Leisure Experience and Imagination

Holiday-makers experience the places where they are on holiday in different ways. Back in 1979, Erik Cohen introduced his `modes of tourist experience'. Cohen's approach was promising for better understanding `experiences' in a phenomenological way, but very little happened afterwards with his `modes' either in a theoretical or empirical way. This article reconsiders his theoretical model and reformulates the modes of experience, which have a basis in Alfred Schutz's lifeworld concept, and a theory on imagination and metaphors. The role imagination can play in free-time experiences is that it can provide a new synthesis between the self and the environment. The metaphorical context has a quality that can be referred to as `out-there-ness'. The concept of out-there-ness, instead of Cohen's `centre-out-there', can be well applied to leisure situations where no centres are relevant, but only orientations and metaphorical references.

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