Tourism Recreation Research

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Complementarity: bridging the tourism academic/

religion divide

Stephen Schweinsberg

To cite this article: Stephen Schweinsberg (2023) Complementarity: bridging the

tourism academic/religion divide, Tourism Recreation Research, 48:4, 627-629, DOI:
10.1080/02508281.2023.2208464

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TOURISM RECREATION RESEARCH
2023, VOL. 48, NO. 4, 627–629
https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2023.2208464
POST PUBLISHED REVIEW*
Complementarity: bridging the tourism academic/religion divide
Stephen Schweinsberg
UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 April 2023; Accepted 19 April 2023
The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth (Niels Bohr)
Friedrich Nietzsche argued that
the whole of nature is the conception of religious men a
sum of actions by conscious and volitional beings … we
men of today feel precisely the opposite; the richer a
man feels within himself, the more polyphonic his sub-
jectivity is, the more powerfully is he impressed by the
uniformity of nature (Nietzsche, 1977, p. 167).
The idea that theistic and mono-theistic beliefs are mis-
guided is long standing and based on the ‘reasoned’
arguments of scientific luminaries such as Charles
Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and Bertrand Russell, etc.
(Dixon & Shapiro, 2022). Scientific knowledge, they
argued is premised on the basis of observations and
incremental reasoning of the natural world (Gower,
1997). The sense of what it means to be human –
freedom, ethics, personal and societal values and an
effort to understand our place in the universe – not
only do not require the presence of a God or Gods,
but in arguing that we can devolve responsibility for
our rationale thinking to religious belief, we are trusting
in a ‘religious method [that] is refuted by its failure’
(Stenger in INCH, 2014).
Science and the scientific method have long been
recognised as one of the foundational disciplines of
tourism knowledge (Tribe & Liburd, 2016; Urano et al.,
2022). Schweinsberg (2023) has built on this disciplinary
framework in this special issue, arguing that religious
faith can serve as a values-based meta narrative govern-
ing an academic’s sense of self as they seek to engage
with different disciplinary perspectives. What he did
not consider, however, was how academics who have
a religious faith might engage constructively with
tourism practices, which conflict with their own faith-
CONTACT Stephen Schweinsberg stephen.schweinsberg@uts.edu.au
Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
*The Post-Published Review (PPR) is a new department introduced to expand the insights produced by the published papers in Tourism Recreation Research,
particularly those attempting to develop a concept in pursuit of knowledge creation or pose some epistemological query and seek to fill in gap in received
information and so on. PPR contributions (in <2000 words) which must be constructive, re-inventing, academic and prejudice-free are welcome. For details
write to Editor-in-Chief (tchuan@mail.ncyu.edu.tw).
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
based perspective. Could I as a person of faith argue
that abortion tourism should be developed in a particu-
lar destination, so long as it adheres to a particular pol-
itical regulatory framework? Similarly, could I
recommend the establishment/ expansion of a red-
light district in a township if I could prove its economic
value for the region? Hollinshead (2010) once asked the
Academy to look beyond its traditional colonialist and
economic framings and embrace a truly post-disciplinary
interpretation of knowledge. This paper asks a follow-on
question; how can new knowledge producers reconcile
their idea of ‘truth’ to the rationalist socio-political and
economic imperatives upon which the tourism industry
still ultimately relies?
Tourism scholars are frequently asked to critically
investigate forms of tourism, which can be seen by
many in society to be ethically suspect including sex
tourism, child sex tourism, suicide tourism, fertility/
reproductive tourism, abortion tourism, and slum
tourism. The economic importance of such industries is
well documented in particular destination localities
(e.g. Brooks & Heaslip, 2019; Guiney & Mostafanezhad,
2015). However, underpinning all of the afore men-
tioned tourism sectors are also wider societal issues
regarding: the sanctity of life; cultural stigmatisation;
the marginalisation of the ‘other’, respect or disrespect
of privacy, and unequal power relations; all of which reli-
gious institutions have strong, often negative opinions
on (e.g. Huschke & Schubotz, 2016; Masci, 2016). Carr
(2016) suggests with respect to sex tourism that aca-
demics should find ways to engage with contentious
tourism in all its forms as a means of illuminating the
darkest parts of the world. But, to what end? If our
goal is to advocate for principles of love, respect, gener-
osity, and forgiveness for all people then these are
UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, 14-18 Ultimo Road,
628 S. SCHWEINSBERG
laudable goals. After all, ‘We love because he [God] first
loved us’ (1 John 4:19). However, if we are being asked to
put aside our own moral principles and advocate for a
developmental outcome for a form of tourism that we
know goes against our own religious beliefs; what
does this mean for the development of truly integrative
post-disciplinary perspectives in tourism? Are we not at-
risk of falling back into the trap of short-sightedness that
the call for this special edition has characterised the
Academy to-date?
Even before tourism research took on a greater focus
on research engagement and impact as a foundation of
its work (Font et al., 2019; Schweinsberg et al., 2022)
many readers would have been uncomfortable with
the idea that scholarship on issues like sex tourism was
focused largely on academic naval gazing. As Carr
