Power, nation and postcolonial resistance:

geographies of the tourism critique in Goa

paper presented by

Arun Saldanha

Center for Media Sociology

Free University of Brussels

Pleinlaan 2

1050 Brussels

Belgium

arun.saldanha@vub.ac.be

(after August 2000: arunsaldanha@hotmail.com)

Session ‘Power and contemporary modernities’

‘Power and knowledge’

Crossroads in Cultural Studies International Conference

Birmingham, 21-25 June 2000

Power, nation and postcolonial resistance:

geographies of the tourism critique in Goa

According to Zygmunt Bauman (1991), modernity, more than merely a phase in political-economic history, is a will to order, an ideology of frontiers, feasibility and future. Nation-building fits into this utopian scheme of classification and centralization by designing a rigid map of national ‘blocks’ upon a landscape of heterogenous social identities and contingent movement of bodies, signs and things. Modernity, says Bauman, attempts at the eradication of indeterminancy, of ambivalence and chance. Nation-building, being quintessentially modern, entails introspective cultural processes caught by phrases like ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983) and ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell, 1976). The imaginary geography (Said, 1978) of the nation then coincides with ‘national identity’, a popular feeling of belonging (and, for others, being excluded). National imagination and identification isn’t just produced centrally by State apparatuses such as schools, broadcasting networks, armies, money and national statistics, but also by culture at large: through language, dress, food, sports, music, literature, science, tourism, lotteries, museums, press, advertising, etc. etc.

Thus, though the practices constituting the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) of a nation-state are extremely diverse, the overall effect seems to be the construction of compelling coherence, of nationhood. Nationhood implicates themes, territorializations, texts, institutions, and the national subject itself. Subjects don’t produce the nation, the nation produces subjects (or rather, subject positions, see Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The nation could then be termed what Foucault (1969) called a ‘discursive formation’ (although Foucault himself wrote little if nothing about the nation as such). It’s not that teachers, football fanatics, wheather reporters, sociologists, people crying over Diana’s death are consciously reproducing nationhood — it sort of just happens. This ‘sort of just happenning’ is what I think is meant by the Foucauldian argument of discourses being ‘strategies without strategists’. The nation’s power is so nebulous, so meticulously dispersed in the little everyday networks of which we form part, that we’re all exercising it without knowing. However, in a short while, I will show that it’s precisely this embodiment in little everyday spaces that renders problematic the notion of nations being discursive formations in the sense alluded to above.

First a small diversion on the concept of modernity. We have witnessed an enormous production of texts on this topic the last few decades, but relatively few address the question of where the modernity which we’re speaking of is located. All too often — as with most of ‘contemporary French theory’ — ‘modernity’ is implicitly understood to be European modernity. Among others, Anthony King (1995) has rightly criticized this geographical bias in theory, for it’s empirically more than evident that the defining features of modernity — the will to order, the nation-state, industrial capitalism, the city, consumer culture, the belief in progress — have spread across the globe. Europe’s modern project was, from the start, backed up by and diffused through its colonial project (cf. Said, 1978). As Frantz Fanon (1961) has famously written, elites in formely colonized spaces have continued the European colonizers’ national and modern projects well beyond the usual historical and geographical demarcations of ‘modernity’. There are other modernities, multiple modernities.

The utopics of nationhood and civil society in postcolonial nation-states are arguably even more tangible than in Europe. These ‘underdeveloped’ countries are required to forge strategies which will bring them to the same evolutionary level as the ‘developed’ countries of the West. Hegemonic ideoscapes (Appadurai, 1990) fixing the meanings of signifiers like ‘national development’ and ‘democracy’ derive from Eurocentric definitions of ‘modernity’. They then propel postcolonial governments to take economic and social measures to ‘leap-frog’ out of lamentable backwardness. In most postcolonial states, political-economic development strategies have been parallelled with the cultural-political strategy of constructing a national identity — an own national identity supposedly independent from former colonialism. Often feeding upon the anti-colonialist nationalism which spawned forth national sovereignity in the first place, Third World nationalisms face similar contradictions and ambivalences as those in Europe. Stuart Hall’s remarks about hybridity and the incongruence of national identity and the cultural and ethnic identities it is supposed to encompass hold as true for postcolonial nation-states (Hall, 1992). What’s more, nationhood, modernity and State in postcolonial spaces are ‘hybrid’ from the outset.

Even if there hasn’t been much theorization of the concept of ‘modernity’ outside Europe, the globalization of modernity has of course been studied in international relations studies, media studies and world-systems analysis. The geography that arises here is one where these modern processes flow from a Center towards a Periphery (Wallerstein, 1979) — or else, from First World to Third World, from North to South. Postcolonial modernities are regarded as simply imitations and extensions of colonialist modernities. In Herbert Schiller’s well-known texts, multinationals from the Center, primarily the U.S., force open postcolonial markets for media technologies, tourism and mass consumer products, ‘thus’ securing the further spread of Western values like consumerism and invidualism (e.g. Schiller, 1976). Within this neat global map of ‘powerful’ versus ‘powerless’ or ‘dependent’ nations, any act on the part of the poorer nations against the ‘cultural imperialism’ of the Center is an act of resistance against domination. Thus, Third World nationalism is commonly thought of as a discourse resisting the onslaught of Western modernity.

