Becoming Through Tourism: Imagination in practice

Abstract

This paper re-considers the role of tourism imaginaries which have emerged as a dominant paradigm in the study of tourism in recent years. The work examines the way in which they are seen as structuring devices for the enactment of touristic practices and argues that such an approach continues to facilitate the schism which erupted between the imagination and the world of the real wrought by the Enlightenment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork involving periods of participant observation on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, the paper demonstrates that not all of tourists’ experiences can be pre-imagined and, drawing on phenomenological and existential perspectives in anthropology, goes on to argue that understandings of touristic practices emerge in the doing and being of tourism.

Keywords

• Mallorca
• imaginaries
• being
• existential anthropology