Abstract
Embracing and engaging in the affective turn is shifting tourism scholars’ attention to the role of feelings and emotions in shaping tourism encounters, practices, destinations, and even tourism studies. In theorising affect, scholars from various disciplines place a focus on questioning and exploring what different versions of affect do, what affects are good for, what a body can do, and how actors relate to each other and are produced in certain ways. This turn to affect has been argued as a turn to an onto-epistemological reconsideration of the being/becoming of a body in a world, where a body can be more than human. This shift in thought significantly moves scholarship beyond the sovereignty of rationality and positivism and opens up new pathways for understanding the intricate entanglements between human-nonhuman bodies, spaces, technologies, socio-cultural practices and knowledge construction. Yet, despite the growing body of discussion on the importance of affect in the social sciences and tourism, scholarship on the epistemological and methodological considerations and implications of researching affect remains rather limited.
Affect, although often articulated in the singular, is inherently multiple and fluid, unfolding through a range of relational intensities across bodies, spaces, and things. Furthermore, affect is always in excess of meaning; it is always relational, provisional, unfinished, and open to (re)interpretation. Thus, in an epistemological sense, can we really know the invisible affective intensities? To what extent? How can affects be approached, observed, and described in empirical research? Methodologically speaking, are the methodological frameworks and strategies currently in use suitable for knowing affects? Or what can we do with current methods and techniques to engage with and understand affects in their situational, (im)material, and (non)discursive entanglements? From this point of view, investigating methodological pathways for engaging with and understanding affect and emotion in tourism is far more than significant, contributing to a variety of fields in the social sciences. Moreover, exploring the possibilities of knowing through different approaches holds epistemological weight and implications, enhancing our understanding of the nature and limits of affect knowledge.
This thesis presents an onto-epistemological inquiry into the exploration of affect in tourism. By taking awe as a specific case example, I attempt to elaborate on the approaches to and processes involved in understanding affect in nature-based tourism destinations in New Zealand, thus discussing the (im)possibilities of knowing affect in tourism. With this aim, I formulate the main research question—(How) Can we know affect in tourism?, which is further supported by three subsidiary research questions:
a: (How) Can we know awe in nature-based tourism?
b: (How) Can we know awe in nature-based tourism through ethnography?
c: (How) Can we know awe in nature-based tourism through netnography?
To address these research inquiries, I conducted multi-phase ethnographic fieldwork in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park and netnographic fieldwork on digital platforms of Instagram and Tripadvisor focusing on awe in Patea/Doubtful Sound within Fiordland National Park. Using a pathos-centric and visual-rhetorical analysis method, my close reading of Doubtful Sound tourism operators’ visual posts and tourists’ textual communications illustrates the specific ways and the degree to which I netnographically come to know the various gradations of intensities, sensations, and energies of awe. Incorporating inter-view, walking-with, and affective reflexivity as essential components of my ethnographic palette, this “ethnography with twists” demonstrates its strong capacities to engage with and understand affective relations and intensities of awe.
In discussing the subjectivities, messiness, uncertainties, limitations and possibilities inherent in my research processes, I argue that a definitive answer, either yes or no, is insufficient to answer my research questions. Instead, unravelling the research processes of knowing is vital and valuable since it carries epistemological, methodological and ethical implications. Onto-epistemologically, researching affect (theory) becomes less about asking “what affect (theory) is” and more about attending to “what the doing of affect (theory) does”. From this perspective, the netnographic and ethnographic explorations of knowing awe in nature-based tourism serve as concrete illustrations of the doing of affect theory. In this sense, this thesis also contributes to affect theory. To move affective tourism scholarship onwards, it is necessary to maintain the liveness and relevance of epistemological explorations in this field while rethinking the question of truth, the matter of knowing, methodological standards, and thus what constitutes “good” qualitative tourism studies.