(2016, p. 188) has argued, shouldn’t the focus instead
be on ‘working in a real world context to help people’
(Carr, 2016, p. 188)? However, how might one achieve
this while being faithful to their own religious beliefs?
The paragraphs that follow will introduce the notion of
complementarity as an ontological mindset for how
people of faith might engage with views they disagree
with. Niels Bohr developed the theory of complementar-
ity in the early twentieth century to describe the prob-
abilistic positioning of electrons in the quantum world
(Gribbin, 2012). Bohr acknowledged that
the epistemological lesson we have received from the
new development in physical science, where the pro-
blems enable a comparatively concise formulation of
principles, may also suggest lines of approach in other
domains of knowledge where the situation is of essen-
tially less accessible character (Bohr, 1950, p. 54).
In such contexts, complementarity theory asks human
beings to recognise that ‘there can be several different
ways of describing a single system, each useful and
internally consistent, but mutually incompatible’ (Wilce-
zek, 2016 in Goetz, 2018, p. 199).
It has long been recognised that an absence of comp-
lementary thinking has the potential to drive a wedge
between scientific and religious worldviews (Reich,
1989). As a Christian, my responsibility is not to approach
science and tourism’s other paradigms from a dogmatic
referential perspective, but rather as a relational con-
struct. The following analogy will illustrate the chal-
lenges and opportunities of such a goal. Imagine you
are listening to a piece of dissonant polyphonic music;
a piece of music where a particular combination of
notes is causing you to feel uncomfortable; at the
extreme you might describe it as like hearing fingernails
scrape on a chalkboard. For some listeners such disso-
nance is not problematic, a reflection of their gradual
exposure to new tonal structures (Johnson-Laird et al.,
2012). For others, as was the case in an early perform-
ance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (subtitled Pic-
tures from Pagan Russia) in 1913 at the Théâtre des
Champs-Elysées in Paris, the musical dissonance and
its description of a ‘pagan ritual in which a sacrificial
virgin dances herself to death’ led to what has popularly
been described as a riot amongst members of the Pari-
sian audience (Classic FM, 2018). Complementarity per-
spectives suppose that when assessing the quality of
the music, the application of its melodies, tonal struc-
tures and instrumentation exist on the one hand. On
the other you have the point of view and expectations
of the audience. As Wilczek (2021, p. 217) argues –
‘Each is a meaningful way to interact with the music.
You can switch between them. But you can’t really do
both at once’. For the record, Stravinsky’s reaction to
seeing the audience’s disquiet was decidedly anti-com-
plimentary, storming out of the theatre in disgust
saying ‘“Go to hell” … [noting that] they were very
naïve and stupid people’ (Classic FM, 2018).
Tourism academics of religious faith often find them-
selves operating in professional environments that can
seem dissonant, contrary to one’s sense of purpose.
Should we seek to influence others in the Academy or
those in the wider ‘world of tourism’ to adopt our
faith-based views, clinging to a narrow view of the
world dictated by dogmatic religious observance? Or
alternatively, should we recognise that our ability to
understand alternative ways of thinking through com-
plementarity thinking does not require us to agree
with everyone (Wilczek, 2021)? Christian academics
must recognise that when they seek to bring faith into
a discussion of sex tourism, they will be inherently
aligned with most in the community around issues to
advocate for the ending of sexual slavery (Daniel-
Hughes, 2018; Miles et al., 2014). At the same time,
however, such an alignment of views must be seen
against the backdrop of more divisive debates in
various church denominations over various gender and
power issues such as rights for LGBTQI peoples
(Human Rights Campaign, 2023), abortion rights
(Masci, 2016) and the rights of women in the church
for ordination and other leadership positions (Riches &
Jennings, 2016). Gender-based power and discrimi-
nation is often seen as an underlying theme behind in
many darker manifestations of commercial forms of
sex tourism (Berdychevsky, 2022).
When I as a Christian academic come to an under-
standing of a divisive form such as sex tourism, I am
reminded of the fact that my beliefs do not match per-
fectly with the everyday experiences of the world I am
observing. At the same time, however, I am cognisant
of the fact that as a scholar I have access to a diverse

range of knowledge domains to describe tourism (see
Tribe & Liburd, 2016). No form of tourism can be
‘embraced in its entirety in one narrative, statistic or dis-
course analysis, so tourism research is not accounted for
or told in one consistent way, from one position, with
one voice’ (Ren et al., 2010, p. 899). It is therefore incum-
bent on me to keep talking collaboratively with different
knowledge domains, as per the principles of comple-
mentarity articulated by Bohr (McGrath, 2009). This is
not always easy but if we do there is the opportunity
to truly understand the nature of the whole.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Stephen Schweinsberg is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Man-
agement at the UTS Business School, University of Technology
Sydney. Stephen has an active research interest in academic
knowledge formation and in the subjective and hetero-
geneous nature of an organisation’s place-based setting.
Recent research has been published in Annals of Tourism
Research, Tourism Management and Journal of Sustainable
Tourism. Stephen is on the Editorial Review Board of Annals
of Tourism Research and Tourism Review.
ORCID
Stephen Schweinsberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8820-
8302
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