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Chapter 6
Backpacker Hostels: Place and
Performance
MICHAEL O’REGAN
Introduction
Backpacking, a form of tourism and sub-lifestyle, has often been
placed in a very different category to mainstream tourism, a form resting
on complex and interdependent infrastructural ‘scapes’; producing (and
being produced by) its own system of interrelated and increasingly
interconnected institutions, transports, guidebooks, routes and symbolic
spaces of consumption. This chapter takes a fresh look at the phenomena
of ‘backpacker hostels’; the network of backpacker-oriented accommoda-
tions, historically, discursively, symbolically and materially part of
backpackers’ lived ‘socio-spatial practices’; part of a global system that
enables, influences and shapes (and vice-a-versa) backpacker flows. The
‘backpacker hostel’ has risen symbolically and materially to become a
validated and sanctioned portal for entry into this lifestyle, central to its
reproduction and development, linking multiple spaces and times
together; an important infrastructure and a key building block through
which people relate to and associate with backpacking. More impor-
tantly, the ‘backpacker hostel’ is a place specifically for consumption and
performance routed in the discourse of spatial mobility, experience
seeking, performance and identity. Celebrated and represented in film,
media and literature as the antithesis to the ‘International hotel’, as the
primary time/space experiential setting for a backpacking trip, it has
become a key symbol of backpacker travel itself, where individuals
perform, narrate stories, sample (or build) an identity, exchange knowl-
edge and interact. As a key mobility system, a significant system of
provision and a key consumption junction, this chapter traces the
historic, symbolic and material meaning attached to them, emphasizing
their role within contemporary backpacking.
85
Conceptual Framework
We can conceptualize the ‘landscapes of tourism’ (Shaw & Williams,
2004) or more accurately, the landscapes of mobility as ‘vacationscapes’
(Gunn, 1989), ‘leisurescapes’ (Urry, 1990) ‘travellerscapes’ (Binder, 2004),
‘tourismscapes’ (Van der Duim, 2007), made up of various flows, which
are constituted through a skein of complex, interlocking networks that
increase and enable tourism between, within and across different
societies (Urry, 2000). Within this framework, Urry (2000: 193) argues
that there are ‘networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts
and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which
flows can be relayed’. This includes networks of transport of people by
air, sea and road, as well as the wires, cables, satellites, fibre and
microwaves that carry phone, email messages, images and money. The
‘-scapes’ suffix signifies transnational distributions of correlated ele-
ments, a concept utilized by Appadurai (1990, 1996) to describe global
flows, illustrated by the transnational arrangements of people, technol-
ogy, finance, media and political resources, labelling them, respectively,
as ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideos-
capes. These ‘scapes’, Appadurai (1990: 296) argues are also ‘deeply
perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic
and political situatedness of different sorts of actors and provide for the
foundation, the spaces and opportunities of ‘‘imagined communities’’
(Anderson, 1983)’. Appadurai (1996: 33) extends Anderson’s concept of
‘imagined communities’ and argues that these ‘scapes’ are the building
blocks of what he calls ‘imagined worlds’, that is ‘the multiple worlds
that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons
and groups spread around the globe’ that constitute new forms of
individual and collective expression.
For Bell and Ward (2000: 88) ‘[t]ourism represents one form of
circulation, or temporary population movement’, a privileged flow along
these ‘scapes’ that is predominately structured and channeled by ‘scapes’
along different nodes, reconfiguring the dimensions of time and space
(Williams et al., 2004). As part of the ‘ethnoscapes’ or ‘the landscape of
persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’ (Appadurai,
1991: 192), tourists along with other moving groups, such as immigrants,
refugees, exiles and guest workers, move around the world as global
flows. Tourism is simply one form in a continuum of flows, helping
to ‘situate tourism in relation to other forms of mobility that are
differentiated in their temporality and spatially’ (Williams et al., 2004:
101). Tourism is deeply structured by scapes the very existence of
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
motorways, flight routes, airports, etc., facilitating and channeling
movement and are in today’s globalizing world ‘fundamental to under-
standing the massing of tourism flows along particular routes’ (Shaw &
Williams, 2004: 3). Backpacking, as a form of tourism, and a privileged
flow (Alneng, 2002) has also been visualized as an imagined world,
constituted, constructed and made possible through globalizing ‘scapes’,
a differentiated flow or imagined community that has constructed (and is
increasingly offering) its own version of these global scapes; a sub-
lifestyle with its own routes, flows and rituals (D’Andrea, 2007).
