intense surveillance, it is simultaneously structurally threatened by mobility, even as it is bound to protect its sanctity and is utterly dependent on it. Governments express enormous anxiety about illegal aliens and immigration, smuggling, contraband ideas, diseases, politics, and so on. Ironically the "freedom to travel" was one of the key, and most seductive, distinguishing features of the "free world" in the Cold War propaganda battles, and features as one of those much-ignored articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Deleuze and Guattari's "Nomadology" thesis is worth quoting at length in explaining the structure of this State ambivalence towards movement, equated here with the tireless movement of the "war machine," exemplified for them by (somewhat dehistoricised) Mongol hordes:

"One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism, but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects. That is why Paul Virilio's thesis is important, when he shows that "the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, management of the public ways," and that "the gates of the city, its levies and duties are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs," people, animals and goods. Gravity, gravitas, such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a "moved body" going from one point to another in striated space. In this sense the State never ceases to decompose, recompose and transform movement, or to regulate speed."4

Within this "logic of the State," airports, train stations and border crossing points are ambivalent markers of State control. These are sites where the practices of regulation and authorization of movement - stamping passports, searching bags, and so on - are always possibly about to be attacked in radical transgressions directed against that very logic of regulation: blowing up aeroplanes, taking hostages, smuggling contraband. The aim of the tourist, or legitimated traveler, is to pass through these points of surveillance and control as quickly and smoothly as possible with the authorisation of all the authorities concerned. In a dark parallel, the terrorist or other illegitimates in transit (smugglers, illegal aliens) attempt to slip around or through this regulatory authority; in the case of the terrorist, to deliver its legitimacy and omnipotence a mocking blow.

Tourists, particularly from the United States, have become acutely aware of their status as privileged targets of terror attacks, and the US overseas travel industry is extremely sensitive to dramatic international conflicts. This was illustrated most clearly in the Gulf War when travel from Europe, but more especially the US, came to a virtual standstill from a widespread fear of "terrorist" reprisals against first world soft targets. In this context it is little wonder that a Wexco publication, The Complete Travellers Guide, which has such chapters as "Executive Targets", "Surviving a Hijacking" and "Fill the Bath; It's a Civil War" has been consistently reprinted from 1980 to 1994. Peter Savage's The Safe Travel Book recommends the following precautions when in countries with a "security problem":

"In public spaces, such as a restaurant, sit where you cannot be seen from the outside and try to sit on the far side of a column, a wall, or other structure- away from the entrance. You want to be inconspicuous, out of the line of fire and protected from any bomb blast. The same precautions should be taken at hotels, at clubs, and even sitting on the deck of a yacht in the harbour."5

While something of a cliche, the construction and loathing of the loud, stupid, gringo stereotype (or Australian in Bali, English in Majorca, etc.) carries a different nuance in the light of the "savage" advice above. The loud and obvious tourist gives away the undercover operation of the "sensitive" cultural tourist (the fantasy of being invisible or undisturbing), reducing both of them to crass consumer. While this is often expressed as a nationality cliche, the issue is more one of class, which harks back to Wordsworth's condemnation of Cook's tours and the railway which brought working class people tramping into his precious Lakes District.

It is reassuring for self-conscious tourists to displace their self-loathing, or at least their vague intuition of local hostilities, onto their "othered" fellow travellers. Jamaica Kincaid describes her expatriate Antiguan perceptions and memories of tourists which confirm the very worst touristic anxieties of being "uncovered" by the perceptions of local people:

"An ugly thing, that is what you become when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you... But some natives-most natives in the world-cannot go anywhere... They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go..."6

The very fact of drawing attention to the presence of tourists, worse still casting them as naive dupes, can itself be an invitation to danger for tourist operations. The danger is in the very literal sense of making tourists a more obvious target for overcharging, intimidation, pickpocketing, and at the more extreme end of the spectrum, attack, murder or kidnapping. Just as immediate, though less obviously dramatic, is the danger that being conspicuous presents to the tourist fantasy of invisibility. As the ideal operative works undercover as far as possible, so too does the tourist, moving into an observation of the everyday life of the other to observe and record that difference which will be disrupted when the tourist operative is uncovered: an army of touts selling souvenirs, offering everything from taxis to prostitutes, moves in to end the illusion of invisibility in an episode that causes tourists grief, confusion, anger, and very often acute embarrassment:

