Personal and Social Experiences

Evidently, Mossberg (2003) and Larsen (2007) indicate that experiences are considered to be highly individual and personal, because each individual has a unique precondition for experiencing and processing experiences in a certain

62 See section 7.2.2 Adventure

way, and thus the outcome becomes unique and personal. As a consequence, the increasing influence of the tourists themselves and the decreasing influence of the tourist organisations in shaping the experiences obtained are brought to attention, and the position taken by Mossberg (2003) and Larsen (2007) is that experience is to a large extent individual and personal, as indicated by the above emphasis on the internal construction of an experience. The internally based outset for tourist experiences is hereby underlined, which again links the two notions of experience via the accumulated experience in notion B and establishes their interdependence, particularly in the light of Pearce’s travel career approach⁶³ in which one shapes the other.

On the other hand, Vetner & Jantzen (2007) imply a social as well as an individual dimension to the experience. British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) adopts a view that the individual may not be highly independent in terms of thoughts and opinions, because all individuals are affected by social environments and institutions that allow them to think and behave in specific ways, as was also suggested by Maffesoli’s (1996) contention of individuals as tribe members.⁶⁴ Much of Douglas’ work is based on Durkheim’s work (1912) in which individual thought always has social origins. Douglas writes of Durkheim’s work:

“Classifications, logical operations, and guiding metaphors are given to the individual by society. Above all, the sense of a priori rightness of some ideas and the nonsensicality of others are handed out as part of the social environment. He [Durkheim] thought the reaction of outrage when entrenched judgments are challenged is a gut response directly due to commitment to a social group” (Douglas, 1986:10)

Therefore, individual thought is in one way or another part of a larger social institution and as such shaped by it. As Douglas (1996) explains, one often thinks that an experience is completely personal until it is discovered that other people might feel the same way, and moreover, people often tend to agree to disapprove of people who do not feel the same way as they and their discovered like-minded peers.

63 See section 5.3 The Role of the Travel Career

64 See introduction to chapter 4 Identity, Consumption & Tourism

In this respect, Douglas refers to thought style, a concept she adopts from Fleck (1935), that entails a frame that defines “[…] the context and sets the limits for any judgment about objective reality” (Douglas, 1986:13). Based on this, Douglas argues that there must be some level of common experience in a given social group, that is, a process of culture in action that offers a measure for standardising experience (Douglas, 1996). In this relation, Ryan (2002) also views the tourist experience from a perspective of tourists as social beings, being part of a particular social history in which they construct themselves, and the meaning of holidaying in light of that particular social frame of reference.

In this dissertation, this view of the nature of experience, proposed mainly by Mary Douglas, serves the purpose of addressing the experience as a commonality between individuals in a particular social group, i.e. in a thought collective to continue Fleck’s (1935) terminology. It is recognised that much popular literature at the moment does consider experiences to be individual and personal as mentioned above. Nevertheless, it is hereby claimed that a level of common consciousness exists, which may be used as a necessary frame of reference in terms of constructing identity through tourist experience. This is because identity is constantly measured by perceptions of self and other, i.e.

through perceptions of who one shares a common consciousness with and who one does not. Because of this, some level of common experience, or perhaps more accurately, an ability to convey a particular experience that other members of an in-group can relate to, is necessary for the construction of identity in this respect. Thus this view of a thought style in relation to tourist experience is applied here in the sense that there is an assumption of socially constructed commonalities shared at some level within a group, even when it comes to abstract and assumedly individual concepts such as experience and identity.

This discussion is not meant to undermine the individuality and personal nature of the tourist experience as such, but merely to say that a more detailed understanding of these individual and personal experiences, which are assumed to have social connotations of some sort as well, may work as an advantage for understanding tourism at many levels. This perspective on the tourist experience is therefore pursued throughout the dissertation, and the position furthermore

supports the focus on the individual tourist – and the individual as a social being – and the meaning of tourism rather than the more market-oriented approaches, which appear to have been explored widely – as evident in the extensive use of business and marketing texts such as Pine & Gilmore (1999) and Jensen (1999) within the field of tourism related experiences. These popular approaches and the tourist approach applied here are not necessarily mutually exclusive though, and one may very well come to support the other.