Catherine Lane West-Newman: Fashioning the Exotic: Marketing Ethnic Indian Style in Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Auckland
New Zealand
Cultural and ethnic tourism are combined with textile and fashion shopping in a tour of Rajasthan and Gujarat. In a participant observer study of marketing and consuming experiences, this paper explores the nature and effects that conjunction through concepts of cultural capital, authenticity, emotional response, and the representation of identity.
It is argued that the ways in which cultural tourism is combined with textile and fashion shopping in these regions of India are constructed not by the agendas of governmental and NGO tourism and craft projects but rather by the information, attitudes, and judgments of individual tour leaders and the consuming desires and practices of their groups. The acquisition and display of cultural capital as the distinction of taste through aesthetic appreciation is both granted, as borrowed capital, and judged through group leaders’ tastes and knowledge. It is also stored in the form of objects bought and displayed upon the return home. The quest for distinction through knowledgeable appreciation and purchase of craft work as textiles and made up into garments is shaped by travellers’ individual understandings of what they believe constitutes authenticity. Their varying interpretations of that quality emphasizes that judgment in these matters is individualistic, contingent, and situationally constructed. In an exotic and ethnicized setting the emotional dimensions of consuming become heightened by the excitement of the unfamiliar and even dangerous. The chances of errors in taste are amplified and dependence on experts is, at least for some consumers, intensified. Each of these elements plays a part in the processes of identity which are consciously and unconsciously present in the experiences of these tourists who shop.
The paper concludes with some reflections on the developmental and ethical dimensions of this form of touristic consumption for producers and buyers.