It is through this social imagination then, that backpacking is often
characterized as a distinct form of tourism, constructed as a more or less
integrated set of practices and a role that an individual might embrace,
an assertion that has seen them and their practices differentiated from
‘mainstream tourists’ (Cave et al., 2007; Cohen, 1973; Uriely et al., 2002;
Welk, 2004; Westerhausen & Macbeth, 2003). They are characterized as
taking up a different role within, between and across a de-territoralized
‘landscape of scapes’ a ‘travellerscape’ (Binder, 2004), which describes
the ‘alternative’ social arena or field in which backpackers experience
their journey across, between and within borders and boundaries. The
scape is constructed out of global scapes; anchored to a set of badges of
honor, or an ideology; ordered ‘according to certain sets of economic,
political, ecological or social practices and discourses’ (Ek & Hultman,
2008); with each individual backpacker participating and experiencing
travel through a larger formation of like-minded individuals because of
what such communion offers and represents. Bradt (1995) identified a
number of ideological ‘badges of honor’, which included: travelling on a
low budget to meet different people; to be (or to feel) free; to be
independent and open-minded; to organize one’s journey individually
and independently; and travelling as long as possible. Pearce (1990)
mapped out a similar ideology that included: a preference for budget
accommodation, an emphasis on meeting other travellers, an indepen-
dently organized and flexible travel schedule, longer rather than very
brief holidays and an emphasis on informal and participatory holiday
activities. Welk (2004: 80) believes that these ‘badges of honor’ are the
‘basic symbols with which backpackers construct traveller identities and
a sense of community’ and ‘serve to distinguish the backpacker from the
(stereo)typical conventional tourist’. So, this imagined community in
many ways constitutes many of the attributes of a lifestyle community, in
the way they constitute themselves, their dispositions, their habitus as
separate from tourists, as they orientate and embody, however slightly,
these badges of honor or performative conventions.
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
87
While diverse mobilities come together to enable backpacking to
happen, Urry (2007: 272) argues it is necessary to analyze the various
systems that distribute people through time-space; given that mobility
systems are ‘organised around the processes that circulate people, objects
and information at various spatial ranges and speeds’ with all mobilities
entailing ‘specific often highly embedded and immobile infrastructures’
(Sheller & Urry, 2006: 210). Furthermore, Hannam et al. (2006: 3) argue
that ‘[m]obilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary
spatial infrastructure and institutional moorings that configure and
enable mobilities’ and that no increase in fluidity can happen without
extensive systems of immobility. Moreover, non-human objects,
machines, times, timetables, sites, desires, systems, bureaucracies,
technologies and texts provide ‘spaces of anticipation’ that enable a
journey to be made, for a traveller to plot an itinerary and which ‘permit
predictable and relatively risk-free repetition of the movement in
question’ (Urry, 2007: 13). In this context, backpackers perform a
particular version of mobility identifiable with the label ‘backpacker’,
even though many who travel this way disassociate from the term as
they buy into specific representations of particular spaces, routes, rituals
and practices that have historic, economic, social, cultural meaning and
significance (Hetherington, 1998). Backpackers’ mobility-related perfor-
mances, activities and practices thus do not exist in a vacuum, but rely on
external institutions, infrastructures and systems, which are constructed
materially and discursively to appeal to them specifically. Pooley et al.
(2005: 15) thus argue that ‘mobility is more than the mechanism through
which mundane tasks are carried out’ and ‘[m]ovement can itself become
a performance through which we make statements about ourselves and
acquire status’.
Backpackers, whose everyday conventions and practices require them
to mobilize themselves spatially, intellectually, ideologically and cultu-
rally in new environmental settings, require structure ‘a degree of
permanence, of fixity of form and identity’ (Hudson, 2005: 17). Back-
packer hostels are an important if not integral institutional infrastructure
that enables, structures and represents their mobility. While Starr (1999:
377) suggested that studying infrastructure was the study of boring
things, it is an important (even if sometimes mundane, unnoticed and
embedded) part of people’s lives, representing some of the most
pervasive and foundational scaffolds of everyday social life. Hostels as
‘infrastructure’ and ‘structure’ have become a central point of reference
within backpacker practices, providing a community and institutionally
sanctioned portal by which means a socio-spatial practice is enacted,
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
knowledge exchanged, where one’s identity can emerge and be vali-
dated. While backpacker movement is not fully determined by hostels, it
plays a major part within the system of interrelated institutions
(transport, communications, roads, airlines) developed to support their
mobility, and it remains the primary accommodation infrastructural
network and a pre-eminent ‘mobility system’ for facilitating this global
phenomenon. However, like mobility itself, the spread of hostels has
been uneven. While some countries operate strict regulatory environ-
ments hindering their spread, others restrict foreign involvement and
investment (by restricting labor, capital and knowledge mobility). Yet,
even in those countries that contain a large, informal, heterogeneous
accommodation base (i.e. Thailand, Bolivia, Peru and China), hostels are
increasingly established.
