|
Field anthropologists
move into and out of airports in the liminal phases linking their
fieldwork with their normal life, but few have so far regarded the
airport as such as a social arena worthy of investigation. The interaction
and symbolisation taking place in airports nevertheless present
us with peculiar problems and highlight current concerns with local--global
linkages and the comparative study of modernities.
The purpose of this sketch is to outline some issues for further
investigation and analysis regarding the international airport seen
as a socio-cultural field. An anthropological focus on the airport
inevitably brings out, in a pointed manner, several of the epistemological
and methodological problems which have been at the forefront of
anthropological self-reflection in recent years - notably problems
concerning the time--space coordinates in social life, the unbounded
character of social process and the epistemological status of the
concept of culture. Drawing on our own admittedly limited fieldwork
in international airports worldwide, we shall present some of our
preliminary findings. Talking of airports in general, our main goal
at this stage is to establish some basic coordinates, as it were,
for a comparative anthropology of airports. Particularities and
variations will thus not be taken account of.
What follows is intended as neither more nor less than a basis for
discussion and further analysis. The presentation is systematic,
but incomplete.
Architecture and location
If you've seen one, you've seen'em all. Of course, airports are
not identical, but in important ways, they relate to the same set
of rules; as arenas, they relate to a single language-game which
is unbounded in space. For this reason, rules and conventions learned
at one airport may tentatively be transferred and applied to another
one.
Apart from the obvious technological requirements, every international
airport must contain immigration and customs counters dividing the
field into two mutually exclusive zones. The side facing the city
or the country in many ways resembles a bus station or a railway
station; in many countries, access to its space, its shops and cafes
is free and unrestricted. The side facing the runway - beyond the
pale, as it were - is much less rooted; in a sense, it is anywhere.
After having had one's passport stamped and having passed through
the metal detector, one is technically speaking nowhere: one is
neither in the country of departure nor in the country of destination.
Airports must also contain transit lounges, which are perhaps even
to a greater extent not places in a cultural sense. By definition,
transit lounges are non-lieux (Augé, 1992), non-places.
Although this division of the airport into two signifies an interesting
distinction, the side facing the city is also in important regards
non-located in a cultural sense. Unlike railway stations, airports
are always located away from the city centre, and therefore already
their spatial location signifies that they are severed from the
society they represent: they are intermediate nodes which in this
sense seem to connect discrete societies by virtue of not belonging
to the societies themselves. In this respect, airports may be seen
to function in a similar way to the international business hotels
described by Hannerz (1990) as "global switchboards".
However, we would like to argue that airports do not merely connect
discrete societies, but perhaps more significantly, they represent
a peculiar form of culture themselves. We now turn to a consideration
of this system of signification.
Space
The organisation of space within the airport has briefly been touched
upon. But evidently, the most intriguing spatial characteristics
of the airport are (i) its location "outside of social space"
and (ii) the relativisation of the spatial correlates of social
life implied by air travel.
In his cultural account of air travel, Augé (1992) emphasises
the smooth efficiency, the modernist comfort and the impersonality
of this mode of transportation. In addition to these aspects, it
would certainly be worthwhile to look into the effects of air travel
on spatial categories. Writers on nationalism and modernisation
have often stressed the importance of literacy, mass education and
maps in the creation of identifications with abstract entities such
as nations; an interesting question in this connection is what kinds
of identification (if any), and what sense of space frequent air
travel may encourage. It is evident, and it is often remarked upon
in casual conversations, that the psychological sense of distance
is altered or distorted seriously with frequent air travel and with
the conversion of distance into flight hours. In brief, nowhere
is really far away in the age of the jet plane, or rather: whether
or not places are near or distant in cultural and psychological
terms does not depend on their spatial distance. It can thus be
argued that to an urban Trinidadian, Brooklyn is closer than Mayaro
(Trinidadian periphery). In social and cultural terms, it will frequently
turn out that urban Trinidadian neighbourhoods maintain more links,
and have more in common with, certain neighbourhoods in Brooklyn
than with neighbourhoods in rural Trinidad. The same can be said
of immigrant communities in many other countries. With the shrinking
of distance entailed by jetplanes, emigration no longer has a ring
of finality and irreversibility, and many migrant groups in European
countries are linked not only with their relatives and co-villagers
in their countries of origin, but are also socially and culturally
connected with immigrants from their country in other European countries.