We shall shortly see why this sort of inter-national cartography of modernity and world dominance is empirically and theoretically flawed. For this, I will reinvoke my earlier discussion of the nation as discursive formation. Though it’s certainly attractive to analyze ‘nation’ as a synthetic power effect of myriad textual, spatial and bodily practices, it might be more fruitful to treat specific nationhoods as shifting sites, whose boundaries, pasts and futures are contested. Each nation is multiply constructed, by many different institutions, representations and social groups; sometimes, these constructions will mutually reinforce each other, sometimes they won’t. The Foucauldian conceptions of discourse and power are certainly useful for studying the social construction of nation-states, maps, law, otherness, history, objectivity etc., but need to be qualified. In studying how the nation, for example, becomes effective reality, I think it’s important not to overlook the clashing of discursive practices — the way the nation’s power is necessarily reworked and rearticulated within particular times, places, flows and spaces, the way its power follows unexpected pathways, the way it affects different social fields with different logics.

Thus, when in postcolonial modernities nationhood is reflexively invoked as a strategy against the dominating power of the ‘Center’, we cannot say this Third World nationalism is a straightforward and monolithic discursive formation resisting neocolonialism. While it is certain that supranational organizations like the IMF primarily represent Western interests, and Western-owned companies aggressively try to create global consumer markets for everything from shampoo to music videos to mass tourism, we cannot conceive the discursive practices of resistance on the part of postcolonial nations as simply opposed to these practices of domination. Nationalistic discourses in the Third World are more complex than that. Not only are the histories and geographies of colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance in world politics intertwined, but ‘domination’ always includes ‘resistance’, and ‘resistance’ always includes ‘domination’.

These abstract thoughts will hopefully become more concrete after I’ve worked through my case-study. I want to discuss the ‘resistance’ of various agencies in the former Portuguese colony of Goa against the ‘domination’ of the tourist industry and touristic culture in this South-Indian state. The data presented here derive from a PhD in progress. Goa’s practices of resistance wouldn’t be so interesting for our present discussion were it not that they feed upon, and feed, patriotic sentiment and definitions of Goan identity. The Goan critique of tourism, therefore, should be seen within the light of Goa’s more general political and cultural struggles, its wider geographies (‘imaginary’ and ‘real’) of postcolonial identity. However, when scrutinizing these geographies, it will soon become apparent that ‘Goa’, as an object constituted discursively through the tourist critique, is fraught with frictures and counter-definitions.

Goa is not a nation-state in the administrative sense; when the Portuguese gave up their colony in 1961, Goa became part of the Indian nation, first as Union Territory, and since 1987 as a proper state with its own official state language, Konkani. But sociologically, it is certainly relevant to talk about Goa’s ‘national’ identity and ‘nationalism’. Foremost because of 451 years of Portuguese colonialism, most Goans identify much more with Goa than with India. Portugal’s aggressive missionarism brought Catholicism, the Portuguese language and Mediterrean customs to Goa.

Economic recession and the inclusion of Goa into the Indian nation lead large numbers of Catholics to migrate to Bombay, Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique and North-America, where they maintain strong sentimental links with their homeland; on the other hand, nearly one out of three in Goa comes from elsewhere in India. The portion of Catholics in the Goan population dropped from over 60% in 1850 to about 28% now. The colonial culture of the Catholics, however, has always been hegemonic in Goa. Goan Catholic pride traditionally draws upon the mythical image of Goa Dourada (Golden Goa), a brief period of economic and cultural prosperity between 1575 and 1600, when Goa was renowned as the ‘Rome of the East’ — as civilized enclave in barbaric space (Cabral e Sá & Pasricha, 1996). Goa Dourada is an intensely modern myth; it was only when the importance of Goa’s sea port in Asia steadily declined, that Goan elites started to longfully look at the past for a raison d’être in the present (cf. Newman, 1989).

Up to this day, Christians in South India distantiate themselves through dress, cuisine, song, festival, education and English literature from the rest of India. That is to say, Catholic cultural patriotism lies deep in Goa, to the expense of Hindu, Muslim, pan-Indian/Gandhian, multicultural and secular patriotisms, even though there has been nearly no communal violence towards non-Christians in Goa since the Portuguese Inquisition. Skimming through Goan fiction, picture books, architecture, gardens and living rooms, it’s not difficult to find the common themes of Goan-Catholic patriotism: nostalgia, sentimentality, faith, community, folklore, kinship and morality. Evidently, a culture so based upon preservation should feel threatened by the forces of modern globalization.

And globalization in Goa is very much connected to tourism. Its beautiful beaches, low prices, reliable climate and a certain easy-going way of life attract more than a million visitors yearly — in 1997, over 260,000 foreigners, more than half of them British, spent their holiday in Goa, staying an average of (just) 9 days. The tourist industry started in the mid-seventies, but really kicked off about a decade later with the charter flights (24 during the 1985-1986 season to 340 during the 1996-1997 season). During the 1997-1998 season, over 88,000 foreigners arrived by charter flights (Tourism Statistics, 1998). Goa used to be a colonial holiday destination for the wealthy Portuguese. In the late sixties and the seventies, the place became a prime station on the ‘hippie-trail’ in Asia. Quickly, drug trafficking, psychedelic music and partying formed a sound (if relatively informal) infrastructure for a hedonistic traveller culture still very much alive to this day, mostly in the Northern village of Anjuna. Most villagers have always been fine with the hippie culture, but since the end of the seventies there has been growing moral panic about the scene, especially the ‘Goa trance’ raves which started in the nineties and are popular amongst local youngsters and Indian tourists too (Saldanha, 2000; Goa Today, 1996a).

