‘FEEL IT’: moral cosmopolitans and the politics of the sensed in tourism

ABSTRACT

Interaction is a matter of concern in all human activities. So far, this basic principle in tourism has been largely analysed and promoted through the perspective of ‘the gaze’. In line with a long North-Atlantic tradition that values vision over all the other senses, tourists are too often stereotyped as gazing subjects. In this article, I present tourists in a more encompassing way: as sensing subjects. I contend that the integration of virtues such as morality and cosmopolitanism in tourism derives considerably from the deliberate inclusion of the sensory in tourism activity. These are virtues best authenticated to the tourists through multisensorial incorporation, rather than just through detached gaze. I address the importance of multisensorial experience in the constitution of tourists’ cosmopolitan selves in moral terms by drawing on my own ethnographic research in the Mozambican village of Canhane.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• sensory
• cosmopolitan
• embodiment
• community development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

João Afonso Baptista is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology in the University of Hamburg and at the Institute of Social Sciences in the University of Lisbon.

Notes

1. The emphasis on the indefinite article ‘a’ serves to reply to one reviewer who noted that one does not need immediate sensatory experience to engage in moral acts. As the reviewer wrote, ‘I can approach morality via reading’. Indeed, I do not argue against this claim. But in this article, I focus on a different type of relationship with things and people, a relationship not so much mediated by text books, photos, or narratives, but characterised by corporeal proximity and immediacy.

2. By mentioning ‘perspectival sensing’, I expand on Paolo Favero’s (2007, p. 57) concept of ‘perspectival seeing’, and thus extend the perspective of tourist selectivity beyond vision.

3. It is now well known that since the Enlightenment, ‘difference became the primary organizing principle’ of perception, action, and culture (Langerman, 2012, p. 177).