ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 consolidates the scholarly foundations of researching and organising case studies. It presents the notion of contents tourism as both a powerful interpretative tool in scholarly research and an unconscious lay activity that needs to be brought to discourse (become conscious): authors produce the worlds they study, in interaction with their informants. These assume different mediated forms in texts, technologies, images, and, above all, feelings. This processual/fluid way of knowing intertwines the emergence of knowledge (episteme) with ontology, producing ‘epistemontology’. Subsequently, the argument that atmospheric creativity has a strong pre-cognitive, affective ‘life’ is applied to all case studies. This is achieved with the help of non-representational theory, which attends to the significance of emotions, actor-network theory, which stresses that technological texts (e.g. interviews, recordings of events) connect humans, machines and nature in interpretations of concrete events, and complex adaptive systems theory, which stresses the ways human agency has become entangled in complex systems involving technologies, natural and landscape ecologies.

Such entanglements of things, animals, environments and technologies place human beings in a ‘cultural economy’ that exceeds the rationale of monetarisation (e.g. giving and taking money from tourists), because it involves conceptions of being hospitable with (caring for) one’s cultural and natural habitats. Considering I Ching as the ancient counterpart of epistemontology, the chapter argues that atmospheres are constantly (re)constituted with the help of scenarios of movement for tourists and locals (their ‘scriptural basis’), their structures and materialities (‘architectonics’), and invisible perimeters, boundaries and borders, within which all subjects move (the ‘kinesphere’/‘kinesfield’).