Elsewhere, as in Calangute, Baga and Colva, beach shacks and renting rooms from local families gave way to large hotel development projects, five-star resorts and the touristic culture we all know too well: video recorders, fish ’n chips, karaoke, lager and getting laid. The industrialization of tourism in India, as in any poor country, is promoted by the government and international organizations like the World Tourism Organization as the road to prosperity and global competitiveness (Menezes & Lobo, 1991). But, again as in other poor countries, tourism in India is primarily beneficial for the upper middle-classes, big hotel owners, the tax collection and all sorts of shady figures exploiting India’s hopelessly corrupt state mechanisms. Village economies, the environment and small vendors suffer from the short-term opportunism that permeates the political leadership and tourism sector.

These problems of tourism have been consistently identified by a number of agencies from different backgrounds. First, there is the press, which in India functions pretty well as a political watchdog. Debates on the policy and effects of tourism regularly appear in Goa’s public sphere (e.g. Goa Today). Second, there are various citizens’ and village activist groups. The most important pan-Goan action group is the Jagrut Goenkaranchi Fauz (JGF, Goa’s Vigilant Army) which works within a broadly Marxist-Leninist framework (see Martins, 1994). Other action groups are based on trade-unionism or small business interests (see Noronha, 1998; Sreekumar et al., 1995). Third, there are scholarly inspired clergy people criticizing tourism from a sort of Third World Christian solidarity ethic (e.g. De Sousa, 1989); many Catholics stress the detrimental moral effects of tourism (e.g. CCAT, 1990). Fourth, there are environmentalist NGOs doing research, raising ecological awareness and filing cases against violations of environmental laws, by far the most influential being the Goa Foundation (Ecoforum, 1993). Fifth, there are popular authors and artists which comment on the realities of tourism (fiction: Botelho, 1994; cooking: Vieira-Continho, 1994; history: Albuquerque, 1988). Sixth, there are academics from a range of disciplines (from economics to maritime ecology) whose work necessarily touches upon questions of tourism. And last, there are some individual politicians who from time to time take public stance against tourist development.

Now, I’m not saying that the critiques of tourism that all these agencies put forward univocally connect to Goan patriotism. My point is exactly that the imagination of ‘Goa’ which informs, and is implicated by, these critiques is not univocal. On the one hand, it is true that patriotism is manifest in many other domains than only the critique of tourism, domains which I won’t directly discuss here. Also, it might not be always accurate to speak of ‘patriotism’ in cases (like some NGO activism) where agencies simply take up a local civic cause. But on the other hand, what cannot be denied is that all these agencies lead to a struggle over the meaning of modern Goa — Goa’s community, Goa’s boundaries in time-space, Goa’s culture, Goa’s future. This characterizes any nation struggling to define itself. By showing that there are multiple and ambiguous constructions of place, constructions that vary socially, situationally and spatially, I’d like to argue, first, that we shouldn’t speak of the power of the nation-state in ways that privilege the image of power either radiating from one center (e.g. C. Wright Mills), or obscurely working everywhere at the same time (i.e. Foucault); and second, that we shouldn’t uncritically celebrate postcolonial resistances ‘against’ global inequalities. Basically, for me, what these two tasks amount to is a geographical deconstruction of the opposition domination/resistance.

There are four interrelated critical operations which will enable me to ‘spatialize’ (i.e. sensitize geographically) Goa’s discourse about tourism and construction of modern self-identity. The geopolitics of the tourism critique is about how it tries to claim ‘Goa’ within the historical interplay of Portugal, Britain, India and the world. The geohistories/ disembeddings of the critique show some cultural and spatial trajectories which have condensed into the critique, as well as how the critique has been ‘lifted out’ of its local context. The tourism critique’s socio-spatial biases refer to the discrepancy between Goa’s real and imaginary social geographies. Construction of place or identity privileges some while leaving out others. And subsequently, the situatedness of the critique points towards the differential localizations of a discourse; any discourse is always instantiated in different ways in different times and places.

Although a ‘critical geopolitics’ (Agnew & Colridge, 1995) of Goa’s position within the international political economy would be interesting, for our purposes by ‘geopolitics’ I mean the study of the construction of place within imperial political realities and the contemporary world map of nations and capitalism. As I’ve explained, Goa’s modernity is intrinsically linked to Portugal’s colonization of the area, and its inclusion within the Indian nation has been ambiguous and contested from the start. During colonialism, Goan and Indian intellectuals were far from univocal about where Goa stood historically (cf. Panikkar, 1995). Goa’s Catholic elites traditionally imagined themselves more as part of a Portuguese empire than of the Indian subcontinent (e.g. Cabral e Sá & Pasricha, 1996; Pereira, 1995); as a consequence, Brahmin elites identified more with the neighbouring state Maharashtra (Newman, 1989). On the other hand, the failings of Portuguese colonial policy and the rapid decline of Goa’s magnificence was a welcome source of ridicule for the British (e.g. Burton, 1851) — Goan efforts in reclaiming its past grandeur are still considered pittiful and funny in Southern India. Indian anti-colonialist intellectuals have always scorned the ‘denationalization’ of Goans, especially the Christians, by which is meant the dis-identification with the Indian ‘nation’ (which didn’t exist either, of course) in favour of Lisbon (see Tombat, 1994).

