Abstract:
According to Michel Foucault (1984), everything is dangerous, including the alternative. Thus, the alternative needs to be problematised, rather than (un)critically celebrated. This hyper-active politics may be relevant for Willing Workers On Organic Farms (WWOOF), an emerging global ecotourism phenomenon with environmental educational potentials. Based on an interpretive ethnographic study of ten young adult international participants in WWOOF (or, WWOOFers) and their nature experience, this paper examines three strategies for transgressive ‘reversible experience’, referring to Jean Baudrillard’s writings from his early-mid period (1976-1980), particularly Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976/1993).Reversible experience is one of the three types of the WWOOFers’ nature experience heuristically identified in the ethnographic study. In reversible experience, the familiar notions of ‘nature’ and ‘human’ began to appear ambiguous to the WWOOFers. Rather than (un)critically othering nature as an ‘alternative’ (McIntosh & Bonnemann, 2006) ecotouristic place for WWOOFers to consume, is it not more hyper-actively environmental and ecological to assert its heterogeneous possibilities of nature in ‘non-place’ (Foucault, 1986)? This paper argues that the ambiguity of ‘nature’-‘human’ that appeared in the WWOOFers’ reversible experience should be defended against the dominant logic of humanistic critical theory in WWOOF experience. This is not only for human WWOOFers to continue enjoying the enigmatic charm of nature, but also for nature to avoid being simulated completely into an ecotourism commodity simulacrum. A close reading of Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death informs three possible strategies to lessen the simulatedness of nature (and human, in turn) in WWOOFers’ nature experience. They are: suicide; enchantment; and hyper-conformity. This paper introduces these three theoretical strategies with empirical examples from the ethnographic study. Each of the three strategies has its limitations. Moreover, deconstruction of ‘nature’ (and ‘human’, in turn) does not promise a better version. Ultimately, the humanist logic of nature experience will probably not disappear as long as we are humans, including aspirational post-humans (Bogost, 2012). Still, considering what we have done badly to the environment so far with the dualism of ‘nature’/’human’ (Merchant, 1980), perhaps it is now time to add a hyper-actively transgressive and experimental moment into our nature experience.References:Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death (I.H. Grant, Trans.). London: SAGE.Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or what it's like to be a thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader (P. Rainbow Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22-27. McIntosh, A. J., & Bonnemann, S. M. (2006). Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF): The alternative farm stay experience? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14(1), 82-99. Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. New York: Harper & Row.