"Camouflage can be as tactical for the tourist as it is for the soldier. This is all the more difficult, however, in that the tourist and the soldier alike are 'marked bodies, unable to blend into the crowd. These excluded figures - the tourist and the soldier - assume a similar representational role on foreign soil: they are both living symbols of another nationalism. Each one is seen as a performative body, measured against the image of its national stereotype.'"7

As "a living symbol of another nationalism" a tourist is perhaps more like an intelligence agent than an invading soldier. The "good" tourist who blends as much as possible with the crowd has a mission as firmly etched on the mind as any intelligence operative: seek the authentically Other, record it as experience, photography, souvenir and written word, and return home to file a report as anecdote, recollection and the personal transformation of having "been there."

Like the intelligence operative or the foreign soldier, the tourist has passed out of the security of the relatively fixed identity of home and into a far less clearly defined liminal zone. To leave home and journey to distant places as a tourist is to enter a symbolic limbo: not at home and yet partly still there; elsewhere but only passing through on an always-returning-home trajectory. The tourist in transit, and the tourist is always in transit, is at once nobody nowhere, as well as the bearer of certain nationalities, credit cards and currencies. Just as the individual identity of the travelling subject is unsettled, a different set of more anonymous identifications come into play. Tourists become value in motion, both in their regular operation as consumers, and in their more rarefied symbolic values as exchange objects embodying another nationalism, for example as "normalisers of relations" (US visitors to China post-Nixon), or as hostages, such as in the Kashmir situation.

Death and danger

"What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of internal structure stripped of all our crutches, deprived of our masks... we are completely on the surface of ourselves This is the most obvious benefit of travel."8

The main feature which distinguishes backpackers from other tourists is the disproportionate value they place on the physical sufferings and dangers of travel on the cheap as a marker of value.9 There is an extensive vocabulary of renunciative strategies and gestures which attach enormous status to poverty, hardship and illness as signifiers of the authenticity of an experience. Backpackers engage in a competitive recounting of austerities undertaken and survived, be it a three-day train trip without a seat or a bout of typhoid. Every suffering is valuable because it can be reconstituted later in a powerful narrative strategy adding to a sense of true connection with alterity.

The emphasis on self-testing can be seen as an example of the voluntarily undergoing of a "rite of passage," acting out a ritual space signifying a break from one life-stage to another, or proving to themselves that they have the strength to deal with a major crisis in their lives. By one account those most likely to engage in "rite of passage tourism" include young people deferring the responsibilities of adulthood, often in an intermediate stage between completing further education and embarking on a career or making commitments to a family, those recently divorced, widowed, or making major career changes.10 It is characterised by prolonged absences from home, and often arduous travels and activities involving some form of self-testing, attributes which Graburn compares to the spirit quest of pre-invasion, North American indigenous societies.11

One of the sites of this distancing from ordinary life is the more conscious awareness of encounters with dangers or the possibility of some danger in exploring the unknown. In India the prime danger the traveler encounters is the risk of contracting some debilitating or even fatal disease. Most of those interviewed had experienced either fevers or severe diarrhoea. One claims to have been close to death from a serious infection and another from typhoid, despite the precautions available to the westerner in the form of immunisation (an activity that could be seen as a metaphoric blessing, protection or granting of power by the home culture to the travelling individual). Travelers in India constantly discuss illnesses, symptoms, cures and so on. These range from the frequent jokes, "If the bottom falls out of your world come to India where the world falls out of your bottom,"12 to discussions of the most appropriate forms of medication and treatment for particular ailments. Status is attached to those who have suffered the worst or most gruesome afflictions, lost the most weight or come the closest to death. It is as if the very ill person has succeeded in moving as far as possible away from our everyday world, which includes health as normal and a civic (bourgeois) duty. Unlike the "closed" hygienic environments of mass-tourists, backpackers valorise an openness to the environments they travel through, including the microbial.

