Rural communities within the same heritage tourism destination often produce divergent development outcomes despite sharing identical institutional conditions. This paper examines this divergence through a comparative ethnographic study of three villages within the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages UNESCO World Heritage site in China, drawing on 4 years of embedded participant observation. Integrating Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness with Social Practice Theory and community agency, we identify the interpretive and practice-level mechanisms through which resource-constrained communities enact distinct development trajectories. The findings reveal three characteristic resourcefulness configurations, each shaped by a distinct internal organizational logic: a market-driven configuration of legitimacy-backed centralization; a resilience-driven configuration of progressive decentralization; and an externally constrained configuration of agency. The study advances ER theory by demonstrating that developmental divergence reflects not unequal resource endowments but unequal resourcefulness practice, and that the internal power architecture of collective ER translates shared structural conditions into divergent outcomes.
Night tourism is commonly examined through economic activity and entertainment consumption, while its emotional and introspective dimensions remain underexplored. This study investigates how nocturnal environments shape inner immersion and emotional processes that lead to peak experiences. Using analytic autoethnography, the research draws on reflective field notes and experiential observations from two contrasting destinations in Vietnam: the foggy mountain city of Da Lat and Hon Son Island. The findings reveal a sequential experiential process in which the night environment triggers inner immersion, this immersion releases emotional responses, and these emotions culminate in distinct peak experiences. Da Lat generates confrontational depth, where dense atmospheric conditions intensify memories and emotional reflection. Hon Son Island produces reconciliational breadth, where the open seascape fosters calmness and emotional balance. The study introduces the concept of inner immersion as a mediating mechanism and proposes a contextual framework explaining how different nocturnal environments shape transformative experiences.
Touristification increasingly shapes how cities are represented, experienced and governed, but little attention has been paid to how urban residents actively intervene in these processes through visual culture. This article examines how urban artists in Barcelona use visual and spatial practices to contest the symbolic and political effects of tourism. Drawing on qualitative interviews with urban artists, interviews with members of the public, and visual fieldwork, the analysis focuses on three forms of intervention: historical muralism and place-based memory work, political muralism addressing contemporary issues, and collective artistic practices aimed at reclaiming public space. The findings show how urban art may disrupt dominant tourist imaginaries, reinsert marginalised histories into the urban landscape, and create opportunities for moments of critical engagement among both residents and visitors. At the same time, these practices are shown to operate within the visual economies of tourism where their meanings remain contingent and open to appropriation. Rather than functioning as decorative or incidental elements, these practices may be understood as forms of counter-tourism infrastructure that mediate the tourist gaze, produce and preserve grassroots heritage and expose the contested politics of visibility in the tourist city. In doing so, the article contributes to urban-tourism research by demonstrating how visual culture enables situated and uneven forms of resistance within highly touristified urban environments, while remaining entangled within the dynamics of attention, consumption and circulation that characterise contemporary tourism.
Various animals are integral inhabitants of rural areas. Together with humans and other nonhuman entities, they constitute the countryside. Rural tourism development is reshaping these components and their interrelations; however, previous studies on tourism-driven rural restructuring have largely focussed on humans while paying limited attention to animals and their agency. Drawing on a relational perspective, this study adopts multispecies ethnography to explore how human-animal relations are restructured through touristification in Xidi and Hongcun villages, China. We suggest that animals, humans, and other nonhuman entities form dynamic relational networks within which animals exercise agency through their physical traits, biological needs, and social behaviours. These networks give rise to reconfigured, resistant, and foregrounded human-animal relations. We further contend that human-animal relations restructuring should be understood as a more-than-human process in which animals become entangled with other material and discursive components, collectively shaping human-animal relations rather than being always dominated by humans. We conclude by offering nuanced insights into tourism-induced rural restructuring and calling for the adoption of multispecies-friendly and inclusive tourism destination management policies.
The continuity of craft-based intangible cultural heritage faces increasing challenges as production practices shift and diversify in response to contemporary demand. Tourism is often used as potential to realise the continuity but often discussed as singularity. Based on Actor-Network Theory, this study examines how continuity is sustained within multiple production networks. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork, including interviews and observations, this study focuses on Huimo ((sic)(sic)), a traditional Chinese inkstick craft associated with Huizhou. The findings indicate that Huimo's continuity is maintained through five interwoven production networks: recording tools, artistic media, collectables, tourist souvenirs, and tourist cultural experiences. Huimo's materialities enable it to engage heterogeneous actors and shape these networks, sustaining diverse production realities that coexist and interact, rather than a unidirectional model of transmission. Crucially, the interplay among tourism and non-tourism related networks allows multiplicity itself to contribute to continuity. This relational approach advances understanding of heritage continuity sustained through materiality, network multiplicity, and inter-network coordination, underscoring their centrality in safeguarding strategies.
