Le touriste comme figure postmoderne du pèlerin

Abstract

The question of the tourist as a pilgrim reflects the demand for authenticity on the part of tourists aspiring to transcend each of their tourist experience into an original and experiential discovery of being. Moreover, we can assert that every tourist is ultimately a pilgrim to varying degrees, for it is in the way he travels that he joins this apostle of inspired displacement. The pilgrim is the mythical figure of the desire for interiority in the elsewhere. Indeed, the quest for identity through the intimate experience of the local and the human allows him to experience the encounter with the other in the mode of mysticism, to reconnect with a certain authenticity of his being in an attempt to return to the essential, in a surge of self-conquest, whose discovery takes place through the world, in the world and through its immersion in the world. Now, isn’t this exactly what the tourist aspires to?