Interscopic fan travelscape: Hybridizing tourism through sport and art

Abstract

Contrary to the common compartmentalization of popular culture and events to specialized forms of fandom-induced tourism (e.g. film-, music-, sport-tourism), event-tourism spaces may also derive from blending different genres that enable symbiotic effects, for example, between sport and art. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of how event-tourism is interwoven and merged with sporting and cinematic popular culture, thereby creating a compound milieu for sport traveling aficionados that we name an “ Interscopic Fan Travelscape” (IFT). To ground our analysis, we use the example of a participatory sport event that blends organically sporting and cinematic facets of popular culture. This is a free-diving event, hosted in the Greek island of Amorgos, and commemorating the 1988 “Big Blue” film, which was primarily shot in Amorgos. Our conceptual framework provides a comprehensive understanding of composite popular culture settings and devoted fan-travel by integrating perspectives of neo-tribalism, serious leisure, fan pilgrimage and event-tourism.

Tourism mobilities, tourist performances: Editors-in-chief’s notes

“…Ord and Behr's (2023) work adds to our critical scholarship that examines, through qualitative approaches, the role of art, festivals and music in tourism (see, e.g. Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2022;Ziakas et al, 2022).…”

“…Ord and Behr’s (2023) work adds to our critical scholarship that examines, through qualitative approaches, the role of art, festivals and music in tourism (see, e.g. Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2022; Ziakas et al, 2022). Moving beyond more taken-for-granted notions of music, sound and soundscapes in tourism constructions and performances, Frohlick and Macevicius’s (2023) feminist critique of soundscape and silence in tourism reveals the embedded moralism in our desired soundscapes, which encourages scholars to rethink silent tourism as ways of knowing.…”

“…To make his argument, Tunestad draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to offer dedicated observations and interpretations of scuba diving worlds, joining previous studies of tourists encounters beyond land such as Merchant’s (2012) account of the ocean as sensorium. Tunestad’s scuba ethnography adds not only to our literature on tourism performance but also that of serious leisure (Liston-Heyes and Daley, 2017; Worthington, 2005; Ziakas et al, 2022).…”

Sensitizing the social-ecosystems of outdoor sport environments: A comprehensive framework

“…For example, it is found that free-divers' connection to the underwater world defines their joint actions and identities, which are based on the principles of slow consumption, slow tourism and eco-aesthetic norms and values (Ziakas et al, 2022a ). Neo-tribalism then informs that community bonding does not take place only between free-divers themselves, but is consolidated at the intersection between their communications and their individual engagement with the natural world as a world of wonder (Tzanelli, 2020a ; Ziakas et al, 2022b ). This is a magical-realist world that amplifies reality to such an extent, that the free-diver experiences a spiritual communion with the sea (Tzanelli, 2020a , b ).…”

Popular Culture Tourism: Conceptual Foundations and State of Play

“…Along these lines, Ziakas (2021) set forth the notion of “ civic dramaturgy ” as a comprehensive analytic for better understanding collective meaning creation in tourism settings, including all expressions of popular culture and appreciating their common ground. Likewise, the concept of “ interscopic fan travelscape ” has been introduced to explain how blends of popular culture create composite tourist settings and hybrid travel cultures (Ziakas, Tzanelli, et al, 2022). In all, processes of tourism hybridization, communal dramaturgy, fandom embodiment, instantiation of symbols, and associated metaphoric discourse are not sufficiently addressed in the literature, especially in regard to the means that synergize an intertextuality of conceptual continuity among different forms of expressive culture to amplify shared meaning and prompt collective action.…”