There have been competing claims to the historical association
between modern backpacking and hostelling. While Loker-Murphy
and Pearce (1985) argue that the historical antecedents to the modern
backpacker hostel can be traced back to the Young Men’s Christian
Association (YMCA) formed in 1844, most scholars see modern hos-
telling as having originated in Europe in 1909, when a German teacher,
Richard Shirrmann, came up with the idea to take his students on
excursions bordering the Rhine using schools along the route as
accommodation (Clarke, 2004b). When Cohen (1973) investigated the
nascent ‘drifter’ flows, precursors to today’s backpackers, he noted they
flowed along parallel geographic lines to tourists, ‘institutionalised on a
level completely segregated from, but parallel to ordinary mass tourism’
(Cohen, 1973: 90). Cohen (1973: 97) noted that drifters sought out these
cheap and conveniently located hostels, often called ‘freak hotels’, which
acted simultaneously as lodging, meeting places and eating places,
where ‘youngsters exchange information, buy and sell their belongings,
or smoke pot’. These original drifters, Cohen argued, travelled ‘outside
the established tourist circuit both geographically and socially’, making
use of local opportunities for lodging, eating and travelling. Loker-
Murphy and Pearce (1985: 824) noted how these developed into an
infrastructure catering specifically to the drifters, comprised of ‘inexpen-
sive transportation systems, with low-priced hotels and youth hostels
surrounded by psychedelic shops, nightclubs, and coffee houses’. Cohen
(1973: 101) noted that ‘drifter-establishments’ were of low-grade and
low-rate services, but still thrived on drifter tourism, but ‘the ordinary
caterer can expect little benefit from it’ and in addition, ‘the intrusion of
the drifters into the itineraries and facilities used by ordinary tourists
could spell a loss for the tourist establishment, since it antagonises the
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
89
other tourists, for whom drifters are often anathema’. This led some
researchers (Riley, 1988; Aramberri, 1991) to argue that backpackers were
not concerned with their amenity surroundings or value-added services;
a characteristic that meant that accommodation could be primarily
offered by locals (Burns, 1999; Scheyvens, 2002a, 2002b), attracting
backpackers in a bottom-up strategy of tourism development (Welk,
2004), where local people (primarily in developing countries) opened up
their houses to relatively affluent nomads, forming nodes in a global
ethnoscape and, as a consequence, were drawn into the multiple and
disparate processes of globalization (Edensor, 2004a).
While the original drifter declined along with counterculture in the
mid-1970s, recession and stagnation in the west; the spaces, narrative,
memories, sights, sites and values associated with them lived on, revived
in the form of backpacking in the mid-1980s. The ‘freak hotels’ and what
they represented to the budget independent travellers were replaced by
the backpacker hostel, a change made possible through massive growth
in ‘alternative guidebooks’ and the travel media. These mediascapes,
which refer ‘to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce
and disseminate information’ (Inda & Rosaldo, 2008: 53) have further
developed the new waves of budget travel and rather than being a
marginal part of alternative literature, hostels have been increasingly
reconstructed and conveyed through ‘backpacker’ films like ‘Hostel’
(2006), TV soap operas like ‘Crash Palace’ (Richards & Wilson, 2004: 267
268) and reality TV shows like ‘Paradise or Bust’ as central infrastructural
scaffolds within backpacking travel. Stru¨ ver (2004: 68) argues that these
representations ‘might be carried in everyday speech, popular culture
and high art, transmitted by TV, music, internet etc.’ and lead to
backpacking, their practices and consumption patterns being increas-
ingly represented within consumer culture.
While hostels along the original ‘hippie trail’, such as Pudding Shop in
Istanbul or the amir Kabir in Tehran, were famous in themselves made
possible through word of mouth, hostels have become increasingly
‘absorbed in the network’, in which ‘no place exists by itself’ since its
position and meaning are ‘defined by flows’ (Castells, 1996: 412413) or
more accurately, ‘the inexorable speeding up of flow’ (Broyard, 1982). This
has led to a network infrastructure that is predictable and standardized
even if not under single ownership, ensuring the same ‘service’ or
‘product’ is expected and ‘delivered in more or less the same way across
the network’ (Urry, 2005: 245). Hostels, given their orientation, strive to tap
into these global texts, resources and discourses, to legitimatize their place
in backpacker discourses, becoming ‘(re)entextualized’ (Salazar, 2006) or
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
reproduced, with some becoming better positioned as nodes; recognized
within globally mediated texts, for certain performances. Visser (2004:
297), for example, notes that, ‘the South African backpacker hostel sector
seems to be emulating backpacker hostels in regions such as Australia and
New Zealand with ‘‘first world’’ building designs, rather than using local
materials and designs’, rejecting the notion that separate geographic
regions develop backpacker accommodations with their own preferred
characteristics.