In recent studies of the globalisation of culture, much attention
has been paid to this feature of the modern world. Hannerz (1992)
recently spoke of transnational families as a challenge for conventional
anthropological notions of social communities and the spatial rootedness
of identity; others, notably Giddens (1990), have written in more
general terms about the relativisation of social space following
technological changes. At the airport itself, which we have proposed
as a physical locus for the investigation of these questions, this
relativisation is indicated in very direct and literal ways: after
all, it could be said that along with TV satellites, airports are
the main vehicles for the ongoing disembedding of cultural signification
from place. The "local" flavour at international airports
is less striking than the uniformity. In this perspective, it makes
little sense to carry out cross-cultural studies of airports, since
they all relate to the same "culture", which neither exists
at a particular place nor originates at a place. This point will
be elaborated somewhat below.
Time
Time is an extremely scarce commodity at airports. Travelling by
air is much faster and more expensive than its alternatives; it
may thus be assumed that frequent air travellers are important invidividuals.
With a number of important exceptions, they tend to be among the
wealthiest members of their societies; sometimes they function as
mediators between societies or see themselves as cosmopolitans in
Hannerz' (1990) sense - they may be diplomats, businessmen, authors,
anthropologists etc.
The scarcity of time stressed in the airport environment is being
exploited commercially. In its ads, producers of laptop computers
and "electronic notebooks" thus tend to depict business
executives working on such a computer in their first-class airplane
seats.
The difference between time zones adds to the breakdown of familiar
time--space continua entailed by air travel. As Baudrillard (1982)
has remarked, a passenger on the Concorde may actually arrive in
New York before he left Paris. The phenomenon of the jet lag, whereby
the biological time of the body is being upset by time differences
between the place of departure and the place of destination, adds
to the impression of the air journey as unreal and somewhat magical:
it transcends nature - it brackets and relativises time and space.
As a social system in time and space, the airport is, of course,
qualitatively different from any local community. It is not constructed
as a permanent, self-reproducing social system. It is marked by
transience. Unlike say, a large ship or a prison, the airport cannot
be seen as a "microcosm". Its main users, the passengers,
pass through. Although the personnel taking part in and reproducing
the airport as a social system is being completely replaced every
few hours (disregarding, for the sake of the argument, the airport
employees), the kinds of interaction taking place are identical
from hour to hour, from day to day. It is predictable.
Iconography
The symbolism and iconography characteristic of departure lounges
confirm the hypothesis that it the airport is severed from the social
contexts of everyday life and takes on a quasi-autonomous existence
as a system of signification. Icons signifying toilets, banks, duty-free
shops, departure gates, customs and so on are almost uniform in
airports all over the world. Their language is largely non-verbal
and easy to learn; it is accessible in a manner reminiscent of traffic
signs. On the other hand, these symbols are clearly interpreted
into pre-existing frames of reference, which are culturally variable.
What are the connotations of airport icons? At the airport itself,
they connote high-cost and high-speed travel, efficiency, a hygienic
and bureaucratised social environment which offers little resistance,
and haute-gamme consumption. Some of these meanings would clearly
be attached to the icons if they were viewed isolated from the wider
context as well.
Shared meaning - a third culture?
The cultural contexts of airports and departure lounges can be seen
as minimal cultures analogous to the meaning-contexts reproduced
in rudimentary pidgin languages. First, the transit and departure
lounges must satisfy a few very basic needs for their users: Food
and drink must be available, and there must be toilets and adequate
seating. Secondly, practical requirements related to the flight
itself must be met: this includes flight information, airline agencies,
check-in counters etc.. Thirdly, some amount of cultural brokerage
must be offered. Most airports in non-English-speaking countries
offer information in (at least) two languages plus icons and numbers
(which codify crucial information such as prices and timings): English
and the vernacular language(s). Although non-verbal communication
will do in many respects, some conversation is often inevitable.
