Emotion in Motion

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.

David Picard, is Senior Research Fellow, CRIA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal and Mike Robinson is Professor, Chair of Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK

1: Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys; 2: The Emotional Tourist; I: Emotions and Inner Journeys; I 3: The Dark is on the Inside: The honne of Japanese Exploratory Tourists; I 4: Seeking the Existential Moment; I 5: Affect and Moral Transformations in Young Volunteer Tourists; I 6: Overwhelmed by Divinity in Jerusalem; I 7: Passionate Movements: Emotional and Social Dynamics of Padre Pio Pilgrims; II: The Emotions of Attractions; II 8: Religious Devotion and Sublime Experience during the Procession of the Romería in El Rocío, Spain; II 9: Emotional Memory Formation at Former Nazi Concentration Camp Sites; II 10: World War II Tourism in France; II 11: Tourist Attractions as Sites of Suicide: The Case of Beachy Head, England; II 12: The Affective Life of the Spa; III: Institutionalizing Emotions in Tourism; III 13: 'I'm sorry I got emotional': 'Real' Work and 'Real' Men at the Canadian Cottage; III 14: Romancing the Colonial on Ilha de Mozambique; III 15: Dancing Tourists: Tourism, Party and Seduction in Cuba 1; III 16: On Edge in an Impossible Paradise