This logic meets its penultimate expression in the significatory power of Death. There is, ultimately, nothing more indisputably "real" than the fact of death experienced either close at hand, or personally. Hutnyk confirms that in the early 1990's, a rumour spread like wildfire on the backpacker circuit, that Tony Wheeler, editor and publisher of the ubiquitous Lonely Planet travel guide empire, had died violently in transit.13 The rumour took hold on a collective imaginative theme: as his guides so meticulously reproduce backpacker ideologies and mark the limits of possibility, his death confirms the authenticating power of his gritty guidebooks. There is a cult quality to these books, commonly referred to as "the Bible," which demands a sacrificial saviour in the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

Death itself becomes a macabre and fascinating tourist site. No trip to India is complete without a ghoulish visit to the burning ghats at sites along the Ganges river. In Irian Jaya/ West Papua it is the preserved bodies of ancestors, in Borneo dried heads, etc... This fascination is due in part to the state-regulated segregation and professionalisation of death and dying in the overdeveloped world, which adds further fuel to the notion that death, or in this case the dead, are the ultimate signifier of the real. Ian Catanach describes a collection of nineteenth century British postcards sent from India during an outbreak of plague which show piles of corpses in one image, while another shows patients dying in a more orderly fashion in a specially constructed plague hospital.14 While such a postcard would probably be regarded as in poor taste today, it does demonstrate a certain continuity of interest in "death elsewhere," which was far more likely to actually visit nineteenth century travelers than it does today.

In 1992 Italian travel agent Massimo Beyerle was offering clients visits to an unspecified (due to the obvious contingencies) "October war zone."15 He was offering to take tourists to the ultimate reality, "places shown on the television news," for US $25,000 per person. His services included armed guards, a doctor, flak jackets and other necessities for visiting "the edge zones of combat." Possible sites included "the south of Lebanon, Dubrovnik or Vukovar; as close as possible to the places shown on the television news, so that our clients can see and speak with the people, and see for themselves the damages caused by the war." While obviously an extreme illustration of this fascination with death, destruction and other dangers on the road, a recent edition of women's magazine Marie Claire features three stories of luckless tourists who died on holiday. Titled "Trouble in Paradise," the article warns, "that long-planned trip to paradise can turn into a holiday in hell."16 Ironically, as the quote from Camus, above, reminds us, this threat of death and danger is something that tourism depends upon to retain its imaginative power as a space for reconnection with that "real" which remains so elusive.

Tourists and commodities

For backpackers, their highly contested in-group status on the road is determined by a checklist of factors. High on the list is contact with the "authentic" Other, one's nonchalant relationship to time and disciplined work, the ability to live on very little money, distance from "Western" values and culture, a lack of materialism, and length of travels and stay in one place. Backpackers value those factors which can be seen to set them apart from the conventional experiences of tourism: their lack of availability to the mass tourist, their relative danger or lack of certainty of outcome and the sincerely non-commercial nature of the exchange (this last being something the backpacker is never quite at ease about yet determined to assert) are themes of the utmost importance in the backpacker status game; they authenticate experience. Ironically, these experiences then become a kind of commodity, exchangeable for status in the travel sub-culture.

The language of exchange is an appropriate one for this encounter as it so much underlies the anxieties of tourists about being exploited in their ignorance of local conditions and values. Many tourists/backpackers complain of never feeling they had contact with locals outside of these commercial boundaries, some even feeling outright hostility towards all local hospitality workers as "exploitative rip-off merchants." The small army of touts, competitive rickshaw-wallahs and salesmen, with which most tourists have to contend at some point, can leave those who perceive themselves as having come for more personal and "meaningful" interactions with locals (ie. outside the market) a little frustrated with the consistency of their hosts' capacity to see them primarily as the source of lucrative transactions (more so where tourism is one of the only means of supplementing local economies). To this end tourists, especially backpackers, will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to obtain "local price" for the purchase of commodities, as a sign of their genuine integration with the locale. Even where non-commercial motives are assumed in an interaction with locals, backpackers tend to remain wary of any suggestions of a commercial or financial nature as a threat to her or his sense of engagement in an "authentic" friendship.17

