Lifestyle travellers and self-development (original) (raw)

Lifestyle travellers: backpacker tourism as a style of living

Although the concept of lifestyle is gaining speed as a theoretical tool in the social sciences, it has not yet been used as a level of social analysis within the field of tourism. This presentation uses theory on lifestyle to conceptualise and subsequently empirically illustrate a tourism niche that has also received scant attention within the academe, that of lifestyle travellers. Lifestyle traveller is a social category representing individuals with extended engagement in corporeal mobility as a style of life, in this case through the mode of backpacking. I illustrate the practice of tourism as a lifestyle through empirical material drawn from ethnographic interviews carried out with backpackers in northern India and southern Thailand in 2007. The findings suggest that certain individuals move beyond the practice of backpacking as part of a transitional phase or time-out from ‘normal’ life and instead style their lives around an ongoing involvement with backpacker tourism. This practice of tourism as a lifestyle choice intersects with issues of identity and expressivity that come to the fore in late modernity. A theoretical implication of this research is that former related, but arguably outmoded, social categories within tourism, such as that of E. Cohen’s (1972) ‘drifter’, should be replaced by a contemporary description of lifestyle travellers.

The search for 'self' for lifestyle travellers

This thesis examines the search for self in the context of lifestyle travellers. It has been suggested that maintaining a coherent sense of self has become problematic in late modernity as the socially constructed notion of a ‘true self’ has come to be regarded as concrete, whilst choice has increasingly replaced obligation or tradition as a basis in defining selves. Issues of self have been noted as especially important in the context of adopted lifestyles, as lifestyle can be a means through which individuals seek coherence in their lives. Furthermore, travelling to ‘find one’s self’ has a lengthy tradition in popular literature that has also been reflected in tourism studies where research has been conducted into backpacker and traveller identities. Lifestyle travel is a post-traditional way of life wherein individuals are voluntarily exposed to an array of cultural praxes. Thus, the literatures on self, lifestyle and tourism point to lifestyle travel as a context where issues of self may be particularly relevant. Whilst there is a significant and growing body of research within tourism studies on backpackers, there is a dearth of information on individuals that travel as a lifestyle. Therefore, this thesis contributes to academic knowledge not only through its investigation into the search for self, but also by its conceptualisation of and empirical research into lifestyle travellers. With criteria for defining lifestyle travellers based on of a fluid combination of self-definition of travel as one’s lifestyle and multiple trips of approximately six months or more, twenty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out by the researcher with lifestyle travellers in northern Indian and southern Thailand from July through September 2007. In keeping with the paradigmatic ideals of interpretivism, emergent themes were identified from within the qualitative material including meanings that the lifestyle travellers attached to the search for self, surrounding issues of avoidance and seeking that influenced why they travelled as a lifestyle and their future travel intentions. Although there were multiple perspectives on how the search for self was conceived and approached, searching for self was voiced as a critical motivating factor for the majority of the lifestyle travellers. With a common view among most of the respondents of self as an internal object to be developed, many lifestyle travellers had been or were still on a Romantic modern quest of searching for their true self. Escapism, freedom and learning through challenge were identified as important themes surrounding the search for self, as lifestyle travellers described varying degrees of success in escaping their home societies and finding increased free space and time to learn about and challenge their ideas of self. Paradoxically, most of the lifestyle travellers sought to experience an inner self that dominant sociological views posit does not exist. The tension of searching for a unified sense of self in a world of relational selves is highlighted as not only problematic for the interviewees, but also for previous tourism studies that have premised their contributions on the existence of an inner self.

Chasing a myth? Searching for ‘self’ through lifestyle travel

Tourist Studies, 2010

"This paper problematises the concept of searching for self in the context of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings on the search for self from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are considered in light of opposing academic perspectives on self. The study reveals a theoretical tension that exists between lifestyle travellers who may seek a unified sense of self, underpinned by the essentialist position that one’s ‘true self’ exists, and contrasting widely held academic viewpoints that instead conceptualise embodied selves as relational and open to multiple performances. Keywords: self, searching, lifestyle travellers, essentialism, social construction."

Lifestyle travellers: Backpacking as a way of life

Annals of Tourism Research, 2011

"Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer an emic account of the practices, ideologies and social identity that characterise lifestyle travel as a distinctive subtype within backpacking. Departing from the drifter construct, which (re)constitutes this identity as socially deviant, the concept of lifestyle allows for a contemporary appraisal of these individuals’ patterns of meaningful consumption and wider insights into how ongoing mobility can lead to different ways of understanding identities and relating to place. Keywords: lifestyle consumption; backpacker; mobility; drifter; identity"

Taking Time and Making Journeys: Narratives on Self and the Other among Backpackers

2004

This work addresses the phenomenon of long-term, so-called ‘independent’ travelling, or backpacking, often to destinations described as the ‘third world’. It regards backpacker journeys as arenas for identity work, for expressing individuality and a ‘strong character’. Rather than merely being a parenthetic detour in time and space a backpacker’s trip to the tropics can be understood as a creative effort by the individual to regain the control over time and space thought to be lost in places travellers call home. Yet, at the same time, backpacking reproduces structures of power, through (re)constructing the image of a ‘primitive other’ upon which much of a successful ‘western identity’ rests. The success is, however, not only dependent upon inventing and encountering ‘primitive’ others but also upon the gender of the traveller as well as the competence in mastering manifestations of adventure and risk. The work argues, for instance, that stereotype expectations of femininity (and ma...

Researching backpacker tourism: changing narratives.

2009

""This paper interweaves my own personal narrative as a former backpacker with the way in which the phenomenon, and how it has been researched, has continued to evolve over recent years and so it takes the form of an explicitly reflective academic journey. In this it has some similarities to autoethnography where the writer metaphorically steps into the text. The paper has four main parts covering the last twenty or so years in approximately chronological order. The first part explores my own experiences on two major trips to Asia as a backpacker. The second part discusses the ‘academic tourist’ through the prism of several research trips to South East Asia as a researcher doing fieldwork (published as Hampton 1998; 2003; 2005, and discussed in Hamzah and Hampton 2007; Hampton and Hamzah, 2008). The third section explores what could be called way markers on the journey, that is, emerging issues as backpacker tourism (and perhaps its nature) changes over time. The paper concludes with reflections on the possible academic journey ahead, and makes some suggestions for further academic research concerning trends towards the massification but also the fragmentation of the backpacker market. Travelling, journeys, mobilities, personal stories and narrative, both grand and immediate: these are the metaphors that run through this paper. Key words: backpackers; economic development; tourism impacts; Less Developed Countries; India; Indonesia; Malaysia""