ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 situates the book’s analytical and theoretical thesis within debates on mobilities design and mobilities justice to discuss the nature of well-being in contexts of hospitality. This involves the coexistence of individual and collective tourist pursuits as a form of pilgrimage to filmed sites, but also the constitutive importance of cross-cultural encounters in the collective flourishing of communities hosting cinematic tourists. Following Chapter 1, this chapter outlines the challenges posed by cinematically-inspired development. Whereas it is recognised that cinematic tourism is a form of pilgrimage to foreign and home lands, the term is replaced with the Japanese notion of ‘contents tourism’. Tracing its origins in an Eastern theosophy (the ancient I Ching Book of Changes) that transcends particular religious canons and embraces holism, contents tourism is developed in the study into a way of giving and accepting hospitality, but also perceiving one’s natural, social and cultural environment, and being in it with animate and inanimate others. This ‘relational ontology’ allows for an in-depth study of the ways contemporary tourist industries and localities create the atmosphere of the tourist destination – that is, the ways place is constructed in multi-sensory ways and experienced by those who inhabit/visit it. It is stressed that localities participate in the creation of atmospheres with their hospitable/inhospitable behaviour, but also their native ways of knowing and acting. This version of contents tourism allows scholars to uncover a profound symmetry (rather than homology) between design creativity in organisational cultures of consumption and communal enactments of protest against them.