Performing Hostels
Hostels are the most visible, material and symbolic part of back-
packing culture, part of the backpacking script, a ‘referential framework
for the planning of a trip, but also a script for how to perform and perhaps
reconfigure their own identities within the desired setting’ (Jansson,
2007: 11; original emphasis). They have become so prevalent that some
scholars argue that modern backpacking was born out and is maintained
by backpacker hostels (Pearce, 1990; Slaughter, 2004). Wilson et al. (2007:
199) assert that Australia ‘gained a competitive advantage in the global
backpacker market because of its rapid and extensive institutionalisation
and commercialisation of backpacker travel’. Backpackers and hostels are
thus locked into a ‘fluid self-reinforcing system’ (Urry, 2005: 239)
significant to those who pass through them and produced as a ‘network’
that enables embodied performances to occur. A backpacker hostel
doesn’t necessarily have to consist of similar people (age, gender,
nationality), but of people sharing the same set of particular values,
conventions, patterns of movement, involving intermittent physical face-
to-face co-presence at locations on symbolic routes an important part of a
network-driven community (Lassen, 2006: 307), even though individuals
will not know exactly who will be encountered in these sites of ‘informal
co-presence’ (Boden & Molotch, 1994; Urry, 2003). The decision to stay
within these places of co-presence and communal proximity isn’t
‘incidental’, but a conscious and habitual way of encountering and
experiencing places and people, the symbolic nature of communal living
differentiating backpacking from mass tourists; where ‘inhabitants
recognized each other, knew what they could or should do, and what
relationships they could develop with each other ’ (Aubert-Gamet &
Cova, 1999: 40). A hostel without other backpackers would seem odd
given an audience is required to establish yourself, your road status and
identity, the presence of others providing the reassurance that you are in
the right place and reinforcing a ‘commonality of experience that exists
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
91
among fellow travellers’ (Obenour et al., 2006). Westerhausen and
MacBeth (2003: 73) note the formation of ‘such vibrant meeting places
en-route’ are a key component in that imagination, of chosen routes and
ultimately destination choice, an imagined world that has become real,
visible and negotiable (Ro¨ mhild, 2002).
Rather than being mundane places of pause and transit, hostels enable
rich, multilayered and dense interactions (Urry, 2003); shared space
becoming an important conduit in the exchange process, whether it is the
exchange of ideas, friendships, information and material goods, support-
ing a range of travel experiences from belonging, companionship,
reflection and learning. It is also an environmental setting in which an
individual can establish his or her own place, how to organize his or her
time and his or her next move. While meeting other travellers may be
secondary to meeting ‘locals’, it is still of significant importance
(Obenour et al., 2006; Cohen, 1973; Binder, 2004; Loker-Murphy & Pearce,
1985; Riley, 1988; Murphy, 2001, 2005; Richards, 2007) with many intense
interactions forming far more quickly than they would in normal life, but
also dissipating quickly (Elsrud, 1998; Riley, 1988; Murphy, 2001;
Sørensen, 2003). Westerhausen and Macbeth (2003: 73) argue that ‘like
magnets in a stream of charged particles’, sub-cultural meeting places
have emerged. These ‘gathering places’ (Vogt, 1976: 36) permit back-
packers to socialize with each other after traversing ‘alien territory’,
serving to reinforce a communal ethos and contributing to the produc-
tion of individual and group identities. Hostels have also been cast as a
continuously updated travel advisory with relevant trip information,
where information is exchanged, people put in contact with local events
and available jobs, a place to make friends and organize temporary ‘ad-
hoc travelling groups to share costs, risks and experiences’ (Binder, 2004:
98100). These shared encounters are the glue of ‘social networks and
have a socializing effect in terms of mutual understanding, empathy,
respect and thus tolerance towards others’ (Willis et al., 2007).
