ABSTRACT
Embodiment is crucial to tourist experience. To understand touristic experiences, one must attend to the sensing, feeling, enacting and doing that come with being in a new place. Perhaps ironically, however, some of the earliest theories of tourist experiences focused predominantly on visual elements. While Urry’s tourist gazes gave us a theoretical framework for understanding the experiential dimensions of the visual consumption of tourism, we should not consider this simply an oversight of the other elements of experience. Rather, the visual is both a part of the embodied experience and an important source of inspiration for many tourist pursuits that result in enriching and immersive place experiences. In fact, it is often the relationality of preconceived notions of place and the elements of embodied experience once on the ground that influence tourists’ perceptions of an authenticity. With this relationality in mind, this chapter presents an overview of the field to date with respect to key concepts and central debates regarding the relations embodiment, performance and tourist experience.
