Free Essay About Beach Tourism

Beach tourism is one domain of tourism with an ubiquitous global presence. Vacations at beaches are a practice virtually all peoples in the developed world enjoy worldwide. As such, Beach tourism is a globally significant cultural institution of tourism. As a tourist destination, the beach is ubiquitous on a global scale, across national cultures and identities. This was not always the case, however. The beach was not a main tourist destination until a half century ago, following World War II. Its global rise in popularity was brought on through mass media which packaged and commodified the concept of the beach through targeted images and mass advertising. In this paper I draw from the work of Orvar Lofgren in order to understand the cultural significance of the beach for tourism. For Lofgren, the beach is a staged space of performance with culturally coded ways of behaving and acting. This essay seeks to elucidate the historical emergence of the beach, its topography and common praxes. In part two, I corroborate this investigation with a reflection on my experience of visiting Mission Beach in San Diego, CA
The social significance of beaches for tourism for Logren is a fairly recent cultural development that emerged over the past century. Understanding its emergence is helpful to contextualize its rise within history. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries were commonplace sites to visit for their diverse landscapes, cooling breeze and flat terrain, making them prime locations for pleasure strolls, yet importantly it was not until the 20th century that beaches became sites of play and symbols of paradise. Beaches and beach tourism is a relatively recent phenomena in our entire histories. Beaches morphed as cultural icons of paradise and cultural institutions of tourism and recreation starting with the post-World War II era, primarily as a result of targeted marketing from corporations vis a vis mass media marketing promoting the tourist and music industries. The roots of global beach tourism really got their start alongside the rise of the Hawaiian tourism and travel industry in post-World War II American, beginning around the mid 1950s This, coupled with the rise of the tourist industry in Hawaii starting around 1950 as thousands of troops ended their service and returned home entering the civilian labor force. Late 1950s and 1960s commodification of low-budget surfer movies and later the widespread appeal of popular music like the Beach Boys propelled the sport of surfing and surf music into international exports, and the beach increased in popularity an gained increasing normative status as a cultural institution. The rise in popularity of the beach party as a hip “avant-garde form of socializing” popularized on TV serial shows quickly entered the public practice. It was during this time that beaches became commodified again as constructed sites with imported sands as the popularity of the urban or suburban sandbox grew widespread across Europe and North America. Beaches now became profitable sites of export for sand. This export of sand eventually found its way to beaches themselves.
As the tourism industry was just beginning, property developers in around beaches recognized the value and competitive advantage in making sustainable improvements to the natural landscape. The practice of artificially constructing beach sites with perfectly white imported sand became common and widespread globally. As the tourist industry rose, beaches experienced standardization and commodification. The marketing of beach sites to consumers highlighted elements of pleasure and paradise in their ideally crafted images.
This undoubtedly correlates with the shift in social mores and behaviors seen as common place on beaches into bastions of hedonism. The sensuousness of water, nearly nude bodies, heat, sun sweat resulted in beaches being a kind of special zone for acting hedonistic.
On an individual level, the beach then becomes a place of individual experience as well as a cultural arena. Often, these moments are in conflict with one another. As a cultural arena, there are practices, ways of behaving in public, certain routines that people engage in on the beach. This is a kind of beach culture that we are consciously aware of and that is initiated in public practice immediately upon our arrival to the beach. Some scholars such as John Fiske have claimed that the beach is an “anomalous zone between nature and culture” free of hierarchies and social dichotomies that fill and complicate modern lives. This view may be partially true insofar as beach culture commands a range of cultural behaviors, cues and codes that persons engage in and which homogenizes the experience for all participants. Lofgren stresses, however, the stubborn ubiquitousness of race and class which never actually grows absent in these natural zones and which are aways identifiable if one in a sense looks hard enough.