Hostels in Development
While local accommodation development were ‘blueprint beginnings’
(Franklin, 2003), Cohen (1982b) noted in the early 1980s that on the
beaches of Southern Thailand, where local ownership of accommodation
was predominant, restricted access to capital made them vulnerable to
being taken over by outside interests. Westerhausen and Macbeth (2003:
72) similarly note how ‘[t]he existence of flourishing backpacker centres
frequently invites a ‘‘hostile takeover’’ of local tourism structures by
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
outside operators and competing tourism sectors’. More recently,
Brenner and Fricke (2007: 225226) looked at backpacker development
in Zipolite, Mexico, and found that ‘developer-tourists’ who expressly
enter the market to build backpacker infrastructure have access to
investment capital and business acumen, and so have a head start
compared to the local population, gaining control over and dominating
the backpacker market segment. While backpacking was traditionally
seen as the first stage of tourism area life cycle (Brenner & Fricke, 2007),
given the (perceived) market potential of ‘thick flows’ coupled with a
global relaxation of foreign ownership rules, free movement of labor,
objects, finance, technology, information, people, knowledge and capital;
(tourist) developers, transnational companies and investment firms have
the necessary capital, in-house (or hired) expertise and knowledge that is
often beyond the reach of local entrepreneurs. Traditionally, while locals
who were geographically tied to a locality entered to serve this market,
outside firms and entrepreneurs, not surprisingly, followed this privi-
leged flow, ‘cherry picking’ high-demand, low-risk and low-cost areas to
try and maximize profits (Graham, 2004: 17). Clarke (2004b) found that
individual capitalist involvement in Sydney’s hostels acted ‘in their own
immediate self-interest’, with the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games bringing
multinational accommodation providers into the backpacker accommo-
dation sector, a development that has seen both Accor and Starwood
Hotel groups enter the market. According to Peel and Steen (2007: 1065),
despite ‘growing backpacker numbers, the continuing strength of local
economic conditions, a booming property market and pressure to
upgrade safety standards, the future of small independent hostels
remains uncertain’. While economic interests penetrated and changed
the original non-routinized and non-institutionalized character of drifter
tourism in the early 1970s (Cohen, 1973: 95) leading to ‘fixed travelling
patterns, established routines and a system of tourist facilities and
services catering specifically to the youthful mass-tourist’ practice-
specific economic infrastructure have now become embedded within
this sub-lifestyle, as backpacker trajectories have become mapped.
The flow of backpackers has attracted an increasing amount of
transnational investment both for profit making (Peel & Steen, 2006)
and as part of local and national government strategies (Prideaux &
Coghlan, 2006a). For destinations that are increasingly in competition in
seeking to attract mobile capital or people (Hall, 2005a), the intimate
relationship between hostel infrastructure and mobility in drawing
international tourists to a region has attracted private investors and
state funding. For example, a 2008 Suffolk University study found
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
93
Hostelling International-Boston’s 32,800 annual guests pumped about
$12.5 million into the local economy (Rivers et al., 2008), while Clarke
(2005: 315316) notes how Sydney’s Central YHA 570 bed hostel, which
has its own travel agency, bar, convenience store, cafe, swimming pool
etc., was politically welcome because of backpacker consumption in the
environs of the hostel and because they are ‘young, healthy, attractive’.
Scheyvens (2002b: 157) meanwhile notes how ‘the development of
backpacker enclaves has transformed some run-down, crime-ridden parts
of cities’, given that backpacker are characterized as being young, fit,
healthy, single, affluent and primarily but not exclusively white. In 2007, a
public-private partnership with Hostelling International was announced
as a centerpiece to revitalize downtown Winnipeg (Canada). HI regional
director, Dylan Rutherford, said the area ‘wasn’t attracting the best crowd’
a case of public funding in serving a predominately non-local market.
But backpackers are the ‘right kind of transnationals’ (Clarke, 2005); part
of a vibrant cultural scene mix along with other previously marginal
groups, a mix that attracts the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2005), which in turn
attracts capital. The ability of backpackers and the infrastructure that
facilitates them to gentrify areas has also been noted in red light districts
from Yogyakarta (Indonesia) to Sydney Kings (Scheyyens, 2002b; Visser,
2004; Howard, 2007), while pushing out marginal locals (homeless, drug
users/dealers, the mentally ill). Increasingly, local, regional and national
governments, through deliberate spatial strategies, are now seeking
backpackers through the establishment of hostels, because of the capital
they possess and also as a source of labor. Given that many backpackers
would not visit a region without having the option of a hostel, the
development of hostels are attractive both for filling seasonal labor
vacancies as well as adding vibrancy to central business districts, which
are normally devoid of night-time residents.
Australia, which has been short of labor for unskilled jobs, has
traditionally not sought to fill such shortages with individuals from their
near neighbors such as the Pacific Islands, but with individuals from
countries thousands of miles away, facilitated by deregulation in trans-
portation and communication systems. This type of working and holiday
making is enabled by the federal government’s ‘Working Holiday Scheme’
(Clarke, 2004a), which favors a very specific types of mobility young,
vibrant, cosmopolitan worker-backpackers (Williams & Hall, 2002), whom
employers value given their enthusiasm and their mobility (Allon et al.,
2008), their search for an ‘Australianism’ (Morris, 2006) and encounters
with the ‘real Australia’, making them a vital source of labor for
seasonal harvest work and capital mobility. These ‘harvest networks’
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
often require up to 20,000 workers, the crop-to-crop mobility requiring
hostel accommodation to attract and house them as long as the harvest
producers require them. Hostel infrastructure along these routes play a
vital function in this process by serving as the focal point for growers to
source workers and post job information. These hostels act as agents,
placing signs outside their establishments and advertising in back-
packer magazines seeking harvest workers. According to Rural Skills
Australia, farmers ring backpacker hostels requesting a specific number
of workers, which the hostel will try to provide, with some hostels also
supplying their own transport to farms, while others serve as pick-up
points for buses that may be provided by farmers, harvest project
contractors or local councils. The demand for these ‘idealized mobile
subjects’ (Richardson & Jensen, 2008: 219) is increasingly important for
places, highlighting the role of hostels in putting a place on the map,
with local issues becoming ‘more tightly and mutually intertwined with
national and global concerns’ (Edensor, 2004a: 11).