Since many different airlines from different countries have agencies
at the airports, this kind of competence is readily available in
most cases. The airport is a material structure and a cultural universe
that the vast majority of travellers merely pass through: Anthony
Burgess's character Mr. Paxton, who has thrown away his passport
after entering the nowhere of departure lounges and planes, filled
his pockets with air tickets and is determined to spend the rest
of his life in the nowhere and comfortable emptiness of planes and
airports is, of course, a rather unusual personage (Burgess, 1989).
The transitory or even liminal character of the social interaction
at airports entails that the airport is a meeting-place and no "society",
and yet its rules and conventions endure and are by and large uniform
at different airports. The kind of cultural competence required
to participate is limited, and yet it is crucial for travellers.
Even the hundreds of illiterate Malaylees whom Eriksen observed
at Bombay airport in March, 1992, who were wearing dhotis and sandals
and whose only luggage was small shoulderbags, knew the procedures
from the check-in counter through immigration and customs to the
departure lounge, and they would also know exactly how to behave
once arrived at Abu Dhabi. Few are as culturally inept as that Naipaul
character (from In a Free Country) who panics at take-off and later
spits betel juice and vomits on the plane seats.
A question which is sometimes asked in relation to issues like these,
is whether this kind of decontextualised meaning-context entails
an extension of a particular, pre-existing cultural universe or
whether it rather constitutes a "third culture" at a remove
from the cultural contexts normally engaged in by its participants/reproducers.
The answer to this kind of question is normally either that airport
culture represents an extension of "Western culture" (whatever
that term means), that it is based on the common denominators of
capitalism and commodity exchange, or that airport culture can indeed
be regarded as a "third culture" because modes of participation
vary and because it requires a certain cultural code switch from
all who propose to take part, including European businessmen. Although
all of these positions can plausibly be argued, we find the latter
the most interesting one for anthropological investigation. According
to this view, the airport can be seen as an "international
symbol" of the modern individual. Airport interaction can be
seen as modernity in its purest social form. There is the relativisation
of time and space discussed above; there is also the cultural uprootedness
and lack of history entailed in the global symbols which refer to
no external social context; and perhaps most significantly, there
is lavish consumption without the slightest trace of labour.
Airport experiences
The airport
is devoid of cultural symbols. Apparently, it lacks codes which
can be interpreted as "national" or "ethnic"
ones. It objectivates freedom and equality - virtues of individualism.
At the same time, the airport may function, for the traveller,
as a kind of catharsis: The moment one passes through immigration
into the departure lounge, one is removed from the impediments
of society: Once there, neither the tax collector nor the family
can reach you. You are a free individual.
(Døving, field notes)
The departure
lounges of airports can fruitfully be analysed in their capacity
as consumption reservations. The scarcity of time which is so crucial
to the airport experience and serves to highlight the importance
of air travellers (as one of our colleagues once remarked, scarcity
of time is a scarce resource) logically implies that waiting is
a main airport activity. Waiting passengers have brought few, but
important personal belongings. Tickets, passport and cards are common
denominators; some nervous travellers ritually check their pockets
at regular intervals.
In all international airports, but to a particular extent at the
larger ones, a wide range of opportunities for consumption is offered
to mitigate the experience of waiting. The airport being a special
place, a liminal place and an exclusive one, special modes of consumption
can be observed there. The emphasis is on luxury goods which heighten
feelings of freedom, individuality and exclusiveness. With the relatively
recent spread of plastic cards, the smoothness and placelessness
of airport culture and airport consumption is further strengthened.
The free magazines distributed by airlines and sometimes by airports
themselves communicate to a craving for luxury consumption among
their readers. This is evident both in the advertising sections
and in the articles of such magazines. The advertisements depict
expensive consumer goods: perfume, cigars, liquors, laptop computers,
cameras, Swiss watches, silk ties etc., as well as car rental firms
and hotels in destination countries. The feature articles typically
describe aspects of the societies the airline flies to, and very
often emphasise the pleasures of the body or the possible acquisition
of status symbols in these societies. Articles on food, beaches
and local handicrafts are particularly common. Here, the interface
between the global and the local is highly visible, and it is obvious
that it is mediated by the market and shared notions of prestige
and symbols of power (cf. e.g. Friedman, 1991, on globalisation
and commodification). For even if it makes sense to regard the airport
as a "third culture", the consumption goods acquired there
are valid in the outside world as well. To this effect, the culture
of airports is linked with the outside world. On the other hand,
it may also be said to take on a semi-autonomous existence. Telephone
booths in departure lounges seem out of place because they enable
one to make city calls for a few coins: their presence interferes
with the basic irrelevance of geographic location - particularly
to passengers in transit.
