This brief insight is an ode to, or a brief discussion of, those of us who consider physical stagnancy a hindrance to our life’s mission. I can give you numerous examples of travelers throughout history who’s concept of “home” was quite fleeting. The bedouins, the Irish travelers, the Roma gypsies, the pilgrims. The difference today is that the ability to migrate has become much more accessible to the larger (financially-and-not-so-financially-well-off) public, and that this vagrancy is significantly more individual than group-based.
I am devoting a small part of one of my thesis chapters to this question, and thought I should let this topic breathe a bit and hit your eyes through this week’s blog entry. This is devoted to all those people out there who see “tourism” as a useless word in the dictionary, where touring is life.
As John Urry stated that today there is a growth of “tourism reflexivity,”1 I would go further and argue that that this growth in reflexivity also translates itself into an increase in the self-reflexivity of the very narrative of mobility. This is directly linked to the general idea of mobility as an essential way of developing one’s identity. No longer is the individual simply thinking of themselves in the context of their locality, but the idea of touring, of traveling, of moving, becomes a set goal, one which develops along with the project of ‘the self.’ As the individual today creates their reality, so necessary in the self-project, the setting or place in which that future is planned is also becomes part of this project.
I bet your boots that you, or someone you know had, at one point, asked themselves: “In five years, will I be in Bangkok or Madrid? In Sydney or Reykjavik?” This is a question which is new to the age we are living in. No longer is tourism just locked in a vacation setting. Tourism has trickled into the lifestyles the individual choses to lead. Thus, our sense of self is now an actor within local, national, and international contexts. This is the state of tourism today. Chosen tourism can be a lifestyle.
On one hand, this “choice” to change one’s setting and to become mobile can be linked to a search for some sort of intense experience which is not available in one’s own locality, an all-sensory intensification with which the newness of another setting can provide. But is this simply linked with pleasure-seeking, me-first, hedonism? Campbell (1995) argues, that while traditional, pre-modern hedonism was concerned primarily with opulence, luxury, abundance, and revelry, contemporary hedonism is also achieved via ‘new’, exciting experience, which may involve danger, grief, hardship and fear.’2
Instead of identifying one’s immediate environment, or even the nation, as “my world,” mass media, new technology, and the internet, causes the individual to take ownership of the global environment, for better or for worse. This sort of mental mobility can either become a new choice in the world of consumerism, or can provide a sort of connection with every space the tourist travels through, and this connection changes this idea of “what I am seeing is something different,” into a holistic approach of “what I am seeing is something mine.” Thus, one can say that tourism today can be both experimental and existential, changing the idea of ‘the home’ as a certain base within one’s locality.
One of my respondents stated that “I can change the world only if I am able to change myself. Traveling helps me to gain insights about myself and reminds me life is not about fitting into a system, life is about knowing who I am.” A 23-year-old Croatian female stated that “by traveling to new places you find yourself in an environment that is new for you, situations that you are not used to and all that makes you see who you really are, you see yourself from a different point of view. You meet that new world and also by getting to know yourself better, you have a chance to improve.” I return to the idea of motivation here. These two respondent’s motivations are less about pleasure (recreational tourism, which, practiced in excess, can be linked to hedonism), and more about self-discovery. This, for them is the tourist attraction.
So what makes some of us move and the rest want to sit in place? With so many of us searching for meaning, insight, closeness, awakening, personal-growth, it is only natural that this search becomes extended out of one’s physical locality. For many, a train or plane ticket not just a ticket to get from one place to another, it’s a ticket to learn something, to experience something which will (most deffinitely) change one’s life.
1http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/urry-globalising-the-tourist-gaze.pdf
2(Gabrial and Lang, 1995: 72). (p. 161).
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