Tourism As Ritual: A Space-Time Model

Tourism is considered as secular ritual and important topic of the anthropological study due to its symbolizing of individual life, and its indicating of the sacred-profane shift of away-home and at-home status. Based on the spatial study of tourism system and the temporal analysis of tourism ritual, the paper tries to develop a space-time model of tourism, and finds that tourism is the complex of space and time and secular ritual in modern society, and the space-time presentation of rites of passage in modern mobile world. For tourism, spatial movement is more distinctive than time elapsing, therefore, space is primary while time is secondary; the spatial characteristics of tourism is far beyond the micro-spatial territory of non-religion rites of passage, thus tourism can be the complement rites of passage in a world on the move.