Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society

Description

This book investigates spiritual tourism - tourism characterised by an intentional search for spiritual benefit - from a contemporary religious studies perspective. Using field research gathered from spiritual tourism locations in Asia and Europe, and utilizing contemporary scholarship on practices concerned with meaning and identity, it explores the phenomena of journeys that are taken for self transformation, tracing the history of transformative ideas in Western cultures of travel, and including the modes in which the travel experience has been communicated. Spiritual Tourism provides an important opportunity to comment on the role of tourism in contemporary conceptions of spirituality and spiritual practice in Western society.

Alex Norman is Lecturer, Tutor and Researcher at the Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney, Australia. He is also Co-editor of the journal Literature and Aesthetics.

Norman has provided the service of combining sources on anthropology, leisure and tourism in pursuit of an area in the study of religion that has hitherto received insufficient attention. Spiritual Tourism will undoubtedly be of interest to scholars who wish to pursue the themes of travel and material culture in religion, as well as students who are studying research methods. -- George D. Chryssides, York St John University, UK * Fieldwork in Religion *