[Downloaded free from http://www.conservationandsociety.org on Wednesday, December 5, 2018, IP: 138.246.2.184] Conservation and Society 16(4): 481-492, 2018 Article Consuming the Tiger: Experiencing Neoliberal Nature Sudha Vasan Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India E-mail: [email protected] Abstract This is an ethnographic account of urban middle class Indian tourists’ experience of seeing the tiger in the national parks (NP) in India, based on participant observation in Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, and Kanha and Bandhavgarh National Parks in Madhya Pradesh, India. This experience of seeing the tiger emerges as a specific form of commodity located within the process of commodification pervasive under neoliberal capitalism, circulated and sustained through a range of media, attainable through competitive exchange of economic and social capital. While the experience is prefigured, standardised and fetishised, actual embodied experience of the tiger safari in NP adds form and content to this commodity. Specific practices including the economy of tiger sighting, forms of access to NP and safari regulations reinforce wildlife experience as a scarce market commodity. The tourist gaze, mediated through global and new social media and materialised through ubiquitous photography, make the tiger simultaneously wild and familiar, cosmopolitan and parochial, universal commodity sign and specifically unique. Material experience through which the tourist ‘consumes’ the tiger reinforces ideas of nature as enclosed, separated and rationed space accessible through the market to those with money to spend, and the tiger as accessible through social status and economic hierarchies. This research unravels a basic contradiction between a sustainable conservation ethic, and subjectivity created by this form of competitive consumption of commoditised nature. Keywords: nature tourism, national parks, tiger tourism, wildlife tourism, commodification of nature, neoliberal nature, competitive consumption of nature, gazing at the tiger INTRODUCTION Delhi and compulsory environmental studies classes in her children’s school.” At the start of this safari, Ramya had been despondent, “We have come to see the tiger; I don’t know Gazing at the Tiger what our destiny will be today. We have already spent money and returned empty. This is our last attempt.” With her two “It looks like National Geographic channel,” exclaimed an teen-aged children and husband, she had arrived the previous excited safari tourist Ramya, pointing at a tiger in Ranthambore morning at Sawai Madhopur, the main point of entry to RNP. National Park (RNP), Rajasthan, India (RNP, May 2012). The family had been on two safaris without sighting a tiger. This was her first ever sighting of a tiger and it lived up “We didn’t see anything,” piped in her son, “we got a useless to her expectations; expectations she explained, that were zone1.” (Vivek, RNP, May 2012). The safari guide overhearing built up “over many years of watching television in New this conversation had reassured us that this was going to be our lucky day. And indeed it was. The almost two hour long Access this article online search for sighting a tiger was a success. The jeep driver Quick Response Code: asked, “has everyone finished taking photographs?” before he Website: dissociated the jeep from the many that had surrounded this www.conservationandsociety.org tiger, and sped back to the gates to reach within the scheduled time for completion of this safari. As the safari ended, tourists DOI: in the jeep were happy to tip the guide and driver, as Ramya’s 10.4103/cs.cs_16_143 husband congratulated them, “you finally managed to show it to us.” (Babu, RNP, May 2012). Copyright: © Vasan 2018. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and distribution of the article, provided the original work is cited. Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow, Mumbai | Managed by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore. For reprints contact: [email protected] [Downloaded free from http://www.conservationandsociety.org on Wednesday, December 5, 2018, IP: 138.246.2.184] 482 / Vasan The experience of seeing a tiger or other charismatic mega- global cultures, serving banal global consumption. The actual fauna in a protected area is mediated by specific social relations wildlife encounter is a significant moment in this circulation, embedded in both historical and contemporary practices and bringing together the ‘real’ and the ‘reel’, contributing to imaginations of nature. In India, many National Parks2 (NP) delineating the commodity and expectations around it. This is are the only sites where majority of middle class urban citizens the objective of this study, examining how the mass of middle- can view the tiger ‘in its natural habitat’ through an organised class urban Indian tourists experience the real tiger, contributing jeep safari. As a safari tourist in Kanha National Park (KNP) content to the circulating global tiger. said, “This is the only place we can see a wild tiger without This practical engagement of the mass of tourists visiting endangering our lives. Zoos (zoological parks) only have NP is significant to how they relate to wildlife, nature, and captive tigers. In NP, it is possible to spend money and see a conservation. Ingold (2000: 186) in delineating the dwelling wild tiger in safety.” (Manohar, KNP, December 2015). This perspective avers that “the forms people build, whether in the experience of seeing a tiger in NP is a commodity that an imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their increasing number of middle-class Indians are choosing to buy. involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their This consumption entails embodied experiences that influence practical engagement with their surroundings.” This perspective popular understandings of conservation, and wider social has been extended to articulate transitory experiences such circulation of conservation imaginations. Yet, wildlife tourists as tourism in terms of involvement rather than location or as a subject of study have attracted the attention of researchers detachment (Obrador-Pons 2003), allowing ‘dwelling’ to only recently and most research has focused on perceptions register the fleeting as well as the enduring, the mobile as well and awareness of tourists regarding conservation (Chin et al. as fixed, the global as well as the local (Obrador-Pons 1995). 2000; Lemelin and Weirsma 2007; Ballantyne et al. 2009; Through ethnography of domestic tourists at NP, this paper Cohen 2012; Karanth et al. 2012; Curtin and Kragh 2014). examines how urban middle class Indians experience the tiger Much of the early literature on tourism portrays tourism as a protected in NP. Experience of seeing the tiger emerges in this purely Western ideology forged in political economies rooted neoliberal economy as a specific form of tourist commodity, in post-colonialism (Burns and Bibbings 2009). However, circulated and sustained through a range of media, attainable non-consumptive wildlife tourism is a growing industry in in the market only through expending economic and social non-Western contexts attracting mass tourism with diverse capital. It is prefigured and fetishized through aspects beyond domestic consumers (Tapper 2006; Karanth and DeFries 2011; the immediate experience, but the actual embodied experience Curtin and Kragh 2014). Surveys have been the most popular adds form and content to this commodity. The experience method of data collection, and research on wildlife tourists of the middle class urban Indian tourist viewing the tiger at has taken a direct ‘impact on conservation’ perspective, and a NP emerges in this study as one of the many sites of the asked how tourists perceive conservation, or what are tourists everyday (re)production of the ‘cosmopolitan’ tiger through willing to pay for the experience. “Future challenges”, write the tourist gaze. This reflects on the larger impact of NPs, Curtin and Kragh (2014: 551) “will concern how best to beyond immediate impacts on local residents, both human and explore the ways in which tourist experiences in these settings non-human, to the spatially and temporally distant subjectivities can influence the human psyche beyond the boundaries of the influenced by commodification of wildlife viewing. experience itself.” Taking up this challenge, this study focuses attention on how the experience of tiger safaris in NP affects Tiger tourism in NP: selling nature to save it the tourists themselves. Fletcher (2014), in one of the rare studies on ‘experience’ While NP have a long history with multiple and changing of eco-tourists, signals the significance of cultural resonances objectives reflecting state and social power relations of rigorous outdoor activity in the social location of white (Rangarajan 2001; Rangarajan and Shahabuddin 2006; upper-middle-class Westerners. Cultural resonances specific to Hughes 2015), they are one of the most important categories of social locations are significant in a self-chosen activity such as legally recognised protected areas in India along with Wildlife tourism, while embodied experiences contribute to formation of Sanctuaries, Conservation Reserves and Community Reserves. such cultures. With charismatic wildlife, global circulation of In April 1973,