Hostels in Enclaves
This chapter is not suggesting that the hostel network is at the cusp of
being colonized by corporate giants, investment firms and profit
entrepreneurs who, as agents of globalization, are offering a rich lifestyle
for a ‘relatively’ cheap price, akin to the glocalized Starbucks network. It
does, however, suggest that hostels, as an important consumption
junction and a spatial setting for many practices that may dominate a
backpackers daily activities, are taking on many of the characteristics of
what Edensor (2000: 328) calls ‘enclavic space’, offering travellers a bit-
part in a theatrical play. To encapsulate consumers, they create synergies
with everyday activities (touring, nightlife, laundry, internet access); with
particular consumption practices acting as ‘binding agents’ (Thrift, 2000)
that give travellers enough autonomy so that they are seen and feel they
are socially constructing, not socially constructed (Thrift, 1996), which
reconfirms (genuine or illusory) individual autonomy (Bauman, 2001).
Paraphrasing Edensor’s (2004b) ‘motorscape’, hostels contain the com-
fort of a spatially coherent identity, connecting places together in an
increasingly enclavic-scape across differing local contexts with a familiar
architectural style, containing familiar comforts such as wi-fi internet,
English-speaking staff, security, live music, sociality, privacy features
that have become so common place and familiar within hostels, that they
are now only noticeable when missing.
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
95
Creating a space for performance, also means restricting the mobility
of others seen as economically marginal, immobile or disruptive, which
usually manifests itself by refusing entry to locals even as paying guests
(Hutnyk, 1996; Visser, 2003), meaning there is relatively little contact
between backpackers and ‘locals’ (Obenour et al., 2006; Huxley, 2007).
Different bodies are separated out, transforming the travelling body in a
series of processing categories, leading to spatial and racial segregation
that excludes certain groups (stag parties, rugby groups, school groups)
and ethnicities, which has recently seen Aboriginals in Australia, Israelis
in India and even English tourists in Wales excluded from certain
hostels. This exclusion extends to any individual or group who ‘could’
disrupt the enactment or performance of a backpacker’s lifestyle or
undermine the commercial activities of the hostel, while ‘the other’ act as
staff ‘performing’ local culture. The ability of an actor to participate in the
network is determined by whether they are seen as contributing to the
goals of the network, denying entry to those who are unable or unwilling
to perform supporting roles in the network. This also extends to
individuals or groups that ‘refuse to comply with the roles expected’,
those individuals who ‘truly disrupt the stage and the normative
enactions performed on it’ (Edensor, 2000: 331), leading to their exclusion
and alienation from the surrounding environment as hostels welcome
similar people on a reciprocal basis throughout the world. Hostel owners
will argue that this is their business, catering to international tourists,
and that they have a duty of care to guard against intercultural
misunderstandings by serving as a ‘buffer against culture confusion’
(Hottola, 2005: 5) on such issues as personal space, privacy, gender and
sexuality. Hostels have become progressively more closed to the
immobile (increasingly, hostels have maximum stay lengths), the non-
paying or those considered economically insignificant. Surveillance,
CCTV cameras, flow management systems, security guards and swipe
cards help hostels offer ‘assisted’ and emplaced predictability and
reliability frictionless and seamless mobility through smooth corridors
on the hostel network a type of encapsulation, where the space is stage-
managed, ‘a strategy for maintaining spatial and imaginary boundaries’
(Jansson, 2007: 9), an encapsulated spell that allows for an ‘imagined’
community to take hold, but ‘in order not to break the spell, people are
obliged to act in an appropriate manner to play the right game’
(Jansson, 2007). These hostel performances mean the boundaries of Self
are not brought into question (Sibley, 2001), as hostels mediate between
the backpacker and otherness, between edge and risk or any intrusion
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
that might produce anxiety, while the individual backpackers them-
selves, if threatened by others, can also retreat to private rooms.
