Notes Towards a Phenomenological Anthropology of Travel and Tourism

Andrews, H and Roberts, L (2025) Notes Towards a Phenomenological Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. Humanities, 14 (6).

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Abstract

This paper is an introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on ‘The Phenomenology of Travel and Tourism’. It is made up of four sections, the first two of which provide the main focus of discussion. We start by considering the idea of travel ‘in comfort’, which, as we show, has been historically bound up with cultures of the mobile virtual gaze. Comfort, by this reckoning, reflects a phenomenological disposition whereby the act of gazing at an object of spectacle is understood not in purely visual terms but as a spatial and somatic prefiguring of that object as an object of spectacle. A phenomenology of comfort, we argue, steers consideration towards the way forms of travel or tourism practice reflect embodied or disembodied modes of engagement with the world. This line of enquiry brings with it the need for more fine-grained analyses of questions of experience, which is picked up and developed in the second section. Here, we examine some of the important and foundational work that has helped push forward scholarship oriented towards the development of a phenomenological anthropology of travel and tourism experiences. Accordingly, a key aim of this paper, and of the Special Issue it provides the introduction to, is to push further and more resolutely towards these ends. The third section is an overview of the nine Special Issue contributions. The paper ends with Kay Ryan’s short poem, ‘The Niagara River’, a quietly foreboding meditation on the hazards of travelling in too much comfort and of reducing the world to little more than ‘changing scenes along the shore’, all the while remaining blind to what awaits downstream.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) > G149 Travel. Voyages and travels (General) > G154.9 Travel and state. Tourism
Divisions:	Liverpool Business School
Publisher:	MDPI
Date of acceptance:	30 May 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	6 June 2025
Date Deposited:	06 Jun 2025 14:26
Last Modified:	06 Jun 2025 14:30
DOI or ID number:	10.3390/h14060119
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26544

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