ABSTRACT
In orthodox views of tourism, commentators stress that tourism experiences differ from everyday life: different places are experienced, different people(s) are gazed upon, tourists get to know different ways of doing things, and so on. To do tourism, then, in these circumstances is to encounter a series of changes from the ordinary but several things
change in the course of the making and consumption of a tourism experience. For instance, everyday structures such as strict school and workplace time regimes or commuter timetables might be exchanged for structures and orderings that are potentially experienced as liberating and empowering, including journeys, tours and events (e.g. Franklin 2004). During such journeys, tours and events, everyday structures might be temporarily suspended or transformed into narratives where myth, history and the future are seductively conflated. Theme parks, for example, transcend borders between reality and fiction, with the result that the distant is conjured right in front of one’s eyes and in effect the local becomes an exotic experience. In this way, tourism studies offer the possibility to reflect on the ontological status of categories and concepts whose meaning we often take for granted. Within philosophy, ontology is the study of being or of existence, and it involves the study of different conceptions and constructions of reality. For instance, what is ‘nature’, ‘environment’, ‘local’ or ‘global’? How do these concepts relate to each other, to everyday life, to the economy or to the ways in which we understand ourselves in the world? This chapter will highlight and examine such an instance of ontological ambiguity; that is, how nature and the environment become disembedded from place-bound contexts and what consequences such a dislocation may have.
