Cultivated pursuits

Metempsychosis and Metensomatosis were concepts introduced in two papers on tourism behaviour published a decade ago (Seaton 2001, 2002). The first paper adapted and adopted the word metempsychosis, a concept originally found in classical myth and ancient religion, to describe a form of cultural tourism in which travellers repeated itineraries made by significant historical others from within their own culture. Such repetitive journeys were taken by people as individual travellers or within packaged tours. Examples included journeys and tours in which subjects followed in the footsteps of James Boswell and Dr Johnson in the Hebrides, William Cobbett on his round-Britain tours, Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, and many other prestigious travellers in history. The second paper extended the notion of ritual repetition more radically. It proposed that alltourism forms, but cultural tourism especially, could be viewed as repeat journeys, but ones made not just in the footsteps of a single significant other, but of many others, some of whom might be significant, while others might be generalised. The label it gave to imitation of such multiple role models was metensomatosis, another adapted concept from ancient myth and religion. This chapter sketches out the evolution of the two concepts and illustrates them from twocultural tourism case histories

Archaeology · Geography · Sociology · Tourism · Military history and social perspectives · Psychology of Social Influence · Sociology and Cultural Identity Studies