Overview

What happens when tourists scream with fear, shout with anger and frustration, weep with joy and delight, or even faint in the face of revealed beauty? How can certain sites affect some tourists so deeply that they require hospitalisation and psychiatric treatment? What are the inner contours of tourist experience and how does it relate to specific emotional cultures? What are the consequences of the emotional cultures of tourists upon destinations? How are differences in emotional culture mobilized and played out in the transnational contact zones of international tourism? While many books have engaged with the structural frames of tourist practice and experience, this is the first to deal with the emotional dimensions of tourism, travel and contact and the ways in which they can transform tourists, destinations and travel cultures through emotional engagements. The book brings together an international array of scholars from anthropology, psychiatry, history, cultural geography and critical tourism studies to explore how the movement to, and through, the realms of exotic people, wild natures, subliminal art, spirit worlds, metropolitan cities and sexualised 'others' variably provoke emotions, peak experiences, travel syndromes and inner dialogues. The authors show how tourism challenges us to engage with concepts of self, other, time, nature, sex, the body and death. Through a set of ethnographic and historic cases, they demonstrate that such engagements usually have little to do with the actual destination but rather, are deeply anchored in personal memories, repressed fears and desires, and the collective imaginaries of our societies.

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9781138261143

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Reviews

'An exploration of the role of emotion in tourism, of inner subjectivity, of how the tourist actually experiences the places and peoples visited. Tourism comes alive. A ground breaking contribution that will influence tourism studies for decades. ' Edward M Bruner, University of Illinois, USA; author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel 'Tourism is contemporary culture's most effective general mechanism for stamping socio-cultural meaning onto the human psyche. This collection is the first to document the emotional contours of different tourist itineraries. More than establishing a salient new direction for tourism research, these essays have a rich quality of immediacy and realism that every sightseer will recognize from their own experiences. These models of emotional connections of tourist subjectivity to the symbolic objects of travel desire are long overdue.' Dean MacCannell, Author of The Tourist (1976 and 1999) and The Ethics of Sightseeing (2011) 'Picard and Robinson have created yet another compelling addition to the academy for scholars of the touristic. It seems whenever they collaborate to produce an edited volume the result is careful, well researched, and valuable as a contribution to knowledge.' Annals of Tourism Research

Author Information

David Picard, is Senior Research Fellow, CRIA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal and Mike Robinson is Professor, Chair of Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK

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