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30 pages, 473 KiB

Open AccessArticle

by Wendelin M. Küpers

Humanities 2025, 14(3), 66; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030066 - 14 Mar 2025

Viewed by 423

This paper adopts a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach to explore the embodied dimensions of place and movement as they pertain to travel and tourism. By drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this study examines how the living body intermediates experiences of place and [...] Read more.

This paper adopts a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach to explore the embodied dimensions of place and movement as they pertain to travel and tourism. By drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this study examines how the living body intermediates experiences of place and performed mobility across various touring modalities. In particular, it introduces the concept of embodied “detouring” as a distinct form of relationally placed mobility. The paper further explores the notion of “heterotouropia” and its connection to detouring in addition to addressing the ideas of “other-placing” and “other-moving” as ways to engage in indirect pathways. The paper concludes by presenting the implications, open questions and perspectives related to detouring and sustainable forms tourism and mobilities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

17 pages, 1627 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hitchhiking and the Production of Haptic Knowledge

by Jonathan Purkis and Patrick Laviolette

Humanities 2024, 13(5), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050116 - 11 Sep 2024

Viewed by 1481

Abstract

Overall, the cultural and artistic practices that continue to surround hitchhiking subcultures are largely untapped by serious scholastic research. This paper, deliberately non-linear, explores the haptic dimensions of hitchhiking. We use this mode of travel to make certain observations about our late-modern, or [...] Read more.

Overall, the cultural and artistic practices that continue to surround hitchhiking subcultures are largely untapped by serious scholastic research. This paper, deliberately non-linear, explores the haptic dimensions of hitchhiking. We use this mode of travel to make certain observations about our late-modern, or cosmopolitan age, as well as about some of the subcultures surrounding adventurous, competitive, and alternative transport. The piece is grounded in a form of duo-auto-ethnography, inspired by the experiences of two authors who are well-versed in this practice, but who have still not met in person. The paper argues that one of the main lessons to arise from the era of mass hitchhiking during the mid-twentieth century is that the types of sensory knowledge acquired and passed on by hitchhikers themselves are unique in their spatio-temporal potential for being imaginatively transformed into tools for shaping wider socio-political projects. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

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23 pages, 26785 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mordaith in Mallorca: Playing with Toy Tourism

by Hazel Andrews

Humanities 2024, 13(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020064 - 19 Apr 2024

Viewed by 1650

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately linked and outlines the ways [...] Read more.

This paper is an exploration of play in tourism. It is situated in an approach to play and toys informed by phenomenological perspectives and theoretical insights drawn from existential anthropology. It argues that tourism and play are intimately linked and outlines the ways in which connections between the two have been made. This paper focuses on a particular practice of play in travel—one that involves the use of a toy. Using the notion of ‘toy tourism’, I examine the ways in which touristic practices associated with play are brought into being in the moment of doing. The research is located in the resorts of Palmanova and Magaluf on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. I conducted the research using a doll from the Barbie Fashionista range, who I named Mordaith. I outline how and why Mordaith became my travel companion and the experience and events associated with my time with her in the resorts. This paper recounts the story of what happened when I brought about the play of toy tourism in Mallorca. It is an experimental approach that unfolds in the writing as much as in the gathering of information during fieldwork. I argue that what play is, and what a toy is, are neither fixed nor graspable objectivities. Rather, both toy and play, and, thus, toy tourism, emerge in my embodied imaginative understanding of what touristic and toy tourism practices are, as well as the actual embodied and emotional movements of employing a toy in practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

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17 pages, 4564 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Virtual Dwelling and the Phenomenology of Experience: Museum Encounters between Self and World

by Catherine Palmer

Humanities 2023, 12(6), 148; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060148 - 12 Dec 2023

Viewed by 2144

Abstract

This article provides an anthropologically derived philosophy of the nature of experience in relation to the lifeworld of virtual tourism. Framed around Martin Heidegger and Tim Ingold’s concept of dwelling, I interrogate what the implications of a virtually derived experience of tourism might [...] Read more.

This article provides an anthropologically derived philosophy of the nature of experience in relation to the lifeworld of virtual tourism. Framed around Martin Heidegger and Tim Ingold’s concept of dwelling, I interrogate what the implications of a virtually derived experience of tourism might be for how we understand what experience means and by extension the experience of being human-in-the-world; in effect, what it means to ‘experience’ virtual tourism. I illustrate my argument by focusing on extended reality (XR) technology within the context of three museums, since museum experiences are increasingly mediated by varying forms of XR. I am interested in what the virtual-tourism-world of a museum might reveal about the experience of being human, experience that I refer to as virtual dwelling. The museums are the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Louvre, both of which are located in Paris, France, and the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Complex in FL, USA. These examples provide a snapshot into the merging, blending or overlaying of the physical with the virtual. In other words, the inseparability of virtual, person and world. Drawing from Heidegger, I argue that the significance of technology does not lie in its instrumentality as a resource or as a means to an end. Its significance comes from its capacity to un-conceal or reveal a ‘real’ world of relations and intentions through which humans take power over reality. The nature of experience, as virtual dwelling revealed, concerns the relationship between humans and the natural world, understandings of cultural value and cultural wealth and notions of human exceptionalism. Ultimately, what technologically modified experiences of a virtual-tourism-world reveal is experience as virtual dwelling, experience of the embeddedness of being human-in-the-world. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

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13 pages, 9068 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Co-Creating Nature: Tourist Photography as a Creative Performance

by Katrín Anna Lund

Humanities 2023, 12(6), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060141 - 29 Nov 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2452

Abstract

This article examines tourism nature photography as a creative and sensual activity. Based on a collection of photographs gathered from tourists in the Strandir region in northwest Iceland, I demonstrate how photographing nature is a more-than-human practice in which nature has full agency. [...] Read more.