This study explores the paradox of climate change denial among Norwegian tourists, a group from a nation celebrated for environmental leadership yet ranked among the highest aviation emitters. Based on 30 qualitative interviews, the research identifies 2 key denial strategies: interpretative denial, which downplays climate change through personal benefits and symbolic actions, and implicatory denial, which manifests as psychological, moral, and political excuses such as apathy, helplessness, and optimism bias. These strategies are shaped by socio-cultural values like national pride, economic pragmatism, trust in technology, and care for nature, reflecting Norway's dual identity as an oil-dependent society and environmental advocate. The findings reveal that denial is not merely an individual psychological response, but a socially organized phenomenon influenced by neoliberal ideology. This study highlights the need for systemic interventions to address entrenched denial and foster sustainable tourism practices.
This paper advances a methodological argument for episodic tourism ethnography in multi-ethnic, politically sensitive field sites. Drawing from my fieldwork in Taman Negara, Malaysia, I explore how a tourism ethnographer moves across different communities and shifts between the tourist-facing and host-community arenas, all while managing insider-outsider roles. Within this broader reflection, the paper introduces "multi-layered shifting positionalities" as a heuristic for understanding how layered positionalities are organised through movement between two principal arenas in tourism ethnography, as well as the researcher's shifting positionality across different communities. The paper shows how uneven immersion, boundary-conscious routeing, and retreat-and-return rhythms can become deliberate strategies for sustaining access, protecting relationships and interpreting inter-group tensions without being absorbed into any single group's worldview. It also clarifies the ethical implications of such mobility, emphasising consent, role presentation, and long-term accountability. The paper advances tourism anthropology and critical qualitative methods by providing practical guidance for researchers in complex, plural and contested destinations.
Recent articles by Jos & eacute; L & oacute;pez-Gonz & aacute;lez and Michalis Nikolakakis contain extended readings of my work and the editors at TS have kindly invited me to respond. The academic standing of tourism research is central to this dialog. Tourism has become so ubiquitous that some argue we have entered a "post tourism" historical phase. According to this view, tourist studies as a special field is no longer needed if researchers in all other areas bear in mind that tourism may be a factor in their research. The two articles correctly suggest that my work stands in sharp contrast to this "post tourist" position. In this "Response" I continue to argue for an independent role for tourism research as the most accurate mirror we have for the larger changes that are currently taking place in society. And I argue that the older fields and disciplines-sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics-lack the theoretical and methodological torque to handle these changes. I further argue that the newer transdisciplinary paradigms-semiotics, structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, etc.-contain conceptual tools that can be adapted to the job ahead. Both Nikolakakis and L & oacute;pez-Gonz & aacute;lez have accurately grasped and explained these and several other aspects of my work.
This paper examines emerging forms of labour loss in the tourist city as a provisional incapacity to work otherwise. This phenomenon is associated with the breaking of promises regarding labour prospects in Barcelona, from the austerity period to the post-pandemic crisis. This examination presents three situations, set within the mundanity of resistance and adjustment, to reflect on distinct yet equally significant labour losses that ground the affective nature of the neoliberal tourist city: occupational illness among chambermaids, youth unemployment, and the cancellation of rickshaw tours. These negative events are experienced through ambivalent dispositions towards labour mobility, migration, and unionism, and through emerging affections of estrangement, belonging, unwillingness, and solidarity that reflect the politics of undoing the tourist city as seen through workers' experiences.
This article examines Tomorrowland as a global ritual system that generates intense emotional, symbolic, and identity-forming experiences among young international participants. Drawing on a 15-year multi-sited methodology integrating autoethnography, sensory ethnography, participant observation, and narrative fragments, the study conceptualises the festival as a mythic and affective infrastructure rather than a conventional entertainment event. The analysis identifies five interrelated mechanisms: (1) myth-making machinery that produces a shared symbolic universe; (2) emotional synchrony shaped through sensory intensities and collective effervescence; (3) ritualised participation enacted through micro-practices such as flag exchanges, countdowns, and synchronised movement; (4) cosmopolitan belonging that fosters transnational communitas; and (5) performative selfhood through which participants craft aspirational identities via affective and digital practices. The findings show that Tomorrowland operates as a secular cosmology that temporarily suspends everyday boundaries and enables participants to inhabit alternative modes of relationality, emotional openness, and global youth identity. More broadly, the study demonstrates how contemporary mega-festivals function as ritual infrastructures that reorganise affect, symbolism, and belonging within global youth culture.
Affect was regarded as a crucial foundation for relational authenticity in theme parks and tourism performance. However, authenticity was often treated as an individual emotional response and cognitive judgment triggered by external stimuli. In response to the affective turn's call to attend to the relational, non-representational, and political-economic dimensions of affect, this study integrates feeling, emotion, and discourse into a relational affect framework to examine how authenticity emerges from affective relations. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, it conducts a case study of the themed space Uniquely Henan within China's political-economic context. The findings show that authenticity is a dynamic result emergent from the multi-dimensional configuration of affective relations involving political economy, discourse, affective apparatuses, and the body. Driven by the flow and transformation of affective energy, this process redefines authenticity as "intensity authenticity," emphasizing the relational attributes and possibilities. This study contributes to extend the understanding of authenticity through relational affect, confirm the role of negative affect in authenticity, and bridge conceptual divides among affect-related terms.
