ABSTRACT
Tourism, like many areas of academic endeavour, draws upon or appropriates existing concepts and theories residing in established disciplines. It does in part as a basis for attempting to explain the practice of tourism and in part to enhance the academic integrity of the study of tourism. The danger exists, however, original concepts become overused, diluted or, in a sense, evolve into a phenomenon themselves as opposed to being an explanation of a phenomenon. Arguably, this is the case with liminality, a concept that is widely and, perhaps, indiscriminately applied in the tourism context. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to consider broadly whether tourist experiences can be referred to as liminal, whether the term liminoid is more appropriate, or whether the original meaning of both has been lost in translation into tourism studies. To do so, the chapter first reviews briefly the origins and development of the concept of liminality, as well as the distinction between the terms liminal and liminoid. It then goes on to discuss the contribution of liminality to understanding the tourist experience, exploring the concept in the context of transformations in the nature, significance and practice of tourism as a form of consumption, as well as considering the extent to which tourist places and tourists’ experience of them may be described or explained as liminal.
