Getting Down to Business: Intercultural Communication and the Utilitarian Discourse System in an Urban Tourist Destination in France
Résumé
Tourism is, in many ways, an exercise in intercultural communication par excellence. It involves social actors from diverse backgrounds coming together in a context in which culture is sought, mobilised, sold, consumed, and, ultimately, produced, in turn producing potentially far-reaching effects. This chapter explores the contextualised communicative practices of social actors involved in “doing” tourism in Marseille, an emerging urban tourist destination in France. Drawing upon data from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Marseille’s Tourist Office, it highlights how individuals seem to actively make culture “irrelevant” in face-to-face interactions in this context in an attempt to undertake the practical, logistical and commercial aspects of tourism as efficiently as possible. It then shows how this can be linked to the communication norms of Scollon et al.’s (2012, Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons) “Utilitarian discourse system” and how this, in turn, allows these communication practices to be linked with the wider ideological dynamics and social organisation of global capitalism, of which tourism is a manifestation. Finally, the chapter explores how this sociolinguistic configuration results in some actors – and especially certain parts of Marseille’s local population – being excluded from participation and thus being denied access to tourism, global capitalism, and their associated benefits.