ABSTRACT
The politics of lifestyle is far from new, many associate the counterculture of the 1960s with the heyday of radical and experimental lifestyle. This chapter argues that as the political ideologies that influenced the 1960s have waned, lifestyle has become less overtly political but, counterintuitively, more central to politics. Giddens' category of 'Life Politics' describes well the contemporary relationship between lifestyles and the realm of politics. Life politics represents the attempt to create morally justifiable lifestyles, and to bridge the gap between the individual and social change, when we are no longer guided by traditions such as class or religion. Today the exhaustion of the political ideologies of liberalism and collectivism leaves these culture wars not as reflections of the political landscape but as a central aspect of it. Alternative tourism lifestyles revolve around moral distinctions premised on a search for selfhood, and in the absence of ideology these moral distinctions are at the expense of political reflection.