Up to this day, the conflict between the ‘exclusivist’ myth of Goa Dourada and the ‘instrumentalist realism’ of Goa Indica (meaning, Goa as part of India) is integral to the geopolitical debate as to what should inform Goan nationalism: Luso-Indian patriotism or Hindu-Christian — ‘Indian’ — syncretism (Newman, 1989). Strangely enough, in the beginning of the twentieth century, some pan-Indian nationalists saw foreign tourism as a remedy against this denationalization: foreigners other than the Portuguese would weaken cultural ties between the Goans and Portugal. However, though some action groups liken tourism to cultural imperialism, European tourists haven’t produced an increase in Goan-Indian consciousness, on the contrary. Thousands of immigrants come to Goa every tourist season in the hope of benefitting from the foreign tourists. There is continuous complaint among local caterers about the influx of Karnatakans, Kashmiri, Bombayites, Rajastani, Nepali and Tibetans. In these daily complaints, as in newspaper reports about rape for instance, ‘Indians’ refers to non-Goans. ‘Indians’ are rowdy, are cheats, can’t cope with booze, with women, with foreigners; Goans can.

There is a similar geopolitical grudge against ‘Indianization’ in talk about tourism development on a macro-scale. Because the Goan land-owning and business families were not quick enough in responding to Goa’s burgeoning mass tourism potential, it was out-of-state capitalists which steadily bought up land and constructed hotels, bungalows, shopping malls, restaurants, holiday appartments and seaside resorts. Goans are quick to point out that this goes hand in hand with violation of the law and of local sentiments about landscape and community. The case of India’s largest hotel group Taj harassing villagers was exemplary. And capital comes from even further. Charter tour operators, multinational developers such as Club Med and Lufthansa, and Indian-foreign hotel deals have been legion since the mid-eighties. The ‘selling out of Goa’ is vehemently criticized. There is a wide-spread feeling, amongst civilians and intellectuals, that in commoditizing Goa’s space, Goans’ political-economic agency is fully denied in the spheres of tourism and land development (Routledge, 1996; see Sreekumar et al., 1995; ISS, 1989).

Long-term economic plans are thought out in New Delhi to exploit Goa for the national treasury. Significantly, India has been opening up its economy for foreign investment since 1992. Then again, at international tourism fairs, the Goan government promotes Goa independently from the Indian nation to international tourism developers. Critical studies (e.g. Menezes & Lobo, 1991; Ecoforum, 1993) present Goan politicians as either corrupt and selfish, or as puppet in the hands of Indian and multinational capital. Telling was the case of Japanese plans of building an entire township for rich retired Japanese on the beaches of Pernem. A luxurious casino pier in Arambol, a 90 km highway and a jumbojet-carrying airport are still future fantasies of the Tourism Department. The government is also condemned for supporting the ‘commercialization of Goan culture’ by presenting a brochure version of Goa which centers on ‘fun and frolic’, beach landscapes, churches and food. ‘Goa is a mood, an ambience, rather than a destination chock-full of things to do and places to see. It’s also an addiction. Instant and life-long. And heavenly’ (D’Souza, 1999: 31). Frequently, official representation is strongly gendered, revolving around images of white women in bikini, thus also presenting Goa to the gaze of hords of men from neighbouring states who think Goa is still the nudists’ paradise some of it used to be in the seventies. By comparing Goa to other, already spoilt places such as Hawaii, Spain, Mexico or Bali, the Goan government is criticized for destroying the uniqueness of its own state (Menezes & Lobo, 1991; ISS, 1989).

In short, the tourist critique in Goa requires a series of positionings of Goa within a complicated historical geography of imperial politics, colonization, migration, Third World nationalisms, state policy and global consumer capitalism. To map all the different actors, interests, technologies and ideologies in this geopolitics is impossible; let it suffice to say that Goa’s politics of the past and politics of inclusion into larger wholes (Indian culture, Indian nation, Western civilization, world capitalism) makes it difficult to talk of simply one geopolitical position.

It is increasingly recognized that every local reality is a particular outcome of movements of people and cultures across space. This is not only the case of the highly complex societies of today’s world, but has been a constant throughout human history long before we started talking about ‘globalization’ and ‘hybridization’ (cf. Hall, 1992). While before, analysts would look at the roots of a local phenomenon (the internal constitution through time), it seems commonplace now to stress the routes (the external constitution through space) as for example James Clifford (1997) does. We could call the reconstruction of the various ‘scapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) converging into a specific local phenomenon that phenomenon’s ‘geohistory’. On the other hand, Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘disembedding’ presents the reverse movement of what he terms the ‘local-global dialectic’, whereby processes are ‘lifted out’ of the locality where they originated, so that social life is disconnected from the here and now and becomes increasingly mediated by modern institutions and communication technologies (Giddens, 1990). A geographical analysis of a local discourse like the tourism critique in Goa entails that we take a look at both ‘where it comes from’ as ‘where it goes’.

It is plain that a lot of the patriotic thrust of the tourism critique goes back to the intensive Christianization and Europeanization that the Portuguese brought to Goa. As is spelled out in novels like Remigio Botelho’s On a Goan beach (1994), Goan Catholics’ repulsion against the hippie/traveller culture generally derive from bourgeois puritanism. Goans were brought up by colonialist education to believe Europe was the cradle of world civilization, while the Europeans they saw were pot-smoking, long-haired nudists dancing on the beach. ‘Hippies’ was appropriated by Goans as a somewhat derigatory term for every young white person and is still very much in use. As James Carrier (1995) comments in response to the hugely influential work on ‘Western images of the Orient’ by Edward Said (1978), cultural analysts have yet to investigate the ‘Eastern images of the Occident’. In Goa, one body of Occidentalist stereotypes (the Occident as origin of Culture and good conduct) was threatened by another (the Occident as province of degenerated youth).

