Chapter 3: Embodiment

As this introductory quotation from an American creative tourist of Japanese calligraphy in Kyoto intimates, tourists do not experience the world outside their bodies and senses. Earlier, a similar point was made by Veijola and Jokinen (1994) who asserted that the body provides a perceptual point of fixation between ourselves and the material world. Rather than flâneurs or passive consumers, creative tourists are active producers of their own experiences. Production entails practices and performances and all practices require a set of skills and a moving body in order to achieve certain goals and maximise satisfaction. Mertena, Kaaristo, and Edensor (2022) note that ‘tourist practices mobilise embodied interactions with humans, non-humans and various materialities’ (p. 1). Although tourists do not experience the world (including cultural heritage) beyond their bodies, creative tourism studies lack a critical analysis of tourist bodies, practices and performances. This neglect is not unique to creative tourism studies, as Hannam and Knox (2010) remark, tourism researchers have largely ignored ‘the physical, social and cultural characteristics of human bodies and the experiences of living in, with and through such bodies’ (p. 57). There are, however, some exceptions; one of them is the work by Palmer and Andrews (2020), which explores holistically the interrelated and inseparable relationship between the body, sense and lifeworld – described as an experience of ‘sensuous dwelling’ (p. 2).