Technology and progress
Freedom and individuality are perhaps the values most strongly expressed
in the culture of airports. To acquiescing participants, the airport
is experienced in terms of freedom, anticipation and security. To
others, it can be a frightening place, for fundamental faith in
technology and anonymous bureaucratic organisation is an absolute
requirement for successful participation in the culture of the airport.
We give our luggage away to strangers who label it and send it into
the dark interior of the airport, assured that it will re-emerge
at our destination, where we will be awaiting its arrival. This
destination can be anywhere in the world, but it has to be at a
particular "baggage retrieval" sign at an international
airport. When invisible loudspeakers announce, at regular intervals,
that unattended luggage will be destroyed, we know that an intricate
and infallible system of security and surveillance attends to our
needs.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, most of us trust that the plane
will bring us safely to our destination at a speed we are simply
unable to understand. As is the case with many of our technological
aids, such as CD players, telephones and radios, few of us believe
that we actually understand how aviation is technologically possible,
yet we are bound to trust it (cf. Giddens, 1990, 1991, on risk and
trust). This trust can be connected to a theme previously touched
upon; the supernatural or magical quality of the airport. The baggage
retrieval system, the surveillance monitors, the suppliers of food,
drink and consumer goods, the voices that make announcements and
the agents who have devised the x-ray machines (which miraculously
do not affect films, tapes or diskettes), the metal detectors and
that complex semiotic field that ensures that the announced departure
gates correspond to planes and announced times and that flight information
is internally consistent: all of this is invisible, and very few
of us understand its functioning. Yet we trust that it works. A
general feature of modernity often remarked upon in the literature,
trust in anonymous and technologically complex systems is extreme
in the case of air travel, since the consequences of failure are
so high.
Styles of participation
The concept of "jet-set" (nowadays a rather dated word)
is drawn from the terminology of air travel. Presumably, members
of the "jet-set" use airports frequently. This implies
that they are rich, need to economise with their time and are regular
consumers of luxury goods. Far from all users of airports can be
said to belong to this group. However, since the participants in
airport culture can have any citizenship, the interaction at the
airport can plausibly be seen as a "third culture" existing
between or above particular "cultures". The differences
between modes of participation are nevertheless significant. At
the one extreme, the Malaylee migrant workers on their way to and
from the Gulf participate in a bare minimum of airport contexts;
apart from the compulsory check-in and immigration routines, they
do not enter the communicational universe of the airport. At the
other extreme, frequent business travellers in expensive suits buy
gifts and prestigious items for their personal consumption, have
meals, take showers, read international (placeless) magazines like
Newsweek and demonstrate by their casual, relaxed manner that they
are finely attuned to the smooth, tranquil efficiency of the airport.
There are many other modes of participation as well; the excited
mode of holidaymakers who associate airports with leisure, the bored
manner of anthropologists and others who are intent on disliking
air travel, the scared mode of grandmothers who have not internalised
the blind faith in anonymous techno-bureaucratic systems, and so
on. Perhaps our notions of "deep" and "shallow"
play (Geertz, 1973) may shed light on these variations: the "deep
players" would be those who are immersed in the symbolisation
and practices in question, whose habitus is saturated with airport
conventions; whereas the "shallow players" would be those
who hover at the edges of the arenas: the penniless and disinterested
ones. It has been argued that the "shallow players" may
nevertheless be in the best position to reflect on the ritual or
drama taking place, since they can move back and forth between spectatorship
and participation (Kapferer, 1986). This nevertheless presupposes
that they truly understand and master the semiotic field that makes
up the arena. Perhaps infrequent travellers who nonetheless enjoy
travelling are in the best position to elicit the symbolic meanings
of the airport and relate them to the wider contexts of modernity.
