The Hitchhiker as Bricoleur Anthropologist

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Doing Things Differently: Opening Cracks in the Tourism System

In this essay, Michael explores cracks in the tourism system, such as moments, activities, and spaces in which relations of domination are broken and other relations are created to assert new ways of doing, moving, encountering and dwelling

Methodological bricolage: A journey on the road less traveled in tourism studies

This article, by exploring an approach to research, argues a case for bricolage as an acceptable approach in tourism research. Tourism researchers thinking about utilizing methodological bricolage as a research approach have little scholarly literature to draw from; therefore, it remains relatively underused and misunderstood as a means of qualitative inquiry. This article presents an account of getting to grips with a multiparadigmatic methodological bricolage as a way of understanding the world of backpacking and its inhabitants, who actively constitute, distinguish, and label themselves as backpackers. It is an approach that delivered a coherent conceptual scaffold, producing a rich, but always partial, understanding of a social world, those who inhabit it, and how they sustain it. It doing so, the research design adds to methodological innovation and diversification in tourism research

Post-Colonial Macau: hope and despair in a World Centre of Tourism and Leisure

The expansion of casino concessions and subsequent growth of employment and gross domestic product (GDP) per Capita in Macau after the 1999 handover from Portugal created an illusion of prosperity in a post-colonial territory of less than 30 sq. km. A Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is the only place in China where adults can legally gamble in casinos. This paper, using interviews with local residents, argues that the imagined category of “World Centre of Tourism and Leisure” coined by local authorities’ masks an illicit occult economy. The paper argues that the miraculous swiftness of GDP per capital, employment and budget surplus growth, was a result of a new post-colonial elite looking backwards into its colonial past. The paper argues that while the “World Centre of Tourism and Leisure” is a political construct and key hegemonic project to keep citizens in a hyper-real world of simulacra and control, it is at the cost of everyday gossip, caution, self-censorship and demoralization

Faith Manifest: Spiritual and Mindfulness Tourism in Chiang Mai, Thailand

From books to movies, the media is now flush with spiritual and wellness tourists related images, films and fiction (which are primarily produced in the West) about South East Asia. Combined with the positive effects of spiritual practices, greater numbers of tourists are travelling to South East Asia for mindfulness, yoga, and other spiritual pursuits. Influenced by popular mass media coverage, such as Hollywood movies and literary bestsellers like Eat Pray Love (2006) and tourism imaginaries about particular peoples and places, spiritual tourists are visiting South East Asia in increasing numbers. They travel to learn about and practice mindfulness, so as to recharge their batteries, achieve spiritual fulfillment, enhance their spiritual well-being and find a true self. However there is a notable lack of scholarly work around the nature and outcomes of spiritual tourism in the region. Owing to its Buddhist temples, cultural heritage, religious history, infrastructure and perceived safety, Chiang Mai in Thailand, in particular, has become a major spiritual tourism destination. Based on participant observation including informal conversations, and 10 semi-structured interviews in Chiang Mai during two summers in 2016 and 2018, our research explored why Western tourists travel to Chiang Mai to engage in mindfulness practices regardless of their religious affiliation. We explored their faith in their spiritual practice in Chiang Mai. Rather than the faith implied in religion, this faith refers to trust or confidence in something. Interestingly, none of the informants identified themselves as Buddhist even though many had practiced Buddhist mindfulness for years. They had faith that mindfulness would resolve problems, such as depression and anxiety, following life events such as divorces, deaths in family, drug abuse, or at least help free them from worries. They noted that mindfulness practices were a constructive means of dealing with negative life events. This study found that the informants sought to embed mindfulness and other spiritual practices into the fabric of their everyday life. Their faith in mindfulness led them to a destination where Buddhist heritage, history and culture are concentrated but also consumed. Whilst discussing the preliminary findings through a critical lens, the research recommends future research pathways

Attendee Motivations at an International Wine Festival in China

Wine festival research has primarily focused on tourism potential and economic impact in western wine destinations, with few studies seeking to understand what motivates those to attend a festival in a “non-traditional” wine destination. An on-site survey study (N = 366) was conducted at the 2012 Dalian International Wine and Dine Festival, China. Factor analysis suggests a unique motivational factor structure with four motivational components identified amongst festival attendees. They were wine festival; where the festival event itself is a primary motive, recover equilibrium at a novel event, family and known group togetherness and cultural exploration through interaction/socialization. An independent t-test and One-way ANOVA tests found statistically significant motivational variances between attendees based on gender, age, education, income level and employment status. These findings offer important implications for festival and event organizations that have an interest in developing and organizing wine festivals in China, and attracting Chinese mainland tourists to overseas wine festivals

The miracle of the road: The affective atmospheres of Europe’s roads

A billion operating cars, with people are on the road around 1.1h a day has spawned an emergent, complex system of roads and motorways no longer designed for people. The private car promised to create a system of freedom and liberation with Simmel speaking about ‘the miracle of the road.” Instead, for many commentators, it created car-dependent cultures with banal infrastructural spaces of car parks, filling stations and repair garages to service motorways that structure and produce unsustainable automobilities. These materialities, or infrastructural spaces, however, have also come to influence different mobilities, based on differing socio-cultural-political readings of infrastructure. Inspired by cultural geography, spatial-cultural theory and affective ontologies in the context of research on mobilities, this largely autoethnographic presentation challenges the current thinking about the organization of movement by exploring the embodied mobility of hitchhiking and the corporeal experiences of being a passenger in trucks, buses, and cars on Europe’s roads and motorways. As a hitchhiker, I hope to tell a story about mobilities of friction and flow which both challenges and reaffirms (auto)mobile materialities and identities and disrupts thinking on car-dependent cultures. I argue that hitchhikers are not passive bodies in cars or motorways ramps and service stations, but a mobility culture with its own politics associated with innovative appropriations of existing materialities, to work below the radar, to modify the abstract rhythms of motorways