ABSTRACT
Introduction We began this book by observing the persistent presence of the Other in contemporary consumption and everyday life and noted that the dense webs of corporeal, imaginative and virtual mobilities that weave together geographically distant parts of the globe in some ways have transformed most of us into ‘everyday cosmopolitans’ (Beck, 2006). Thus, Beck has argued that the increased day-today experience of the global through consumption, media, and so on produces a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’, which, whether it is reflexive or not, ‘transforms the experiential spheres of life worlds enforcing a globalization of emotions and empathy’ (Beck, 2004: 151-2). In continuation of this, we may argue that tourist performances and experiences are perhaps the single most significant vehicle for the emergence of cosmopolitan orientations in the midst of the everyday. It is when performing tourism that we are most likely to achieve a first-hand experience of other places, people and cultures and experience our connectedness with (or detachment from) these. In this way, tourism is an important part of the ways in which people position themselves in – and as part of – the world.
