Sociolinguistic research on tourism often points to power dynamics in light of modernity and globalization, as represented in multi-faceted identities (Blommaert 2005, Coupland 2007, Jaworski and Thurlow 2013). However, how such complex identities are dialogically constituted in tourism remains under-examined. Moreover, the cases in the previous tourism research usually involve economic activity of business.
By analyzing cross-cultural communication between a Japanese volunteer walking-tour guide and foreign tourists, this study demonstrates the dialogic engagement (Bakhtin 1981 [1934]) enacted through the resonant display of stancetaking (Du Bois 2007) in inbound communication, focusing on the process of negotiation and creation of hybrid identities of the host and tourists. The data are drawn from the video recordings collected in Nara, a historic site in western Japan.
It was found that the tour guide and tourists intersubjectively co-construct their national (or collective) identities as “local” and “foreign,” on the basis of their different level of epistemic stance with respect to cultural ownerships, as exemplified in the tour guide’s cultural explanation of the history and religion of the target entities and tourists’ reactions to it. Moreover, it was observed that they co-construct personal identities on the individual basis as equal global citizens, as instantiated in mutual affective stancetaking through playful interaction. This suggests that in tourism, against its nature as “a fleeting encounter” (Jaworski and Thurlow 2013), the host and tourists dialogically deploy each other’s symbolic resources and constitute hybrid and emergent identities that bear consequences in their social life.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 [1934]. The dialogic imagination: Four essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. Amsterdam: John Banjamins. 139-182.
Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow. 2013. Language and the globalizing habitus of tourism: Toward a sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), The handbook of language and globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 255-286.
