Michael A. Di Giovine

David Picard

The Seductions of Pilgrimage explores the simultaneously attractive and repellent, beguiling and alluring forms of seduction in pilgrimage. It focuses on the varied discursive, imaginative, and practical mechanisms of seduction that draw individual pilgrims to a pilgrimage site; the objects, places, and paradigms that pilgrims leave behind as they embark on their hyper-meaningful travel experience; and the often unforeseen elements that lead pilgrims off their desired course. Presenting the first comprehensive study of the role of seduction on individual pilgrims in the study of pilgrimage and tourism, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, cultural geography, tourism, heritage, and religious studies.

Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition

The Seductions of Pilgrimage

Mike Robinson

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.

Tourism, Affect and Transformation

Emotion in Motion

Sonja Buchberger

The book provides unique insights into the culture of computer-mediated hospitality and how this has begun to transform contemporary tourism and travel practice. Focusing on Couchsurfing.org, one of the largest online hospitality communities worldwide, the authors explore how social relations, intimacy and trust are built in the online environment and then extended into the offline contexts of actual tourism and travel. Being active couchsurfers themselves, the authors scrutinise the candid claim by much of the online hospitality community that couchsurfing creates a »better world«. The book is key reading for anyone interested in how computer mediated communication is changing contemporary forms of contact, travel and hospitality, and the kinds of cosmopolitism it brings into being. Authors: David Picard, Sonja Buchberger, Jennie Germann Molz, Dennis Zuev, De-Jung Chen, Bernard Schéou, Jun-E Tan, Paula Bialski and Nelson Graburn.

Can Tourism Make a Better World?

Couchsurfing Cosmopolitanisms

Why do tourists take photos of certain things and not of others? Why do tourists take photos at all? How do photos build places, how do they change and shape lives? An interdisciplinary team of contributors from across the globe explore such questions as they examine the relationships between photography and tourism and tourists.

Tourism, Tourists and Photography

The Framed World

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

Cultivating the Human Garden

Tourism, Magic and Modernity

This edied work explores the linkages between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, this book examines the festivals as ways of responding to various forms of crisis.

Remaking Worlds

Festivals, Tourism and Social Change

Photographs create visual narratives of experiences, places, peoples and objects that collectively and individually comprise the tourist gaze. Photography is acknowledged as having an important role in the determining of places and spaces, the construction and re-construction of identities, and the invention and re-invention of histories. So why do tourists take photos of certain things and not of others? Why do tourists take photos at all? How do photos build places, how do they change and shape lives? An interdisciplinary team of contributors from across the globe explore such questions as they examine the relationships between photography and tourism and tourists.

David Picard

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