Hostels are becoming increasingly adept at providing and organizing
scripts, interconnecting with specialized transport companies and other
backpacker operators through ‘backpacker conferences’, web-portals like
hostelworld.com and specific hostel management forums (www.hostel-
management.com) to manage a stage on which interaction will be carried
out, modifying and manipulating spatial practices, tapping into global
flows; helping create a scape that ensures travellers never feel lost,
immobile or isolated no matter where they happen to be. Mobilizing
shared activities and mutual aid systems that were traditionally tied to
hostels, such as shared meals, kitchens, notice boards, wash rooms and
communal chores become problematic in this co-production, as hostels,
through accident and design, give new spatial meaning for more affluent
mobilities. Many collective, shared practices and rituals that were once
enabled by hostels are now withdrawn, no longer supported or inscribed
within structures and are replaced by more individualized activities
aimed at instant gratification, with less attention paid to activities that
help self-organization or benefit a collective culture. Thus, the elevation
of private space and commercial activities mean individuals can pursue
their own interests, the ‘[e]xpectations of backpacker/hostel accommo-
dation appear to be changing from the communal, cheap, ‘‘just a bed’’
option that it once was believed to be ... something more in line with the
accommodation experience of the mainstream tourist’ (Cave et al., 2007:
245). While the de
´cor and layout of a hostel lobby once meant creating a
very different experience from that encountered at a five star hotel,
increasingly individuals are coming to expect very tangible and physical
evidence of a servicescape (Bitner, 1992), whether it be internet access
that works, to a level of service and performance from the ‘management’
and staff.
Hostels in Play
Even though performances are increasingly prescriptive, individual
travellers are active rather than just passive performers, producers
as much as consumers. Jamal and Hill (2002: 100) note how tourists (as
well as entrepreneurs and locals) can ‘interpret for themselves and resist
the ideological or hegemonic meanings being imparted by the industry
or destination/attraction managers’ and have the agency not to be co-
opted ‘to exercise performative freedom and resistance to being normal-
ised into the dominant discourses’ by escaping the institutions and
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97
structures that try and channel them (Sheller, 2001). Thus, backpackers
will express themselves by fulfilling or occupying a consumptive role
different from that of other tourists, positioning themselves in opposition
to those ‘conventional’ tourists (Wilson & Richards, 2004: 123). Bruner
(1991: 247 cited in Shaffer, 2004: 142) argues that this is often difficult
given that ‘once the tourist infrastructure is in place, the traveller can
hardly avoid the well-trodden path of the tourists’. While Judd (2003: 34)
argues that even when a tourist leaves his or her enclave to indulge in the
unpredictable adventures of the fla
ˆneur, there is a ‘limited range of
options and choices available to them’. Yet, travellers will contest what is
‘appropriate’ activity in a given setting, engaging and engage in ‘tactical
revolts’ and ‘actively resist conformist performances’ (Hannam, 2006:
244), not only sometimes arranging accommodation outside the network,
but living outside the network geographically, materially and socially
(Elsrud, 1998), committing themselves to the sub-lifestyle values by
approaching the ‘local’ in a different manner (Loker, 1993; Riley, 1988;
Scheyvens, 2002a, 2000b), evolving means and representation that they
believe represents their social world more accurately than that which the
industry can offer or impose.
Consumption might thus also be enacted through less privileged
spaces, such as in heterogeneous spaces located to serve passing trade
and the local population, accommodation that co-exists ‘with local small
businesses, shops, street vendors, public and private institutions, and
domestic housing’ (Edensor, 1998: 53), which may ‘provide stages where
transitional identities may be performed alongside the everyday enac-
tions of residents, passers-by and workers’ (Edensor, 2001: 64). These
spaces are not connected to the global tourism industry to the same
extent as enclavic space and do not (or may not have the abiity) to
package and perform particular kinds of authenticity for backpacker
consumption. These alternative spaces suggest or give the traveller (even
if it is illusionary) the notion of serendipity, where a local place provides
a convincing backdrop to identity creation. The traveller can perform
when practicing language, for example, removing themselves linguisti-
cally and culturally while utilizing bargaining skills to find ego
enhancement from getting ‘best value’ (Riley, 1988). Heterogeneous
accommodation exists as rich and varied ‘soundcapes’ and ‘smellscapes’
(Edensor, 1998: 62) amongst the local shops, schools, hairdressers,
markets, flats, residents, suburbs, street vendors and restaurants. In
this context, Crawshaw and Urry (1997) similarly note the idea of a
flaneur ‘attracted to the city’s dark corners, to chance encounters to
confront the unexpected, to engage in a kind of counter-tourism that
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
involves a poetic confrontation with the ‘‘dark corners’’ occupied by the
dispossessed and marginal of a town or city, and to experience
supposedly ‘‘real’’ ‘‘authentic’’ life uncluttered by the dominant vi-
sual/tourist images of that place’.
