Tourism refers to travelling for leisure, recreational or business purposes. Tourists usually refer to people who travel and stay away from their normal environment or home with their own will to experience some kind of change and getting involved in leisure, business, religious or other purposes. Tourism is the world’s largest industry these days, which is a very crucial area as a lot of money is made by tourism. A lot of money is spent by various countries around the world, in order to ensure that tourism is running successfully. I strongly support the view presented by Nelson H. Graburn in “Secular Ritual: A general theory of Tourism” that tourism is best understood as a kind of ritual, where the special occasions of travel and leisure are opposite to daily routine life at work and home.
Tourism as a kind of Ritual
As there are rituals in life stages of an individual, for example: for birth, naming, marriage etc, where people are moved to special places having spatial features. Once the ritual begins, people enter the liminal state i.e. the state between the old state of affairs and the new state that is to come. After the rituals are performed, things are back to normal with the change that ritual subject has gained higher or new status.
Tourism is also a ritual of similar kind where:
Everybody spend time away from dull, boring and less exciting daily routine. People move to different places to enjoy and spend some quality time.
Special liminal spaces are created which are different from everyday spaces of working and living. The places can be spontaneous like the theme park or monument site or any natural or religious site.
The behavior of the tourists on visiting these places is normally different from their everyday behavior. People wear different clothes, experience different things with fun and enjoyment; their tourism activities define their time schedule. These different activities help in producing a different state of mind (excitement, wonder, fatigue, awe), which people enjoy a lot.
There is a state of transition when people return to their everyday life. People enjoy higher or new status like well travelled, consumer of enjoying experiences, or transition to a new or improved state of mind. Sometimes, travel may involve transition in all three types of senses; corporate, spiritual and social series of life changes.
With this in mind, Graburn provided the structure of tourism and ritual where he modeled modern times as the period of profane or work. The episodes of tourism are modeled as sacred. According to his model, point A defines the profane, point B as the entry point into the tourism or sacred life, point C defines the experience of tourism itself, Point D indicates the level where people go back to their less exciting life of work, point E is the next period of work life or profane. For e.g In 2014, I was having very hectic and monotonous work life (profane) and then I planned my trip to New York. I started preparing for the trip which was an entry point into the sacred life, I enjoyed my trip a lot and when I had to come back to my work life, I was little stubborn to not to end my vacation. After coming back I missed that excitement for a couple of days and then started with my work life again.
This alternation of profane and sacred states where the sequential process of leaving the ordinary to non-ordinary state where people enjoy exciting things, and then returning back to normal life of work is well put on by Graburn. Same scenario happens with each festival also where the transition takes place from normal profane life to exciting sacred life of enjoyment and then back to normal. I strongly support his opinion for this flow of time, as there are sensory changes involved in tourism, people enjoy different clothing, food, culture, settings and even smell and touch in case of beach or hill station holidays.
The ritual theory of tourism is also based on the process of reversal where people experience “push” and “pull” factors. Tourists leave their places as they want to get away from their normal schedule of daily life; they choose a particular place to visit as they believe they would experience something new there, different from what they cannot easily experience at their places. For example, people living in warm places tend to go to hill stations or chilly areas for their vacations, lower-middle-class people tend to go luxurious style of life in big hotels well-appointed rooms.
The experience of going to different places, the feeling of going on a vacation has significant effects on the life of any individual outside of the time spent in travelling. Before the vacations, people enjoy the rituals of preparations like booking hotels, flights, tourist guides, buying garments, planning, luggage etc. Getting into the right frame of mind, people enjoy the ritual of preparations before the actual trip. People also enjoy social arrangements before going away from home like leaving emergency numbers, someone to look after the house, garden and pet, collecting important letters or couriers and sometimes having parties to say goodbye to friends. The pleasure of anticipation weeks before the actual trip is very satisfactory. Similarly, the feelings after coming back from the vacations are equally important and filled with mixed ideas. For example, before my vacations to Niagara Falls, I enjoyed booking flights, hotels and doing other preparations. The Pleasure of anticipation was so nice. I enjoyed a lot there and after coming back also, I missed all the excitement and had mixed feelings.
Bibliography
Burns, Peter M. An Introduction to Tourism and Anthropology. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Timothy, Dallen J., and Daniel Olsen. Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys. New York: Routledge, 2006.