The relations of exchange are reversed somewhat in the situation where tourists are taken hostage, such as the European backpackers in Kashmir. It is precisely because of their high exchange value in the image economy of the media and in the public relations economy of international, diplomatic relations, that they are captured in the first place. Ironically the quest of these backpackers to add maximum value to their adventures, by traveling way off the beaten track and even into "dangerous" territory, sees their own bodies converted into a form of exchange value, in this case held by the militants against the Indian Government.18 The high anxiety of national governments, underwritten by national media attention in such instances, illustrates the significant resources that back up the itineraries of most backpackers. While they may often carry little money, holding certain passports has a real value on the ground that mostly confers an assumed protection: that harm done to a foreigner from a powerful country will make for terrible trouble. This logic of course is reversed in the hostage situation, where the citizens of the most powerful nation, the USA, seem to carry the highest exchange value.19

In the recent case of the three backpacker hostages in Cambodia, it may well have been the fact of their national composition that caused their murder. After a Khmer Rouge attack on a train travelling to a coastal town, the guerillas rounded up all the foreign nationals on board. The Vietnamese passengers were summarily shot on the spot, one can only assume on the assumption that they were agents of the anti-Khmer Rouge Vietnamese government. The remaining foreigners, three unsuspecting male backpackers who had been headed south for famed marijuana and adventure on the frontier of anarchy, comprised an Australian, a Frenchman and an Englishman. Consistent with backpacker logic, they had ignored the advice of their expatriates that it was too dangerous to travel where they planned. The first two carried particular value as subjects of neo-colonial players in Cambodian politics: Australia, and the country's former colonial ruler, France. Both countries were sponsors of the Cambodian peace accord, and were major sponsors of the Hun Sen regime after the breakdown of relations with the Khmer Rouge, supplying aid, weapons, and military training for government forces. The hostages were potentially powerful bargaining tools with the Cambodian government, which could be expected to pay dearly for the return of the citizens of its sponsor states. As it so happened they became pawns in a complex geopolitical game and were ultimately executed, arguably because the Cambodian government could extract more value from them dead than alive.20

Tourists are occasional targets of terrorist attacks and kidnappings primarily because they are available. However there is a more complex dynamic at work as well. The media value of tourists as hostages is not only based on their coming from a powerful or wealthy country, but also preys on common perceptions in media-saturated cultures of their apparent innocence. The tourist is almost by definition an innocent abroad, a consumer suckling infant-like at the great breast of the world. At the same time by turning everything around them into exchange value, tourists are necessarily guilty and undeserving in terms of their own discourses of authentic and uncorrupted otherness. The tourist is caught in a dialectic of innocence, whereby their very innocence as a consumer propels them into guilty participant, even agent, of global exploitation and corruption. This clearly seems to have been the combination that served as justification for the killing of tourists at Luxor, Egypt at the end of 1997.21

My interviews with tourists suggest that at least my youthful sample group traveling in Asia feel trapped within this dialectic. I suspect by imputation that tourists of all sorts feel guilty and anxious at some level about being tourists. Hostage-taking and murder confirm this anxiety in a very dramatic way.

Tourist shame: a conclusion

Dean MacCannell analysed the structure of tourist semiotics over two decades ago.22 Primarily, tourists are engaged in a quest for the real or authentic site. He pointed to the simple fact that this "real" could not be found without convenient markers to present it as such, but that the astute observer (theorist) would notice a productive apparatus behind this staging of the authentic which was in fact the "really real." This apparatus would in many cases become itself a tourist site in turn: the sewers-of-Paris tour, tours of Hollywood studio lots, tours of "real working life," and so on. The subsequent critiques of MacCannell's work have of course pointed to the privileged position he accords to the theorist (himself) who can somehow escape the world of artifice and show, and delve straight to reality itself. Tourists are dupes: theorists are smarter than tourists.23 The greatest irony is that MacCannell's theory repeats one of the primary motifs of late Twentieth Century tourism: the claim of privileged access to the real shored up with the assertion of being different from the mass of other tourists. Obviously intellectuals, acutely status-conscious bourgeois creatures that we tend to be, suffer far more severely from this painful delusion than do those tourists more resigned to, or even celebratory of, or maybe even, as MacCannell would have it, oblivious to, their status as consumers of a staged authenticity.

