Tourism and transformation: negotiating metaphors, experiencing change

Abstract

The article introduces this special issue on tourism and transformation. After offering a brief review of the place and significance of ‘transformation’ in social sciences studies of tourism – from ‘impact studies’ to ethnographies of tourists and, more recently, ‘tourist media studies’ – we propose to take one step further and focus our attention on the performativity and reflexivity of ‘transformation’. Our main argument is that much may be gained analytically by considering how notions and experiences of transformation are addressed, negotiated and purposefully deployed in tourism contexts. We conclude with an outline of each of the contributions to this special issue, stressing that the collection re-opens the issue of transformation in tourism and provides new insights into how experiences-turned-metaphors and metaphors-turned-experiences influence both the travel experience and the development of theory.

Keywords:

• tourism
• transformation
• experience
• metaphors
• performativity
• reflexivity

Acknowledgements

This collection of articles stems from the International Symposium, ‘Sacred Tourism, Secular Pilgrimage: Travel and Transformation in the 21st Century’, held in Lisbon in July 2011 and hosted by the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) and the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), which was organised by Sofia Sampaio, Cyril Isnart, and Anna Fedele. We wish to thank all the other participants – Nelson Graburn, Ellen Badone, Maria Cardeira da Silva, Antonio Miguel Nogués-Pedregal, David Picard, Katia Boissevain, and Ema Pires – for their precious contribution to this stimulating meeting. Finally, special thanks are due to Nelson Graburn and Josef Ploner for their useful comments on this introduction.

Funding

We would like to acknowledge the financial support (FACC-FCT 2011-1-690) of the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (FCT), which enabled the realisation of the above-mentioned event. The present work was also supported by FCT, through CRIA's strategic project PEst-OE/SADG/UI4038/2014.