INVITED SPEAKERS

Encouraging Travel in the Context of Boycott: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Myanmar Tourism Guides

 

 This paper examines the official tourism website for Myanmar ( Burma) as well as the Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar to see how the respective guides promote and warn potential tourists of this Southeast Asian country.

Many contexts exist for examining the role of language and other semiotic modalities in the new capitalism (Fairclough 1999) with these modalities understood as mediators of social concerns and of social action in response to these concerns. One such context is tourist discourse – the context and modalities through which nations promote themselves. The national board of a repressive regime can employ visual and linguistic texts in order to present a positive face, e.g.

Myanmar offers all the traditional delights of Asia in one fascinating country. Virgin jungles, snow-capped mountains and pristine beaches, combined with a rich and glorious heritage spanning from more than two thousand years…

Another facet of tourist discourse, however, is the product of travel guides that seek to address both positive and possibly negative aspects of travel to a particular locale. Non-governmental tour guides, e.g. Lonely Planet, may see the need to promote tourism in a given area, while simultaneously informing potential tourists about the controversies (and dangers) of traveling in such areas, as seen in (2):

 

  • Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi advocates boycotting all forms of travel to the country [of Myanmar] as a means of isolating the government and forcing reform.

 

As Jaworski and Thurlow (2004:297) claim, ‘tourism can be viewed as an identity resource for members of post-industrial, late-modern societies.’ We argue that an analysis of national identity construction (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Leibhart 1999) must focus multimodally (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) on how national identities are mediated (Scollon 2001) through text – both linguistic and visual. These perspectives share a concern for studying language as a social action.

As a country undergoing civil and political change, Myanmar is in a position to construct its (late-)modern identity. In the view of mediated discourse analysis, this constitutes a social problem as this country defines itself for its citizens and the world beyond its borders. In this study, we look to the Myanmar tourism website and travel guides – their words and images – for how they mediate the social construction of Myanmar as a travel destination. This analysis demonstrates how this construction serves as a social action.

References

Fairclough, Norman. 1999. Global capitalism and critical awareness of language. Language Awareness 8:2, 71-83

Jaaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow. 2004. Language, tourism and globalization: mapping new international identities. Language matters: Communication, identity, and culture, ed by Sik Hyun Ng, Christopher N. Candlin, and Chi Yue Chiu. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 297-321.

 

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal discourse: The Modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.

 

Scollon, Ron. 2001. Mediated Discourse: the nexus of practice. London: Routledge.

Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cilia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart. 1999. The discursive construction of national identity (translated by Angelika Hirsch and Richard Mitten). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.