Not surprisingly, it is the former, bourgeois intellectual, touristic sensibility that predominates in representations of tourist activity and consciousness: travel books, ethnographies, documentaries, postcards and other technologies of dissemination. Two strategies are almost universal in these technologies:

1. Deny the presence of mass, or any other tourists, in the visited locale. This is most commonly practised in photography where frequent attempts are made to erase other tourists, and any other signs of capitalist modernity, from the frame; a symbolic destruction of the signs of the self and its possible multiplication. Any challenge to the claim that being here in this place is a unique, unrepeatable event, any rupture that might shatter the aura of the real, must be denied, erased and refused.

2. In those moments when the presence of other tourists is an undeniable and inescapable fact, the primary strategy is that of removal by distinction. Other tourists become "them": the uncouth, despised, insensitive, problematic, simplistic tourist, who threatens to give the whole game away and blow the "real traveler's" cover (he in search of the real, the intelligence officer of romanticism). This is a common strategy of travel writers from Paul Theroux through to the more playful Pico Iyer. Indeed, the claim to be more than a tourist, to see that which could otherwise not be seen, to travel with the purpose of gathering intelligence to write a report is the very currency of travel writing.

All this leads to the conclusion that there is a homicidal underside to tourist ideology: tourists (or more accurately, a de-personalised tourist logic) wish to obliterate that which doesn't meet with their fantasms. Eric Cohen has a brilliant illustration of this in his account of beach and hill tourism in Thailand.24 He describes how foreign tourists in Thailand go to the hills of the "Golden Triangle" to observe, photograph and experience the tribal peoples, cultures and costumes of the region. Cohen observes that when these same tourists go to the beach islands of southern Thailand they express and demonstrate almost complete indifference to the existence of "exotic" and vibrant village life a hundred metres inland from the beaches which so captivate them. In the first situation, discovering authentic cultural difference is the tourist's inspired mission; in the second, the experience of "nature" obliterates the local inhabitants as anything but service personnel. Cohen records a near-homicidal encounter brought on by this indifference to local sensibilities, and assumes that they will inevitably occur.

A similar phenomenon occurs in Egypt which is always pre-figured as "ancient," absenting contemporary Islam and Arabs from this European fantasy. The pyramids are known as a tourist site primarily for monumentalising the dead. In the face of this the living can perhaps only pale into insignificance, though in the case of Egypt, tourist accounts are inclined to inscribe the local people as a kind of pestilence! This absenting hostility has ironically, and in some cases fatally, been returned recently by Islamic militants who find foreign tourists a disturbance of their reality, or as useful targets in a campaign to destabilise the "moderate" government of Egypt, which generates substantial foreign exchange from tourism to its pre-Islamic monuments.25 These overdetermined relations of tourists to place and people are widely varied, but for the most part revolve around the well-worn themes of nature, culture, history and nation. The theme which is perceived to hold the key to the authenticity of a place may vary over time, but the commitment to its pursuit remains militantly persistent.

This argument is not attempting to explain the motivations for the kinds of individual psychotic violence directed against tourists from the Port Arthur massacre (Tasmania 1996) to the Miami serial killer (Florida 1997). It is, however perversely, suggesting that these acts resonate so powerfully in the Euro-Austral-American media, at least in part, because they confirm the homicidal underside of tourism itself. Tourists, at least symbolically, attempt to absent other tourists and anyone else who comes between them and their fantasies. The death of our fellow tourists brings us face to face with the ambivalent and death-driven horror of those formations and commodity relations which make us homo-touristus. As American Express advertising reminds us: "Don't forget to pack your peace of mind."

Notes:

1. Mentioning tourists and terrorists in the same tenor unsettles already-tenuous notions of guilt and innocence, citizen and criminal, consumer and killer, victim and perpetrator. While Said and others have challenged the discursive effects and political deployments of the laden term "terrorist" as opposed to "(our) freedom fighting allies," tourists, their unassuming doppelgangers, have escaped sustained attention while being at least as politically and morally charged a category. Dead tourists are a more significant trope than one might have expected.