Backpackers are also deploying technologies by using social network-
ing hospitality sites like bewelcome.org and couchsurfing.com, creating
new forms of ‘meetingness’ (Urry, 2003); appropriated and lived as part
of everyday travel experience, creating ‘empathetic sociality’ (Maffesoli,
1996: 11), overtaking the power exerted by institutions while creating
new tactical media and responses in the face of massification. However,
not all backpackers have the access, skills, competences, motivation and
knowledge to move beyond the hostel network into heterogeneous space
or other networks. Edensor (2000: 331) argues that most will acknowl-
edge, accept and even welcome the controlled nature of enclavic spaces
and adapt performances accordingly, ‘prepared to trade self-expression
for the benefits of consistency, reliability, and comfort’ (Edensor, 2000:
331). For many backpackers, hostels are a reliable and habitual means to
avoid the messy mobilities that one finds in heterogeneous spaces.
Conclusion
The global processes enabled by technological developments in
transport and communications combined with a wider ‘appreciation’
of independent travel has created and extended powerful (and affluent)
thick flows that criss-cross the globe. This has embedded an increasingly
interconnected, interdependent and mapped ‘travellerscape’, which
includes a material and symbolic hostel network that serves as a
‘mobility nexus’ (Normark, 2006) a place of identity making and
identity habit (Jenkins, 1996), a distinct social space and a visible part of a
sub-lifestyle. The hostel network is a symbolic space that connects places
across time/space as well a material space that connects an ‘imagined
community’ together through a shared movement of bodies, ideas,
assumptions, stories and knowledge. Hostels are thus a key infrastruc-
ture scaffold, deeply embedded within backpacker travel arrangements;
an infrastructure that supports backpacker mobility in a routinized
manner. It is this global spread and habitualization that has led observers
to suggest that these meeting places both represent a crucial component
for destination choice for this form of tourism (Westerhausen & Macbeth,
2003), but also highlights its increasing institutionalization. Increasingly,
hostels link together and with the media, transport, the state offering
a very consumption-driven community and forms of sociality, even if
Backpacker Hostels: Place and Performance
99
they only fleetingly represent familiarity and recognition, a shield of
emotional protection, and a substitute for insecurity and unpredictability
within the informal unorganized sector (Bell, 2005).
Backpacker hostels continue to reproduce and sustain themselves
given they are an infrastructure considered as a foundational scaffold of
everyday travel life the primary form of accommodation associated
with independent backpacker travel, symbolically, materially and dis-
cursively, providing an increasing level of predictability, safety and
security. However, this is primarily achieved through exclusion, segrega-
tion and marginalization rather than by enabling any sort of ‘local’
contact or even low prices as they reterritorialize ‘a sense of place’
through theming and ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell, 1999: 92).
Hostels have developed immensely complex ‘participatory’ programs
to provide backpackers with consumption opportunities that are socially
authentic, providing a stage for performances that tends to exclude those
that do not want to or cannot participate, a strategy that increasingly
mediates between the individual traveller and the ‘outside world’
whether it is for food, nightlife, laundry or internet access a process
that is welcomed by many. This process has led to a certain amount of de-
individualization or reduced autonomy, a continual cumulative process
whereby backpacking is captured and made safe for individuals, but
only for those affluent enough to participate and willing to give up some
individual agency for a ‘controlled edge’ (Hannigan, 2007: 73); a safe
adventure and experimentation with identity that offers escape from
everyday routines. Hostels then are safe ground for the individualizing
and reconfirmation of self through encounters with familiar others but
freedom and interaction is increasingly expected and purchased rather
than earned as individuals interact ‘lightly’ without too much riding on
the outcome (Hudson, 2005), escaping if boundaries of self are brought
into question. While hostels increasingly become interconnected and
interdependent through transport, informational and communications
innovations, the scape by taking on a more enclavic nature might clash
with individuals’ imaginary embodiment in the world. Tactical re-
sponses, such as the use of heterogeneous accommodations and the
use of the ‘Technologies of the Self’ such as hospitality exchange sites
mean individual backpackers given the motivation, competence, access,
skills and tools can reposition themselves along with others to coordinate
their tactical movement through space on the ‘promise of affection,
conservation, a sense of new beginnings’ (Turkle, 2008: 125). It may be
that a new disjuncture is been created as individuals in coordination with
others seek greater control of their self-image, as they set out to ‘win
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Beyond Backpacker Tourism
space’ that may be experienced as personalized, authentic, capital
intensive and identity-enhancing. The question remains as to whether
these creative and adaptive tactical responses and the creation of
distinctly new social spaces can transform the global-local processes
that have made hostels a key infrastructural system, acting as a
preparatory step for geographically dispersed individuals to create
new forms of alternative travel styles from below.
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