Representations of the contemporary psychedelic rave scene (Saldanha, 2000) in the press, on email discussion groups and in everyday conversations reflect a similar hostile and conservative attitude towards the foreigner’s hedonism, fuelled by wild stories about what happens at the raves. Since the beginnings of hippie/traveller/ dance/drugs culture in Goa, it has been largely Catholics which have been most worried about the nefarious ‘impact’ this sort of tourism has on Goan youth. Local village activists have been far more concerned with the possible disappearance of their income in the face of luxury tourism, rather than their ‘values’ (Sreekumar et al., 1995). One Catholic group, the Citizens Concerned About Tourism, in a letter to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (as usual on behalf of the ‘people of Goa’), called the hippies

Civilians and activists demand that the police and government take firm measures. Sometimes the anti-hippie, anti-rave discourse resembles that of the extreme-right in Europe demanding the deportation of ‘criminal foreigners’, for the sake of cultural purity of future generations. It’s more than ironic that the post-colonial (Catholic) culture that the young Goans are required to cling to, was forced upon Goan society by the Portuguese in a much more brutal and systematic way than what hippies and ravers are doing now. That is to say, the Occidentalist reactions against the ‘neocolonialism’ of tourism is historically itself derivative of conservative colonial ideoscapes (cf. Chatterjee, 1986).

But the puritan stance against the ‘invasion’ of Western youth culture in India isn’t confined to Catholics. As with Western authors like Schiller (1976), the presence of MTV, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Nike have prompted many Indian Marxist-Leninists too to decry ‘cultural imperialism’. In Goa, of course, this process is identified with tourism. The activist group JGF states:

There’s no space here to delve into the essentialisms and rhetorical complications in the discourse on cultural imperialism and the anti-colonial left in India (see e.g. Chatterjee, 1986). What is relevant for the discussion here, is that the discursive frameworks for the critique of the ‘onslaught’ of the tourist industry and hippie culture in Goa are basically modernist imports from the West, either Catholic-traditionalist or anti-imperialist or environmentalist or nationalist or a peculiar mix of these. It goes without saying that while the geohistory of the Indian critique of tourism might point to hybridization of colonial ideoscapes, this doesn’t make the critique less ‘authentic’ or less effective in Goa’s local reality.

The geohistory of action groups’ ideologies and concrete demands in Goa also points towards their disembedding. While the action radius of village activism is mostly confined to the territory of the villages in question (Sreekumar et al., 1995), larger groups like JGF and Goa Foundation have regular contact with Indian and foreign development agencies (e.g. Equations in Bangalore, Tourism Concern in London) through documentation, research, Internet and meetings. When foreign journalists, filmers or scholars like myself write on tourism in Goa, to a large extent they rely on information provided by JGF and Goa Foundation. Both have appeared several times on the BBC. The Lonely Planet travel guides of Goa and India have, upon criticism from JGF and Goa Foundation, taken some trouble to raise awareness about problems of tourism. Through websites and email discussion groups, Goans communicate with Goan diaspora and thus expand the discussions about tourism from the local public sphere into cyberspace. These Goan expatriates, nearly exclusively Catholic, at times seem to be more patriotic and panicky about things going wrong in Goa than most in Goa itself.

Goans at home and Goans abroad sharply criticize the state mechanisms for paying lip service to the non-Goan charter and luxury tourist industries. Their imagination of Goa then explicitly opposes itself to the official and commercial international marketing of Goa. Still, the opposition is ambiguous, as many civilians themselves represent Goa as sossegado — easy-going, fun-loving, traditions-laden, subtropical, hospitable Mediterrean. Mario Cabral e Sá, for instance, deplores the fact Goa attracts hedonists, and wrote of the hippies in the village of Anjuna indulging ‘in nude bathing (in the sea and under the sun) and their moonlight orgies — oral, anal, frontal, mono, homo, hetero, what have you — and tableaux à deux as often à trois no holds barred, no qualms, no guilt, no shame’ (cited in Albuquerque, 1988: 84). Strangely enough, he ends a patriotic picture book with

The local struggles to define Goa within/against tourism show various organizational connectivities, and draw upon global resources far beyond the state territories of Goa and India. The global connectivity of the local tourist critique is also evident on a deeper ideological-cultural level. ‘Western’ signifiers such as ‘identity’, ‘local culture’, ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’, ‘tradition’, ‘development’, ‘durable tourism’, ‘commercialization’ and ‘materialism’, through geohistories of missionarism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, development cooperation, migration and nationalism, have slipped into place-specific critiques of globalization (cf. Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The critique is ambiguous, however, as the sentiments and rhetorics it uses to fight globalization are themselves global in origin.