2. This is known in Australia as "The Port Arthur Massacre," which occurred at the former prison/concentration camp, now tourist site at Port Arthur, Tasmania. In the perverse logic of media-mediated violence, news consumers were constantly reminded that it was some kind of numerical record of deaths of this kind, setting a challenge that one assumes some other crazed "white" man will soon feel moved to surpass. I emphasise this gender/ethnicity configuration because it strikes me as significant that mass murderers of the rogue individual type seem to consistently fit these categories. Another project perhaps? I can make no claim to explain the excess of violence in the world but aspects of it speak in a language that might be heard. I remember the shock of "meaninglessness" after the murder of one backpacker friend, - no answers here, but some sense.

3. This writing has been pressed by its uncanny timing to take some responsibility for these deaths, or take some account for them in a different (cash/knowledge) register than the media's hyper-numeracy. This is an attempt to speak of these horrors in an abstract and structural mode with the faint hope that academic discourse may be able to effect some catharsis, while acknowledging a cure would involve something far more revolutionary. There is no intention here of offending the many people who have known and loved "dead tourists," but only to offend the encrusted binaries of innocence and guilt, rationality and irrationality, and the obscenity of a world made safe for First World consumption.

4. Deleuze and Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. Semiotext(e), New York, 1986;pp. 59-60. Perhaps the real border-crossing threat to the power of the state is the movement of finance capital, both as investment, and the much shorter-term movements of currency dealing and exchange-rate fluctuation which hold governements to ransom: floating currencies unsettle the State more than floating populations.

5. Savage, Peter, The Safe Travel Book, 1993.

6. Kincaid, Jamaica, A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988, 17-9. Quoted in Kaplan, Caren, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke, 1996, 62.

7. Diller and Scofidio (eds), Visite aux Armees: Tourismes de Guerre/Back to the Front: Tourisms of War. F.R.A.C. Basse-Normandie, France, 1994, 24.

8. Albert Camus, Carnets 1935-37, NRF/Gallimard, (1962, 26).

9. For a more complete account of the tourist/backpacker distinction see Phipps (1991). Even the apparently straight forward category "tourist" remains a troubled one in the social science of tourism. To revert to a moment of legalism, tourists are defined under the definition of the U.N. International Travel and Tourism meeting in Rome in 1963 as: "..temporary visitors staying at least 24 hours in the country visited and the purpose of whose journey can be classified under one of the following headings:

i) Leisure (recreation, holiday, health, study, religion, sport);

ii) Business, family, mission, meeting." (quoted in Cohen, 1974, 530). Obviously these categories are extremely general and permeable.

10. Graburn, Nelson H.H. , "The Anthropology of Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 10:9-33, 1983.

11.Diller and Scofidio (1994, 80) cite a wonderful demographic survey by S. Plog: "Travellers can be categorized according to psychographic segments distributed along a spectrum extending, at one pole, from the "psychocentric" (inhibited, nonadventurous travellers) to the "allocentric" traveller demanding change and adventure. The bulk of travellers fit into the intermediate area, the "mid-centric." There are five basic motivations for leisure travel, with the following distribution: Life is too short 35%, Adds interest to life 30%, the Need to unwind 29%, Ego support 4%, Sense of self-discovery 4%."

12. Hutnyk, John, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. London: Zed Books, 1996, 54.

13. ibid., 63-4.

14. Catanach, Ian, "Famine and disease before and after 1947." Oral presentation at the South Asian Studies Association conference, "Translatings: Ideas of India Since Independence." Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1997.

15. op. cit., Diller and Scofidio, 136.

16. O'Donoughue, Claire, "Trouble in Paradise." In Marie Claire, September, 1995, pp 55-58.

17. Peter Phipps, 1990, "Travelling Subjects; A deconstructive Ethnography of Backpackers in India," Honours Thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne.

18. I would like to thank Raminder Kaur for making these fascinating connections for me. Much of this paragraph is a simple paraphrase of an e-mail she sent me on 13/8/96.

