{"title":"‘I had more time to listen to my inner voice’: Zen meditation tourism for Generation Z","authors":"Jiayu Wu, Juan Tang, Elizabeth Agyeiwaah","doi":"10.1177/14687976231189833","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"With much academic attention to experiential learning in on-site tourism experiences, the benefits of Zen meditation tourism on Generation Z after their re-entry into daily secular life remains largely unexplored. Drawing on experiential learning theory, this study explores the benefits experienced by participants after Zen meditation tourism in three stages including reflection, learning results, and active experimentation. Employing phenomenology-based ethnography, six consecutive rounds of online face-to-face interviews were conducted with 12 informants who were continuously traced after attending a Zen camp. The study findings revealed long-term positive benefits in three aspects of this generational cohort. First, Zen practices tend to be fading yet abiding after the Zen camp which continues sporadically into daily life. Second, socialisation is continuously progressive; but self-growth is complicated and unstable. Theoretical and practical implications of these novel findings are discussed.","PeriodicalId":47199,"journal":{"name":"Tourist Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Tourist Studies","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687976231189833","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
With much academic attention to experiential learning in on-site tourism experiences, the benefits of Zen meditation tourism on Generation Z after their re-entry into daily secular life remains largely unexplored. Drawing on experiential learning theory, this study explores the benefits experienced by participants after Zen meditation tourism in three stages including reflection, learning results, and active experimentation. Employing phenomenology-based ethnography, six consecutive rounds of online face-to-face interviews were conducted with 12 informants who were continuously traced after attending a Zen camp. The study findings revealed long-term positive benefits in three aspects of this generational cohort. First, Zen practices tend to be fading yet abiding after the Zen camp which continues sporadically into daily life. Second, socialisation is continuously progressive; but self-growth is complicated and unstable. Theoretical and practical implications of these novel findings are discussed.
期刊介绍:
Tourist Studies is a multi-disciplinary journal providing a platform for the development of critical perspectives on the nature of tourism as a social phenomenon through a qualitative lens. Theoretical and multi-disciplinary. Tourist Studies provides a critical social science approach to the study of the tourist and the structures which influence tourist behaviour and the production and reproduction of tourism. The journal examines the relationship between tourism and related fields of social inquiry. Tourism and tourist styles consumption are not only emblematic of many features of contemporary social change, such as mobility, restlessness, the search for authenticity and escape, but they are increasingly central to economic restructuring, globalization, the sociology of consumption and the aestheticization of everyday life. Tourist Studies analyzes these features of tourism from a multi-disciplinary perspective and seeks to evaluate, compare and integrate approaches to tourism from sociology, socio-psychology, leisure studies, cultural studies, geography and anthropology. Global Perspective. Tourist Studies takes a global perspective of tourism, widening and challenging the established views of tourism presented in current periodical literature. Tourist Studies includes: Theoretical analysis with a firm grounding in contemporary problems and issues in tourism studies, qualitative analyses of tourism and the tourist experience, reviews linking theory and policy, interviews with scholars at the forefront of their fields, review essays on particular fields or issues in the study of tourism, review of key texts, publications and visual media relating to tourism studies, and notes on conferences and other events of topical interest to the field of tourism studies.