For this project I visited Mission Beach one of the most iconic beaches in cultural memory which, fortuitously, is local to San Diego. Mission Beach in San Diego is one of the busiest and dynamic beaches in the entire region. At the periphery of entering the designated, zoned off beach area, one is able to take in full whiffs of the manifest smells and odors that fill the public space. The air smells almost 5 smells at once, of human sweat and bodies, the lingering salt of sea, of garlic meats like gyros roasting in street food chambers, of the diesel gasoline powering vendors' vehicle storefronts, and of cotton candy rolling round a cone by the candy maker nearby. The dichotomy of collectivity and togetherness brought by a kind of beach culture and the underlying class and race divisions that are ever present and identifiable as a major social ascriptions are noticeably everywhere. I walk through the concrete passageway wearing a full coverage suit and t-shirt, sandals, a towel, a beach bag and a hat. The classes, styles and divisions of people clustered in groups looks like the divisions you see in a large public university campus or high school. The space occupation has points of integration near the center but segregates along the sides. The loveliest part of this beach is that it is filled with sunbathers, beach balls and colorful umbrellas everywhere on a relatively busy day. This image recalls a somewhat aged, gritty reminder of the iconic imagery of the beach party that grew out of cultural com modification of the hugely profitably surfer music most recognizable with reference to the Beach Boys. As a cultural site, Mission Beach seems more a place for voyeuristic tourism rather than hedonistic enjoyment. Ironically, the grit and filth that is apart of Mission Beach is almost a self-reflexive acknowledgment of the hedonism elemental to contemporary beach cultural practices. Bodies lay about, some clothed, some unclothed, of various shapes and sizes. The pure notion of beauty one feels when seeing a suited body who is in proportional as in the scenes on European beaches or Israeli beaches is somewhat missing at this locale. The rubbing, baking and tanning of bodies that is erotic and suggestive in this strange zoned-off free for all is occupied mostly by overweight men and women whose bathing suit choice seems almost deliberately picked out to emphasize the most unattractive and even disgusting parts of bodies.
This element is identical to that discussed by Lofgren in the discussion above. Strangely, I noticed that the most demonstrative and hedonistic of sunbathers in their lotion application were the least ideal physical specimens. Lofgren writes similarly of the beach as a display for flesh and body: “wherever you look there are bodies, all kinds of bodies, old and young bodies [] fat and thin bodies. Life at the beach becomes modern bodywork: exposing oneself to sun, water winds and sand..” The crowdedness of Mission beach intensifies this corporal effect as I am viewing. A glance from left to right over the horizon reveals rows of endless towels, of near-naked flesh pouring lotions, oils, rubbing and lying. This practice is a collective action engaged in by all beach dwellers. Its periodic repetition between lying and drifting off to sleep suggests that its performance is an effort to break the monotony of lying idle in heat over crushed dirt for the day.
The individual There is no possibility of snagging a rocky cove all to oneself. He or she, no matter how early one arrives, inevitably will be forced to land their beach tower devastatingly close for comfort to an enthusiastic hedonist typically with little respect for the norms of cultural space. There is no crystal blue sky. The smog filling the upper skyline from the countervailing forces of Tijuana and San Diego Metro's various industrial engines fills the sky line with a hazy, radioactive gray. The snoozing, rolling, woosy feeling of a hot, sensual afternoon is lost by gang signals thrown and fear of razor blade scar across one's face. I suggest that urban beach settings like this may support collective behaviors that resemble those seen at an inner city urban park rather than the touristic paradise experience that drives beach iconography.
In this essay we have considered the nature and subject of beach tourism as it relates to culture drawing from Lofgren's landmark work on global beach tourism. The beach is a zone of staged performance that We argue that the beach is a staged place of performance that become designated zones where people engage in certain kinds of common sense behaviors. The beach is supposed to be a concept of ideal leisure and separation from the mundane habits of our everyday lives. The recursion into habits and norms while on the beach is significant to our understanding of the way tourist destinations which purport to offer people a break with the sameness of everyday life to experience something foreign, exotic and new, ultimately become managed zones of impersonation and repetition.