This paper explores the neglected topic of subterranean tourism and seeks to distinguish the particular factors that continue to lure tourists to underground attractions. Through a literature review and research of numerous sites, we identify three key themes through which underground tourism has remained alluring, namely an enduring desire to visit formerly inaccessible or forbidden spaces, the vivid depictions of subterranean worlds stoked by literature and film, and desires to enter realms of sensory alterity. We subsequently detail our tours to four very different human-fashioned underground sites: Margate's mysterious Shell Grotto, West Wycombe's scandal-plagued 18th century Hellfire Caves, Charing Cross disused Jubilee Line tube station, and Drakeford Nuclear Bunker. Each example exemplifies the general themes we have identified and yet every site has its own peculiarities and allurements, as we discuss in our conclusion.
While tourism research has extensively explored host-guest dynamics and land-use conflicts, the interactions between tourists themselves remain underexamined despite their profound influence on experiences, destination image, and potential tensions. This study addresses this gap by investigating intra-tourist gaze, that is, how tourists observe, interpret, and influence one another, within the unique context of a European naturist resort, where nude and clothed visitors coexist. Drawing on 225 TripAdvisor reviews and autoethnographic reflections, the research reveals that conflicting gazes among tourist subgroups create a multilayered common gaze, shaped by cultural practices and destination management. In naturist settings, the absence of clothing intensifies the power of the gaze, transforming it into a visceral, embodied experience that can evoke discomfort, connection, or resistance. The presence of clothed tourists, for instance, disrupts the liberating ethos of naturism, reintroducing social scrutiny and challenging the destination's identity. These tensions highlight the fragility of shared spaces and the need for managers to proactively balance inclusivity with the preservation of core values. By framing intra-tourist interactions as a dynamic, co-productive process, this study underscores their critical role in shaping both individual satisfaction and the broader sustainability of tourist destinations.
Touristification has emerged as a defining feature of contemporary tourism development, often subordinating social and economic life to market-driven imperatives. This article examines how Indigenous community-based tourism (CBT) in the highly touristified Yucatan Peninsula articulate alternative tourism models grounded in collective organization and diversified livelihood strategies. Drawing on a qualitative multiple-case study based on semi-structured interviews with leaders of four Indigenous tourism cooperatives, the study analyzes governance arrangements, economic rationalities, and approaches to growth. Findings show that tourism is not conceived as a standalone development strategy, but as part of broader pluriactive livelihood systems. While the cooperatives advocate for culturally grounded and socially embedded forms of tourism, they do not categorically reject growth; rather, they frame it as socially negotiated and collectively bounded. The article contributes to debates on Indigenous tourism, social economy, and limits to growth by showing how alternative tourism models are pragmatically constructed within highly touristified regions.
Southeast Asian governments were forced to reposition their tourism markets as a result of border lockdowns brought on by the COVID-19 virus. We examine the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries’ marketing strategies intended to bolster their respective domestic tourism industries during the pandemic years of 2020–2022. This paper sketches three approaches that dominated the region at the time: building national community, strengthening sustainability, and creating a safe travel experience. In presenting these approaches we reconceptualize the region as one where domestic tourism is central. The conclusion assesses the conceptual implications of the study for the ASEAN region and also reflects on the future role of domestic tourism in Southeast Asia now that the borders are open.
Cute animals attract visitors. This study adopts a multispecies ethnographic approach to deconstruct the anthropocentric, unidirectional construction of "cuteness." It explores how giant pandas' cuteness shapes tourists' cognition and emotional experiences in wildlife tourism, while motivating a commitment to conservation. Cuteness, as a form of agency enacted by giant pandas, manifests their "agentic subject" status through their appearance, behavior, and interactions with tourists, which all shape tourist perceptions. Moreover, pandas' cuteness elicits emotions like tenderness, care and concern, prompting attention to both the welfare of individual pandas and species survival. The study thereby provides empirical support for the synergy between animal conservation and tourism value. Transcending anthropocentrism, this study frames "cuteness" as a form of animal agency. It uncovers the role of cuteness in structuring interspecies relationships, ultimately orienting toward a multispecies coexistence ethic that acknowledges species' intrinsic value.
Preschoolers, accompanied by their families, represent a highly under-researched demographic in dark heritage sites, due to the sensitive and challenging historical topics associated with these venues and exhibitions, as well as the ethical and methodological considerations pertinent to this unique visitor group. Based on a hermeneutic phenomenological methodological approach, this study utilized unobtrusive non-participatory observation and observational anecdotes to document the interactions of 29 families with 32 preschoolers at the Nanjing Massacre oil painting exhibition in a local Chinese art museum in the city of Changsha, China. The research findings reveal that preschoolers exhibited visceral cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions to this artwork. In comparison to their active engagement with the artwork, parents responded with a relatively passive approach, often avoiding discussions of challenging topics with them. This study provides some exploratory evidence for understanding preschoolers' experiences in dark tourism and offers insights for museums with dark heritage and similar public cultural settings to support preschooler families in a child-friendly manner.