A third aspect of the geography of Goa’s tourism critique is its socio-spatial biases. The discursive constructions of modern Goan society refract the fractures present in that society: fractures of region, locality, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, occupation, caste, language, migratory past, generation, etc. The representativity of the tourism critique poses a thorny problem especially to pan-Goan NGOs, intellectuals and priests, who claim to adhere to a participatory-democratic objective of protecting ‘Goans’ from the negative effects of tourism. As is the case in all Third World economies, the socio-spatial divide between city and village is a crucial factor in Goa’s economic and cultural politics. Although mining is the prime industry, a large portion of Goans still make their living with agriculture (rice, coconut) and, on the coast, fishing. Of course, tourism has radically changed patterns of income (see ISS, 1989). Most domestic tourists stay in towns and take day-trips to the beaches, while most foreign tourists spend their holiday in coastal areas, where consequently more capital is both invested and generated. The tourism critique is overwhelmingly focussed on Goa’s coast.

The Catholic ideology of Goa Dourada builds upon Goa Velha’s (the ancient city of Goa) mythical urban past. The Luso-Indian culture of Goa Dourada is still tangible in Catholic urban and suburban spaces: churches, chapels, relics, patios, gardens, squares, statues, mansions, verandas, living rooms, furniture, family photographs, pianos. Moreover, the non-urban spaces depicted in a sentimental picture book like Goa: Pearl of the East (Cabral e Sá & Pasricha, 1996) tend to show Goa’s natural beauty, not its Hindu villagers. However, twentieth-century Goan patriotism is equally involved in constructing an imagery of Goan Gemeinschaft outside of urban modernity (e.g. Albuquerque, 1988; Botelho, 1994; Pereira, 1995). In these constructions as well, there is a definite bias towards the Catholic middle-classes living on the coastal belt (although there’s always some mention of the different religious communities living peacefully together — again, as opposed to the religious violence in the rest of India). Catholics are also represented more in the North, the so-called Old Conquests which have always maintained a stronger connection to Europe (and which incidentally receives the most tourists).

In short, the discourse on Goa’s rural landscape, coastal peasant communities and the effects thereupon of industrialization and mass tourism chiefly comes from educated middle-class Catholics living in towns. Put in simple terms, village activism isn’t half as based on cultural nostalgia as the tourism critiques of ‘cultural imperialism’ by Catholic and some Marxist intellectuals (Sreekumar et al., 1995). While a rope-maker joins a demonstration against the acquisition of coconut fields by a big hotel group for local, quite pragmatic reasons, a group like CCAT might join the demonstration to keep alive a romantic image of pan-Goan craftmanship. CCAT would be then far less concerned about criticizing the enduring structures of exploitation by Goan landlords, industrialists and government officials.

What’s more, the social groups arguably most exploited by tourism capitalists are the thousands of construction workers, many of which are seasonal migrants from the rest of India. Then there are the thousands of gypsies, merchants, service providers (like the infamous ear cleaners) and handicrafters from outside the state, who are resented by Goans for cheating foreigners and adding on to the fierce competition of the small-scale tourism economy. The representation of the interests of these guest-workers in the Goan tourism critique is very rare. While village activists and environmentalists have in recent years joined forces, distancing themselves more and more from the patriotic moralism of the Goan Church and organizations like CCAT (Sreekumar et al., 1995), the difficulty of articulating the cause of these immigrants with Goan patriotic sentiment stands in the way of securing their socio-economic position within the industrialization of tourism.

I could add here that tourists themselves can be ‘victims’ too, as the daily accounts of being cheated by vendors and harassed by the corrupt police testify. The heroin addicts, the foreign girls who have been raped, the backpackers without passport or whose money has been stolen, the Indian tourists who have been beaten up by locals, the Indian tourists who have drowned, the discrimination of homosexuals, the backpackers who are sentenced to years of rigorous imprisonment just to boost up the public image of the Goan cops: the interests of these are seldom defended in the tourism critique.

Through the tourist critique, constructions of a ‘we’ against a ‘them’ arises — villagers/big business (Sreekumar et al., 1995, talk about the ‘big other’), Goans/non-Goans, Goans/whites. The process of othering happens in line with moral disapproval and covert classism. This is evident in representations of charter-touristic culture — my own words above, ‘video recorders, fish ’n chips, karaoke, lager and getting laid’ were classist too. Classism is even more evident in Goan representations of the ‘hippies’, the ‘drop-outs from Western society’, who have been consistently stereotyped in the press, in meetings and in everyday conversations as poor, crazy, lazy, criminal and dirty, not belonging anywhere. The moral panic about their music and drugs (Saldanha, 2000) sometimes leads to all sorts of mind-boggling conspiracy theories of, for instance, the mafia having invented Goa trance music in order to sell more LSD. The music is represented as fundamentally non-Goan, as totally alien. What happens then to the increasing amount of Goan boys who genuinely like Goa trance? Again, it’s ironic that traditional Goan music itself is basically adapted Portuguese and English music, sometimes with Konkani lyrics.

The hedonism of young foreigners is considered illegitimate as opposed to the much ‘milder’ hedonism of Goans. The eroticization and commercialization of Carnival for tourists is hotly debated every spring: traditional escapism is okay, but add semi-nude girls and it becomes ‘decadent’. Also very interesting was the Freddy Peat paedophilia case, in which the moral panic completely ignored the possibility of the existence of such a perversion amongst Goans (Goa Today, 1996b). The hedonism of sex, drugs and rave is also constructed differentially from the hedonism of the casinos, golf courses and expensive water sports. Classism is obvious in the utopian schemes of the Goan government, who since the late eighties has openly and steadily been following a policy of discouraging backpackers (and recently, even charter tourists) in favour of upperclass Indians and foreigners.

