{"title":"Serious leisure imaginaries: The construction of tourists, locals and localities in scuba diving tourism","authors":"Hans Tunestad","doi":"10.1177/14687976231193110","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Scuba diving is a global leisure activity today often undertaken as a form of tourism, counting millions of practitioners. Drawing on my experience of diving in different parts of the world, as well as on various forms of documentation, this article focuses on the structural characteristics of this form of purposeful tourism. As a sport, scuba diving follows certain routines and regulations and can thus be seen as a form of serious leisure; that is, leisure involving plans and demands. As a form of tourism, it is a particular way of imagining the world, based on a specific form of cartography and mass mediated images and stories of the vast blue and its inhabitants. My argument is that when undertaking scuba as a form of tourism, whether guiding or being guided, divers submit to the structures of both the sport and the touring. These then determine both how they dive from a technical point of view and how they come to think about diving and indeed, in a sense, the world. Divers are thus guided by ‘serious leisure imaginaries’. Altogether, scuba diving tourism here emerges as a transformative social force where tourists, locals and localities are constructed simultaneously in a dynamic interplay.","PeriodicalId":47199,"journal":{"name":"Tourist Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Tourist Studies","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687976231193110","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Scuba diving is a global leisure activity today often undertaken as a form of tourism, counting millions of practitioners. Drawing on my experience of diving in different parts of the world, as well as on various forms of documentation, this article focuses on the structural characteristics of this form of purposeful tourism. As a sport, scuba diving follows certain routines and regulations and can thus be seen as a form of serious leisure; that is, leisure involving plans and demands. As a form of tourism, it is a particular way of imagining the world, based on a specific form of cartography and mass mediated images and stories of the vast blue and its inhabitants. My argument is that when undertaking scuba as a form of tourism, whether guiding or being guided, divers submit to the structures of both the sport and the touring. These then determine both how they dive from a technical point of view and how they come to think about diving and indeed, in a sense, the world. Divers are thus guided by ‘serious leisure imaginaries’. Altogether, scuba diving tourism here emerges as a transformative social force where tourists, locals and localities are constructed simultaneously in a dynamic interplay.
期刊介绍:
Tourist Studies is a multi-disciplinary journal providing a platform for the development of critical perspectives on the nature of tourism as a social phenomenon through a qualitative lens. Theoretical and multi-disciplinary. Tourist Studies provides a critical social science approach to the study of the tourist and the structures which influence tourist behaviour and the production and reproduction of tourism. The journal examines the relationship between tourism and related fields of social inquiry. Tourism and tourist styles consumption are not only emblematic of many features of contemporary social change, such as mobility, restlessness, the search for authenticity and escape, but they are increasingly central to economic restructuring, globalization, the sociology of consumption and the aestheticization of everyday life. Tourist Studies analyzes these features of tourism from a multi-disciplinary perspective and seeks to evaluate, compare and integrate approaches to tourism from sociology, socio-psychology, leisure studies, cultural studies, geography and anthropology. Global Perspective. Tourist Studies takes a global perspective of tourism, widening and challenging the established views of tourism presented in current periodical literature. Tourist Studies includes: Theoretical analysis with a firm grounding in contemporary problems and issues in tourism studies, qualitative analyses of tourism and the tourist experience, reviews linking theory and policy, interviews with scholars at the forefront of their fields, review essays on particular fields or issues in the study of tourism, review of key texts, publications and visual media relating to tourism studies, and notes on conferences and other events of topical interest to the field of tourism studies.