Thinking About Tourists

This article is part of a larger project which, based on interviews with 35 Canadian upper-middle-class tourists, explores what the `touristic experience' means to these people. In this article, the author takes a preliminary look at the role of aesthetics in the process of meaning-making in which these tourists engage as part of their ongoing commitment to travel for pleasure. The author argues that the tourists' comments suggested that their appreciation of their travels was embedded in large part in a sensual, aesthetic perception of the experience. Through this aestheticization, the ordinary, the everyday, joined with the monumental to become the `extraordinary', the `special'. But there is an irony in the experiential aesthetic of these touristic travels, as it induced a state of both detachment and engagement. These tourists are not in a simple state of banal escape or vulgar consumption but a much more complex one, `enwrapped' in intense sensual pleasure.