19. The recent events in Peru are an brilliant variation on this theme, where the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Army bypassed all symbolic intermediaries (such as tourists) and kidnapped the diplomats and ruling elite themselves. They have wagered on the fair assumption that the diplomats with whom they are negotiating have enormous concern for the welfare of diplomats. Similarly they bypassed all media intermediaries by publishing their plans, objectives and press releases on an internet site on the same day as their raid on the Japanese embassy.

20. In the complexity of power in Cambodia, however, a country where the military had over 1000 generals at the time, some of whom operated as semi-independent warlords, or on behalf of differing government factions, the hostages were to become part of a still more complex game. Over the months of isolated reports of the hostages' whereabouts, some photos and tape recordings were smuggled (or sent as part of a media-savvy strategy) out of the jungle, In Australia the media ran the story as front-page news each time new information emerged. They were particularly responsive to the release of images of the hostages and their recorded voices, and from the start of the crisis developed a portrait of the Australian hostage, David Wilson, as an embodiment of the virtues of spirited Australian youth: independent, suspicious of authority and brave. These representations reached a climax when images and recordings of the hostages became available, which were interpreted to show Wilson as the leader and spokesperson for the group, as much by national as personal strength. Just as Australia had led the Cambodian peace process, and was the apparent leader of diplomatic efforts to free the hostages, the Australian national held hostage became the leader of the hostages in a poignant moment of symmetry. This image had still more emotive depth because of its association with Australia's official drive to "become part of Asia" on the one hand, and its resonance with deeply rooted memories of Australians as prisoners of war under the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army.

After months of intense confusion over the whereabouts of the hostages, their welfare and who was conducting the negotiations for their release, there appeared to be an immanent breakthrough. The Khmer Rouge base where they were being held was identified and approached by government military forces. A price for the release of the hostages was negotiated, and as they were being brought towards the government forces, and were approached by the negotiator, the military opened fire on the Khmer Rouge in an intense bombardment and brought an immediate end to the exchange of money for hostages and weeks of careful negotiation.

It has since been surmised that there were elements in the Cambodian Government who concluded that it would be more advantageous to fail to secure the return of the hostages than to succeed. If the hostages could not be returned, or were killed, it would increase Australian, French, and possibly British support for the corrupt and increasingly inept government, particularly in their war against the Khmer Rouge. This view was further encouraged in Australia by the extreme obfuscation by the Australian Foreign Affairs Ministry over the exact process of negotiations concerning what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and so on. In the months that followed, confused and contradicting reports emerged about the hostages location and welfare, until finally their bodies were found by Cambodian soldiers led there by a Khmer Rouge defector. They had been killed in the method characteristic of the Khmer Rouge in their genocidal phase, with a blow to the back of the head by a mattock. In this instance, it was the particular value of the national affiliation of the hostages that had determined their ultimate fate through such a complex chain of values and strategies. Had they been Indian, Kenyan or Dutch, they may have been released without mishap, or perhaps have met the fate of the Vietnamese nationals and been summarily shot.

21. Sheik Abdel-Rahman, an inspiration for Islamic militants in Egypt, was quoted in 1993 as saying of tourists, "They go to Egypt for transgressions such as fornication, drinking, intoxicants, gambling and usury. They transmit diseases such as AIDS to our land. To those lamenting what has happened to tourism, I say it is sinful... the lands of Muslims will not become bordellos for sinners of every race and color." (The Age, Melbourne, Australia, November 22, 1997, 19)

22. MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory Of The Leisure Class. London: Macmillan, 1976.

23. See also Van Den Abeele, 1980; Morris, 1988; Frow, 1991, for ongoing discussion of this problematic.

24. Cohen, Erik , "Marginal Paradises: Bungalow Tourism On The Islands Of Southern Thailand", Annals of Tourism Research 9, 1982:189-228.

25. I wrote this before September 1997 when a busload of German tourists were killed in a firebomb attack outside the state museum in Cairo, and the later killing at Luxor. Egypt earns more than $4.33 billion Australian dollars a year from tourism, making it a major source of foreign currency (Bendigo Advertiser, November 19, 1997, page 4).

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