Spiritual tourism as a quest

Abstract

The academic literature on spiritual tourism is often limited to taxonomies of travel, and reasons for spiritually oriented tourism are analysed largely according to their economic, social and historical aspects. Despite the recent growth in interest in spiritually oriented tourism it has become increasingly apparent that to fully understand the practical implication for the field of spiritual tourism, a theoretical discussion on the discursive shift from a ‘religious’ to ‘spiritual’ experience of travel needs to be addressed. Although these concepts have only recently been touched upon in academic travel literature, they have been richly explored in literary travel-focused memoirs. It is the intention of this paper to conflate the theoretical discussion of spiritual tourism with personal accounts written by writers of literary travel memoirs. The first part of the paper will discuss the reasons for travelling for spiritual growth, as opposed to the traditional notion of religious pilgrimage supported by Michel Foucault's theory of the heterogeneous aspects of discursive formation. The second part of the paper looks into the existing typologies of spiritual tourism and compares them to Joseph Campbell's (1973) stages of a mythic quest. Lastly, the third part supports the academic discussion with brief excerpts from three literary spiritual travel memoirs.