Tourism as a ‘Moment of Being

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to gather together a number of conceptual or theoretical points drawn from the wider social anthropological discourse on the nature of experience. It advances understandings of the anthropology of experience through the medium of tourism. In turn it also illuminates understandings of the nature of tourism experiences. The article is largely a theoretical piece that is illustrated with details drawn from an ethnographic study of two charter tourism resorts—Palmanova and Magaluf—in Mallorca. Therefore, in an attempt to elucidate more carefully what experience means, it draws on the discussions of ‘experience’ in the wider anthropological literature, most notably the existential anthropology of Michael Jackson (2005) and The nthropology of Experience (Turner and Bruner 1986), and makes links to the writings of Pierre Bourdieu on the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, bringing them to bear on the subject of tourism. Keywords: experience, Erlebnis, Erfahrung, habitus, identity, Mallorca, tourists