Looking at the proud reports in the Goan and Indian press of the bunjee-jump facility in Anjuna in the 1999-2000 season, ‘the first in South-Asia’, the government’s prestigious tourism infrastructure projects are even likely to be welcomed instead of despised by many (Westernized) Goan patriots. In fact, the extensive media attention to Anjuna’s festivites during the 1999-2000 season balanced between moral panic about ‘narco-tourism’ and the decadence of rave on one side, and secret patriotic pride on the other. A tiny state such as Goa manages to attract many thousands of the foreign and Bombay jetset for the ‘third biggest millennium party on the planet’ (India Today, 1999): the sheer successes of tourism and international attention on some occasions makes the tourism critique very ambivalent. Ordinary Goans often boast about the number of nationalities found in Goa, a proof that it’s the most beautiful land in the world. Any ‘progress’ putting India on the world map elicits a kind of patriotism amongst literate Indians, even radical intellectuals; anything from posh casinos to cricket to Miss World to the software industry to rally-cross to nuclear tests.

So the question rises: what kind of tourism is criticized in Goa’s tourism critique? If a five-star gated community, like Cidade de Goa outside state capital Panjim, is built without displacement of villages, is that okay? If the Taj Village would be in Goan hands, or a Goan Catholic country club would acquire village land, would that be okay? If the carrying capacity of coastal villages is superseded, should the government start promoting forest, mountain or grassland tourism (it has already started promoting monsoon tourism)? Should the Goan Department of Tourism cooperate with that of Maharashtra, Karnataka and India? Where has the protest to be concentrated, on the beaches, or in-land, where there are infrastructural problems of water, construction and roads? On Anjuna with the ‘travellers’, or on Baga and Calangute with the charter tourists, or the more scattered luxury tourism projects? The Catholic and Church critiques have concentrated on the first kind of tourism (e.g. De Sousa, 1989), while Marxists have chiefly concentrated on the second and third (e.g. Menezes & Lobo, 1991).

If ‘hippies’ and ‘ravers’, ‘drug addicts’ and ‘AIDS carriers’, ‘lower-class tourists’ and ‘the ultra-rich’, ‘rowdy Indians’ and ‘rapists’, ‘prostitutes’ and ‘sex tourists’, ‘hedonists’ and ‘materialists’ aren’t welcome, who is? And yet again, what do the locals think? How will they be educated in the complex ecological and sociological theories of industrial tourism? What happens when the agendas of village- or sector-specific activists and pan-Goan NGOs or intellectuals don’t match? While many middle-class urbanites hailed the ‘party ban’ after the 1999-2000 moral panic about the rave scene in Anjuna, local vendors protested, as during season the raves are their bread and butter (then again, it is alleged that these protests were staged by the rave organizers). If the raves would be held with legal permits, in designated places outside villages, without ‘noise pollution’, would that be okay? What happens when the rave scene effectively dies out in Anjuna and goes other places, outside Goa (like Hampi)? Will the middle-classes there be happy with the Goan policy of ‘zero-tolerance’?

What all these pertinent questions (and there are many more) point to, is the observation that the tourism critique in Goa is socio-spatially fragmented. Multiple imaginary geographies of Goa and Goa’s tourism are voiced by multiple agencies — even within the agencies. The imaginations favour some issues over others, some social groups over others, some places and spaces over others. There is disagreement on what is at stake: environment or law, traditional identity or social economy, ‘progress’ or ‘durability’. Goa is then multiply constructed, as victim of pollution and wild capitalism, or as invaded by cheap labour power, or aggressive music, or AIDS. Or lesbianism:

It follows from these representations of changing Goa, that Goa, without tourism, is a clean, honest, egalitarian, friendly, decent, heterosexual place. Even if many Goans would at least implicitly agree, the question remains which of these attributes needs to be saved first from the ill effects of tourism, and how.

A fourth and final critical operation showing Goan tourism critique’s geography consists in finding out how it acquires different forms in different contexts. There is a thread of theorizations of the ‘situatedness’ of language, discourse, society, identity and science, going from philosophy (Wittgenstein) to sociology (Goffman) to feminism (Donna Harraway) and queer theory (Judith Butler). The ultimate way to examine the tourism critique and struggles for postcolonial identity in Goa would be to ethnographically analyze each and every situation, connection, object, trajectory, each and every performance, thought and feeling which can be identified as constituting the process under scrutiny, meticulously looking at when/where the discourse is continuous and when/where it is discontinuous.

Sadly, this is impossible, a limit in the mathematical sense to which I can only strive. In this paper I have provided very little ethnographic evidence. Ethnographic evidence would show much more ambiguities, misinterpretations, antagonisms, doubts. Still I think that from the discussion above, it will be clear that tourism is criticized in different ways, by different groups and invididuals, in different times and spaces, for different reasons, with different technologies. Goan email discussion groups aren’t the same as Goan newsrooms; Western travel literature has changed since the times of Sir Burton (1851); Marxists aren’t Catholics (though could be); North Goa isn’t South Goa; villages aren’t towns; Indian tourists aren’t Western tourists; seventies drugs aren’t nineties drugs; beaches aren’t rivers; gypsies aren’t toddytappers; German NGO partners aren’t Roman NGO partners; the Indian past isn’t the Portuguese past; environmentalism isn’t feminism; Goa Dourada isn’t contemporary Goan patriotism; the court isn’t the street; raves aren’t Carnival; hotels aren’t brothels (though could be).