This article examines tourism nature photography as a creative and sensual activity. Based on a collection of photographs gathered from tourists in the Strandir region in northwest Iceland, I demonstrate how photographing nature is a more-than-human practice in which nature has full agency. Much has been written about tourist photography since John Urry theorised about the tourist gaze in the early 1990s; this view has been criticised, especially in the light of the performance turn in tourism studies.It has, for example, been noted that tourist photography is not just about the gazing tourist, but also about social relations that the surrounding landscape partly directs and stages. It has also been argued that, as photographing tourists, we become ‘concerned with the artistic production of ourselves’. Photography is thus a practise that is relational and sensual and that cannot be reduced to the seeing eye. However, whilst emphasising the tourist as a creative being, the surrounding landscape has been left out as a stage and its active agency ignored. I address the complex, more-than-human relations that emerge in the photographs collected in Strandir. I argue that the act of photographing, as a performative practice, is improvisational and co-creative, and the material surroundings have a direct and active agency. As has been demonstrated, photography communicates ‘not through the realist paradigm but through lyrical expressiveness’ and, thus, it may be argued that tourist photography is a poetic practice of making, as it weaves together the sensing self and the vital surroundings in the moving moment that the photograph captures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

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13 pages, 239 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Tourist Trap: Cuba as a Microcosm

by Michael Chanan

Humanities 2023, 12(5), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050091 - 29 Aug 2023

Viewed by 1479

Abstract

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who called tourism an industry “whose production is identical to its advertisement”, also wrote about the pitfalls of what he called the “tourism of the revolution” that flourished between the world wars in Soviet Russia. This essay combines both perspectives [...] Read more.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who called tourism an industry “whose production is identical to its advertisement”, also wrote about the pitfalls of what he called the “tourism of the revolution” that flourished between the world wars in Soviet Russia. This essay combines both perspectives in a discussion of the experience of making a film about ecology in Cuba in 2019, Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes, which includes a section on the tourist industry. Informed by the perspectives of autoethnography and phenomenology, the author explores the cognitive dissonance of the filmmaker’s ambiguous relationship, as a professional tourist, to the contradictions of the tourist industry as refracted through the small coastal town of Caibarién on the north coast where Hurricane Irma made landfall in 2017. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

12 pages, 286 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Questioning Walking Tourism from a Phenomenological Perspective: Epistemological and Methodological Innovations

by Chiara Rabbiosi and Sabrina Meneghello

Humanities 2023, 12(4), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040065 - 19 Jul 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2363

Abstract

This article aims to illuminate the overlooked entanglement of space, material practices, affects, and cognitive work emplaced in walking tourism. Walking as a tourism activity is generally practised in the open air away from crowded locations; therefore, it is being encouraged even more [...] Read more.

This article aims to illuminate the overlooked entanglement of space, material practices, affects, and cognitive work emplaced in walking tourism. Walking as a tourism activity is generally practised in the open air away from crowded locations; therefore, it is being encouraged even more in this (post)pandemic era than prior to the pandemic. While walking is often represented as a relatively easy activity in common promotional discourse, this article argues that it is much more complex. It revises the notion of tourist place performance, focusing on walking both as a tourist practice and as a research method that questions multi-sensory and emotional walker engagement. While extensively revisiting literature on walking tourism and the most novel methodological innovations, the article draws from a walking tourism experience undertaken as part of a student trip to demonstrate that the emotions that arise from walkers’ embodied encounters with living, as well as inanimate elements, extend beyond what might be included in a simple focus on landscape “sights”. In conclusion, it is suggested that a phenomenological approach to walking may prove particularly useful for understanding key issues associated with space, place, and tourism mobilities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

14 pages, 316 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Spaces and Places of the Tourism Encounter. On Re-Centring the Human in a More-Than/Non-Human World

by Edward Hákon Huijbens

Humanities 2023, 12(4), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040055 - 26 Jun 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2056

Abstract

This paper will revalue the phenomenological understandings of the tourism encounter, inspired by spatial theories of intentionality. With a growing body of theory delving into the relational realm and the ways in which the body and our actions are relationally enmeshed in networks [...] Read more.

This paper will revalue the phenomenological understandings of the tourism encounter, inspired by spatial theories of intentionality. With a growing body of theory delving into the relational realm and the ways in which the body and our actions are relationally enmeshed in networks of more-than/non-human entities, this paper seeks to recentre human intentionality as the core of the tourism encounter to better address its political nature and relevance. Whilst thereby critiquing some of the propositions of relational ontology, the paper is not about rejecting these, but augmenting them through a focus on the intention to care. Thereby, the paper will explore the ways in which the tourism encounter can be re-storied as one for making spaces and places of conviviality through people relating to each other and their surroundings with particular intent imbued with care. Valuing care and how it can be narrated helps to make space for a plurality of futures which can in turn break the deadlock of tourism being conceived either as mass/over- or alternative tourism. Both of these and more exist at the same time in the same place. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

15 pages, 306 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory

by Les Roberts

Humanities 2023, 12(3), 52; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030052 - 16 Jun 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2647

Abstract

Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the [...] Read more.

Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel with music memory and to map/unmap the travelling of music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to memorialise it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism)

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