{"title":"The road worth taking, the life worth living, and the person worth being: Morality, authenticity and personhood in volunteer tourism and beyond","authors":"Netta Kahana","doi":"10.1177/14687976211019910","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article explores what volunteer tourists designate as moral in the practice of volunteering. Findings from in-depth interviews demonstrate how this experience’s moral worth relates to notions of moral personhood, rather than to responsibility for others. This article argues that in late modernity middle class volunteer tourists see the moral worth of the practice as resting on its capacity as an outlet for expression and cultivation of one’s true self. This emphasis reflects a contemporary ‘ethics of authenticity’, wherein being true to yourself is a moral principle and a contributing factor to a full existence. The article explores the ways this moral principle appears in interviewees’ wide moral perceptions and highlights the role of volunteer tourism in materializing these perceptions. By adding the moral layer to the quest for authenticity via tourism the article provides an insight into the role of tourism in peoples’ moral lives.","PeriodicalId":47199,"journal":{"name":"Tourist Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"509 - 525"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14687976211019910","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Tourist Studies","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687976211019910","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: 3
Abstract
This article explores what volunteer tourists designate as moral in the practice of volunteering. Findings from in-depth interviews demonstrate how this experience’s moral worth relates to notions of moral personhood, rather than to responsibility for others. This article argues that in late modernity middle class volunteer tourists see the moral worth of the practice as resting on its capacity as an outlet for expression and cultivation of one’s true self. This emphasis reflects a contemporary ‘ethics of authenticity’, wherein being true to yourself is a moral principle and a contributing factor to a full existence. The article explores the ways this moral principle appears in interviewees’ wide moral perceptions and highlights the role of volunteer tourism in materializing these perceptions. By adding the moral layer to the quest for authenticity via tourism the article provides an insight into the role of tourism in peoples’ moral lives.
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.