The "deepest player" of all must in any case be the aforementioned
Mr. Paxton, who - and that was clearly Burgess' intention - gives
a demonstration of the cultural emptiness entailed in this peculiar
expression of modernity. An uprooted man who had lost everything
that connected him to the thick, rich meaning-contexts of ordinary
life (he was retired, a widower, and his children had left home),
he was intent on ending his days in the nowhere of air travel.
"God
almighty," I said. What he showed me was a large yellow plastic
folder crammed with air tickets. He said, riffling through them:
"Going everywhere. Rio de Janeiro, Valparaiso, wherever that
is, Mozambique, Sydney, Christchurch, Honolulu, Moscow."
"If there's one place where you'll need a visa, it's certainly
Moscow," I said. "But, damn it, how do you propose to
go anywhere without a passport?"
"There's going and going," he said. "When I get
to one place then I start off right away for another. Well, in
some cases not right away. There's a fair amount of waiting in
some of the places. But they have what they call transit lounges.
Get a wash and a brush-up. Perhaps a bath. Throw a dirty shirt
away and buy a new one. Ditto for socks and underpants. No trouble,
really."
"In effect," I said, astonished, "you'll be travelling
without arriving."
"You could put it that way."
(Burgess, 1989: 141)
* * *
The whole airport
may be regarded as a transit lounge, as a waiting-room between two
places. The airport itself is not considered a place. All of us
have witnessed discussions about whether one has actually visited
a city or country when one has only seen the airport, and in the
majority of cases, people agree that one has not. Upon entering
the airport, one enters a cultural void - a third, global culture.
Sterile is a word often used to describe the significance of such
non-places as compared to the thick contexts of ordinary life.
In this sketch, we have not succeeded in depicting the airport as
a self-contained system of signification. The symbols reproduced
there are intrinsically related to, and take their meaning from,
contexts of the encompassing world. Social lives are not reproduced
in airports: even the most avid travellers spend only a fraction
of their life in airports. On the other hand, seen as one element
in the worldwide articulation of global-local links and an emphatically
global one at that, an anthropological understanding of airports
along the lines suggested here may provide interesting contributions
to a comparative understanding of modernities. Airports can, like
international business hotels, be analysed as relatively uniform
"bridgeheads" for cross-cultural understanding: their
meaning will inevitably vary enormously in different cities and
local communities (in Manhattan, the airport scarcely has the same
meaning as in Jakarta). They can additionally be analysed as decontextualised,
distilled and relatively pure forms of modernity. That will be our
aim when we pursue the present analysis further.
Perhaps, therefore, Eriksen's Mauritian informant was not as untypical
as his peers believed: he was a middle-aged man who spent much of
his spare time in the rooftop cafe at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam
International Airport to watch the planes come and go. At one stage
in his life, he managed to persuade his employer to fund his ticket
to England because, he said, he wanted to emigrate. Three days after
his departure (he had been wearing a new suit and a solemn face),
he was back in town, and eventually he admitted that he had never
really intended to migrate. He was simply fascinated with aviation
and the culture of airports. He was a modern man.
References
Augé, Marc (1992) Non-lieux. Introduction á une anthropologie
de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil
Baudrillard, Jean (1982) A l'ombre des majorités silencieuses.
Paris
Burgess, Anthony (1989) The Devil's Mode. New York: Pocket Books
Friedman, Jonathan (1991) Narcissism, roots and postmodernity: the
constitution of selfhood in the global crisis. In Scott Lash and
Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity, pp. 331-366. Oxford:
Blackwell
Geertz, Clifford (1973) Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight.
In Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 412-454. New York:
Basic Books
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge:
Polity
- (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity
Hannerz, Ulf (1990) Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture. In
Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization
and Modernity, pp. 237-252. London: SAGE
- (1992) The withering away of the nation? Paper delivered at the
conference Defining the National. Bjärsjölagård,
Sweden, 26-28 April, 1992
Kapferer, Bruce (1986) The ritual process and the problem of reflexivity
in Sinhalese demon exorcism. In John MacAloon, ed., Rite, Drama,
Festival, Spectacle, pp. 179-207. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
|
