ABSTRACT
To best echo its ethnographic nature, the details of a socially constructed grounded theory method investigation of attendee behaviour at community festivals are presented as a confessional tale. Ethnographic participation observation meshed with ideas of an 'immediate conscious experience approach' to observe actual leisure behaviour. Authentic experience is a term of knowledge, occurrence, and emotion. Van Gennep categorised religious rituals and profane festivals as pre-liminal ventures away from ordinary routine, liminal participation in the unusual, and post-liminal returns to normalcy. Traditional senses include sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but there are other stimuli including temperature, vibration, and balance. Addressing transformational experience at an event innovation forum, Rinehart informed the audience when senses are stimulated, synapses in the brain are affected by neurotransmitters that create emotional responses. Attendees with stimulated senses were seen to be social and creative, not passive spectators.