Yes, often, the constructions of Goa that all these situated critiques entailed, would fit, interlock, mutually reinforce each other. Yes, you can find Goans who are against consumer capitalism and against lesbians and against sexist advertising. To the extent that issues and biases connect, I’ve been talking about the tourism critique, about one discursive formation, supposing one Goan identity, applicable to all situations. But I feel it is as important, at the least, to take into account the instances where they don’t connect, where there is a conflict about what Goan tourism and Goan identity stand for. This means that the connections are contingent. They are non-necessary not only in a logical sense, but very concretely, in a situational, geographical sense.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) have been correct in proposing a radical-democratic deconstruction of ‘society’ in which ‘articulations’ between political discourses and identities aren’t accepted as pre-given truths, but have to be actively constituted in practice. My story so far is intended to add a geographical twist to Laclau & Mouffe’s ‘social topography’, to take their spatial metaphors (‘floating signifiers’, ‘nodal points’, ‘subject positions’) a lot more literally than has been done hitherto. The signifier ‘cultural imperialism’ has actually floated from Latin-American universities to Goan NGOs (how did it get there?). A street protest in which village activists and CCAT articulate their concerns about drug addiction, is indeed a nodal point, situated in time and space. And the subjectivity of those two lesbians in Pongreaband was, in a very real sense, positioned on the beach.

I started this paper with the common sociological assumption that modernity is all about the more or less reflexive institution of order and identity: then and now, here and there, normal and abnormal, us and them, self and other. Central to this modern institutional project is the formation of the nation-state. I had two comments on the majority of the literature about modernity and the nation-state. One was that it speaks too little about modernities and nation-states outside the west. The other was that there’s a tendency to overstate the power of the nation, as if national identity was always and everywhere the same, uncontested, unmediated, unambiguous.

Although Foucault has greatly improved our understanding of how power permeates the formation of medical, criminal, sexual, demographic etc. discourses, he has said little about the formation of national discourse. However, the way nation and patriotic sentiment are construed in the myriad activities of everyday life (the way they are ‘regularly dispersed’), seems to enable us to treat the nation as a discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense. Seems to, because as I tried to show later on, even when people in a place such as Goa feel that their ‘national’ identity is threatened by the ‘onslaught’ of external forces, their construction of nation is not so equivocal and monolithic as the concept of discursive formation allows. And this conclusion is arrived at precisely by taking seriously those ‘microphysics’ in which the nation’s discourse and power are realized.

I also touched upon the thesis of cultural imperialism, which states that the export of phenomena like industrial capitalism, consumerism and entertainment culture to the ‘Periphery’ is instrumental in maintaining economic superiority of the ‘Center’. Nationalism in the Periphery reacting against this imperialism is then an act of resistance against world domination. I wanted to problematize some imaginary geographies which are common, though implicit, in a lot of accounts of world capitalism, global political economy, globalization, colonialism and anti-colonialism: geographies which dichotomize power relations into one dominating side and another resisting side.

Tourism is a crucial commodifying and politicizing force in global capitalism today, and I chose to look at some socio-cultural processes at work in the state of Goa, where the critique of tourism is intimately tied to a politics of modern identity. Looking at Goa’s tourism critique ‘geographically’ meant being sensitive to four aspects: its geopolitics, its socio-spatial biases, its geohistories and disembeddings, and its situatedness. What the geographical analysis showed was that the tourism critique is ambivalent and variable, and invokes ambivalent and variable versions of Goan identity. The tourism critique not only refracts many interacting power relations in and outside Goa, but isn’t straightforwardly connected to the power of Goa’s imagined community or the Goan state. In other words, because the tourist critique necessarily takes a continuously shifting geographic form, because it necessarily ‘takes place’ within certain localities, trajectories, networks, scapes, situations, it is not one. It changes. Sometimes/someplaces, there is articulation, sometimes/someplaces, there’s conflict. Both the tourist critique and Goan identity, we could say, are mediated by space (Allen, 1999).

Agencies voicing the tourist critique articulated classism, sexism, occidentalism, puritanism, heterosexism, moralism, socialism, elitism, populism and other essentialisms in varying degrees and manners. Thus, ‘power’ in one form or the other is at work ‘in’ the ‘resistance’ against cultural imperialism. We cannot draw a clear line between the spaces of domination (of the Center, or multinationals, or the State, or Panjim, or Lisbon, or Delhi, or New York) and the spaces of resistance (of NGOs, or village protests, or Third World nations, or postcolonial literature). They are completely interconnected historically, through the mechanisms of colonization, Christianization, modernization. And both ‘domination’ (e.g. of the tourist industry) and ‘resistance’ (e.g. against the tourist industry) are mediated by space, are differentially situated, can fail or succeed. Because power relations are always practised, and practice is always embodied, contextual, situated, taking place somewhere and sometime (and not somewhere else, sometime else): that’s why domination and resistance are always entangled.

‘Entangled’ is the latest of latest metaphors and it comes from a new collection entitled Entanglements of power: geographies of domination/ resistance (Sharp et al., eds., 2000). In it, geographers argue that we can’t and shouldn’t separate domination from resistance, that one contains the other, and that this entanglement becomes observable especially when we turn to the actual spaces where power relations are embodied. Cultural studies still has a lot to learn of geography, for what geography says about meaning and power is fundamental. If space mediates all social and cultural phenomena we study, if geography matters; if, in this case, you can fine-tune Foucault by looking at how the power of nation and postcolonial identity is place-specific — then you cannot pretend to analyze power without analyzing its geography.

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