Being-on-holiday: Tourist dwelling, bodies and place

This article explores the relevance of dwelling and embodiment metaphors in tourist studies. These metaphors make possible an account of tourism which acknowledges the mobile and complex reality of the 21st century whilst neither delocalizing nor dis-embodying nor isolating tourists. In proposing such metaphors, I develop the possibilities of non-representational theory in tourist studies (Thrift, 1997). This article develops a perspective on tourism as a practical and embodied way through which we are involved in the world, we create knowledge and interact with the physical environment; to put it in Heideggerian terms, a way of being-in-theworld, of dwelling in it. This article is thus able to explore the possibilities that ideas of a situated, elusory and expressive body open in tourist studies and considers a de-centred and rhizomatic understanding of tourist agency that neither undermines the material and non-material networks folded into the human world nor overemphasizes the human action, concealing the inevitably messy human condition.