Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards offer a material record of how travel can be represented when physical location, pictured place, relational attachment and public legibility do not fully coincide. Drawing on a selected corpus from the Bishop postcard archive at Vassar College, this article develops the concept of the interstitial imagination of travel to describe representational work generated under such conditions. The concept concerns not non-coincidence in itself, but structured non-coincidence under unequal conditions of public legibility. Close readings show how ordinary tourism vocabulary can compress politically and socially dense conditions of mobility; how arrival, dwelling, recognition and belonging remain analytically distinct even when a traveller has established a durable life in a place; and how postcard signs may remain publicly available while acquiring relational force that is unevenly accessible to different readers. These relations become observable because received images, inscription, correction, emphasis and address remain materially associated within particular objects. Bishop’s practice therefore does not establish the postcard as an exceptional medium or a simple counter-discourse to tourist representation. It shows how agency works on already circulating representations of place, and how travel may culminate in arrival without resolving how belonging can be represented or publicly recognised.
This study explores the rise and fall of tourism along the Spanish-Portuguese border. The context of a debordering and severely peripheralising area is essential to understand the diverse destination-based evolution of tourism. Butler’s resort-based TALC model is applied to rural areas. The model’s applicability is limited to specific destinations as complex hierarchical multi-scalar decision-making and powerful supra-local market actors explain deviant place-specific biographies. Cultural and natural heritage and man-made attractions generate tourism in ways that result from local combinations of external market forces, extra-local institutional interventions and community involvement.
Employing Interaction Ritual Chains theory, this study examines how museum tourism reinforces collective national identity through mutual focus and emotional entrainment among visitors within shared ritual settings, and traces its post-visit continuity and sedimentation at the individual level. Interviews with 45 visitors and longitudinal tracking of 20 participants reveal that ritual elements generate collective identity products: emotional energy, group solidarity, sacred symbols, and moral outrage. These products translate into sustained behavioral tendencies, solidify into cognitive schemas, and deepen emotional attachment. The study identifies a situation-collective-individual pathway of identity reinforcement, demonstrating how museum tourism systematically shapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, reinforcing national identity at the collective level while enabling its sustained sedimentation at the individual level.
Aging in India is moving away from the discourses of withdrawal and otherworldliness to new forms of social engagement. Older adults, a growing demographic figure in the country, now seek care well beyond conventional institutions where active tourism has become one such site. Travel offers them cross-cultural belongingness, exposure to the pace of life elsewhere and the pleasures of leisured mobility, all of which reshape what active aging and self-care mean within India’s fragmented structures of care. Exploring this, the paper draws on the lived experiences of upper-middle class older tourists in Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, whose time, resources and class position allow them to enter the global tourism industry as consumers and for whom travel doubles as a performance of class identity and a means of remaking domestic roles. Yet their consumerist agency does not arise in a vacuum. It emerges from changing kinship relations and the out-migration of adult children, which together produce an embodied experience of loneliness. The paper therefore proposes tourism in later life as an adaptive strategy, one in which the older adults travel not simply for leisure but to repair the social worlds that migration and shifting kinship relationships have hollowed out.
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.
